Without wanting to distract from today’s main news, which should certainly be your main concern if you have only time to read about one thing (summary: Boris intends to make 80,000 of the poorest Londoners poorer still as soon as possible), I wanted to post something about this too.
Last year, one Saturday in May, I attended the State of London Debate.
This was an excellent day, covering a wide range of topics. It opened with an address by Ken, followed by questions from the floor, a session lasting about 90 minutes. This was followed by a number of workshops with experts and officials, which you could choose between, attending a total of three across the day and generally having a very interesting day and feeding into Mayoral policies and thinking on a wide range of different issues.
The full programme for the one I attended has been archived here (although apparently without stylesheets or graphics).
Archive.org also reveals that the previous year’s, which I didn’t know about at the time, and which looks like it was probably the first, had a very similar format.
So how much importance does Boris put on the State of London Debate?
His plan for this year involves a number of changes to the established schedule:
- Move it from a weekend to a Wednesday evening.
- Cut it back from all day to two hours.
- Have just a single session instead of many.
- Involve just two people other than the Mayor himself, both of whom are close Mayoral advisers.
Presumably he’ll position these changes as a cost-cutting measure, but surely as the Mayor of London it is important to give Londoners a regular, proper opportunity to feed their thoughts and feelings into your decision-making processes? By abolishing the numerous specialist workshops to which Londoners such as myself have enjoyed contributing in the past two years, Boris shows that he’s not interested in what we think.
What’s clearly far more important to him is to implement policies dreamed up by his clique of right-wing advisers, including the aforementioned doubling of bus fares for over 80,000 Londoners on Income Support. I don’t think he’d've found much support for that in a break-out workshop on poverty…
Tags: avoiding the public · cost-cutting · cutbacks · State of London Debate6 Comments
6 responses so far ↓
Just out of interest, how many Londoners turned up to feed their thoughts and feelings into the decision-making processes?
I don’t have any official attendance figures but it was an enormous hall it was in and it was packed full.
I’m an absolutely hopeless judge of numbers of people so I’ll just say that it must very easily have been a four-digit number of attendees, but probably didn’t reach five figures.
Sounds like an interesting event. One argument might be that a shorter evening event, more akin to a traditional public meeting, could be more accessible to the general public than asking people to commit to a whole day which sounds like the preserve of hardcore policy wonks. As a trade off for a shorter debate, maybe it should be more frequent than once a year?
But if there was enough people to pack the hall on the previous event, it does sound a shame to change the format.
[...] Mr Stop Boris noted last month, the event has been considerably cut, but will nonetheless feature Munira Mirza (Arts and [...]
Boris now says
“The 2008 State of London Debate was held as an evening event because of the timing of the mayoral elections and in order to fulfil my statutory duties in regards to the timing of the debate and the publication of the annual report. The State of London Debate was also held as an evening event after the 2004 mayoral elections.
S.47 of the GLA Act 1999 requires the Mayor to hold a State of London Debate annually, with the debate open to all members of the public.
The GLA Act does not set out the form and procedure of the debate, other than the requirement that it must be set up in a way so as to provide members of the public to speak. In
accordance with the Act, the form and procedure of the 2009 State of London Debate shall be as I determine after consultation with the London Assembly.
The 2008 State of London Debate took place just three weeks ago so proposals for the format of next year’s event are still under development. However, I hope to start consultation with the Assembly on the 2009 debate before the end of the year and look forward to another successful dialogue with Londoners.”
Thanks for that, James. It’s good to keep threads updated.
Boris is becoming quite adept at protracted hand-waving.