Posted at 22nd December 2007 19:50Chairs & tables
The Dredging Petition went off to Jonathan Shaw MP at DEFRA over a month ago and so far there has not been so much as an acknowledgement from a minor civil servant. It may be Christmas, he may be busy or he might not appreciate the content … but this still seems a pretty cavalier approach from a minister responsible for a small Authority that nearly two thousand people saw fit to complain about. Politicians ignore the electorate at their peril – and this only serves to underline and reinforce the view that the Broads Authority and its masters at DEFRA consider themselves publicly unaccountable.
It seems a similar corporate attitude problem also lurks only just below the surface at Colegate. Toll payers contribute increasingly significant sums to the Broads Authority, yet these paymasters are accorded remarkably little influence. The Stapleton affair was nothing more than an ill-judged comment; properly vindicated by a resignation. What remains unresolved; even conspicuously sidestepped is Professor Kerry Turner’s part in the saga. His circulation of Stapleton’s email was an error of judgment of at least similar proportions. Overlooking the largely irrelevant content of Stapleton’s email; Turner should have brought the use of such derogatory language to an immediate halt – and certainly since this was in email form and so easily intercepted and forwarded. In fact he saw fit to distribute these comments to a further thirty addressees - all members of the Navigation Committee and the Broads Authority. This was an error of judgment of far greater proportions - unless of course descriptions of this ilk were entirely familiar to him. Unfortunately, the use of derogatory descriptions of bona fide Broads users and tollpayers have been used before at meetings by senior representatives of the Broads Authority. The refusal to comment further to the local Press on the affair deepens suspicion of institutionalised arrogance.
The Chief Executive is seen to drive Broads Authority policy, when his proper function should be to carry through member’s instructions. It may be that this has finally been recognised but it is possible that it arose as a result of a chairman with an insufficiently strong character to maintain control of his Chief Executive. All of this places additional stress on the choice of a replacement chairman. Motivations are questionable but progression to a minor public honour seems the worst possible motivation for taking on the chairmanship of an Authority with so many deep-rooted, structural problems.
The absence of local representation on the Broads Authority is as indefensible as DEFRA’s nomination of eleven members of the Authority on the basis of sending us people they think will be good for us. We might consider this condescending if we were not aware of the selection panels that DEFRA and Natural England employed to select Authority members. The Broads Authority may be ‘a member of the National Park family’ but at least all are agreed that it’s not a standard National Park – thanks entirely to a statutory duty as our navigation authority. Natural England has about as much as DEFRA to offer a navigation authority; so of course they use a standard National Park selection panel – which by definition doesn’t include any navigational expertise. On one hand this reduces the likelihood of Broads Authority members knowing any more about navigational matters than the range of navigationally unqualified Broads Authority staff. Hardly professional but this selection process helps to keep conservationist interests uppermost on the Authority – right up Natural England’s street of course. It really is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this public body needs a really good shake up; an arrogance by-pass and imperatively, far greater local representation.
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