APATHY RULES

In last week’s letters page, Prof Rick Norman reminded us that the council is considering restructuring the way it works. Unfortunately, it’s hardly a topic to set the dinner tables and bar alight with conversation. Do we want town councils for greater local decisionmaking? Beefed-up Area Member Panels (you have to be a proper local authority nerd to know what these are)? Or should we have something called community groups influencing decision-making in our local government? How many people care? At the last meeting of the Canterbury Area Member Panel, for instance, 10 members of the public attended. Seven of them I know by name, two were a couple who attend every one of these meetings and one I had never seen before. There’s a good reason why council meetings aren’t well-attended: they’re mindnumbingly boring. I do realise that for some people this particular brand of sadomasochism is desirable. But even if you managed to exorcise the pettifogging, grandstanding and moral preening, they’d still be dull. The truth is that while the council is boring or just getting on with running the district, few people have any reason to have anything to do with it. As such there’s little interest about council restructuring. I don’t even sense there is much interest from the councillors themselves. The authority is carrying out the drearily titled Community Governance Review because it has to. You can get involved and respond to its questionnaire or – as I suspect will be the case for most people – not. But recent local government history teaches one thing above others: that in the life of the previous administration (2011-2015), when residents fighting the proposed sell-off of Kingsmead Field or the unpopular Westgate Towers traffic trial discovered the way the council made its decisions, they didn’t like it. They didn’t like the executive system which concentrated power in too few hands – and they succeeded in changing it. No one knows what the future holds or what great subject may one day galvanise public opinion. That is why there are very real implications in the way the council chooses to organise itself. And if at some point in the future you find yourself coming into contact with the decision-making process you can’t say you weren’t offered the chance to influence how it’s done.