CTC Campaigns

[dellzeqq]

Would somebody who knows about this stuff tell me how many people are working in the CTC Campaigns Department?

 

[theclaud]

Would somebody who knows about this stuff tell me how many people are working in the CTC Campaigns Department?

I was with a Councillor on Saturday, and he has been unable to find out stuff like this. He tells me that asking such questions attracts opprobrium...

 

[GrumpyGregry]

Today? No one. They are all counting the ballot papers. Snigger.

 

[dellzeqq]

I reckon there'll be even fewer people working in CTC Campaigns in the next year, given the financial situation...

I have my doubts. Should we ask John and Peter to ask Kevin at the next Council meeting?

I wrote the stuff below at the beginning of December (you were there, Greg). I thought I'd been put in to the (entirely unsatisfactory) picture. I now wonder if Roger might have been holding back stuff - like how many staff he has. As in not many.

All I can say is that I'm rather pleased I'm not paying for this stuff right now....

Campaigning – is it all over?

I attended a meeting of the London Region CTC last weekend. I’d not intended to go, because these occasions always inspire a degree of melancholy, brought on by a feeling that the LR CTC is a bit of a lost ship in an ocean of LCC activity, but the Midnight Dash to Bognor was iced off, and her nibs was away, so I braved the non-accessible stairs down to the dank cellar of the Fabian Society and re-acquainted myself with the faithful keeping the CTC flame burning in the capital. The second I walked in, my heart lifted – the LR CTC is home to people I count myself fortunate to know.

The ‘high’ point of the agenda was a presentation of the CTC’s campaigning strategy by Roger Geffen. I’ll tell you straight away that I gave Roger a hard time for about two hours. But, when you read the following, you might think he had it coming.

Roger told us that he’d consciously concentrated to what he called ‘national campaigning’ for the last eight years, but, with the demise of Cycling England and the Coalition’s ‘localisation’ of transport policy, the CTC would find local campaigning ‘very difficult’.

Now some of you will already have been bored to tears by my presentation to the CTC Council in January 2006 in which I wittered on about the third sector’s ability to mesh professional work with voluntary work. Drucker was called to mind. And some of you will realise that this meshing is something the CTC doesn’t do. Which, as I pointed out to Roger, is a pity, because if you want to campaign at a local level you need to be able to harness volunteer effort, expertise and knowledge. I admit I got a bit Lady Bracknell when suggesting that losing one RtR liaison officer might be unfortunate, but losing two in six months might be seen as careless, and all the more so because they both quit in search of meaning rather than mindless admin, but the general case I made is incontrovertible – the RtR network has been kept pretty much on a drip feed, and relies on the good intentions of John Meudell and the zeal and energy of a few good souls like Stephen Kinsella. And......the connection with local groups hasn’t been good, but with Adrian Lawson deciding that he couldn’t take it anymore, and the appointment of a part-timer with other responsibilities, it looks like we’ll be lucky to get membership lists, let alone help, advice and inspiration on campaigning.

I made the point in 2006 that the CTC was in the knowledge business. Campaigning depended on knowledge, and we had to ‘build’ knowledge by researching and sharing. Fat chance. We know next to nothing about urbanism, despite having experts in our midst. We know next to nothing about planning policy, despite having experts in our midst. Hundreds of councils up and down the country have written their Local Development Frameworks and we haven’t been involved. There’s been a re-writing of the Code for Sustainable Homes that was a massive step back in that it removed transport from the criteria, and we weren’t involved. In some London boroughs LCC reps comment on every single application of any size, and have, bit by bit, shifted planning policy to reduce car parking, and make transport strategies a requirement. They’ve harried TfL on junction works and shopping centre redevelopment. If any of this happens in the CTC it’s because a few individuals in Southend and Malvern take it upon themselves to learn themselves up, and not because there’s a fund of CTC knowledge and expertise to be drawn from.

There was some talk of cascades and structures. I’m afraid I got a bit shirty. Cascades don’t work outside of the Catholic Church. Knowledge doesn’t come down the mountain on tablets of stone – it’s a mix of theory and experience, and in campaigning it will move laterally if the means of moving it is there. Best practice – now that’s a different thing. Filtering for relevance, buffing up presentations, checklists – all can be built up and distributed from the centre, although, again, cascading is preposterous when you can send something out to 100 people just as quickly as you can send something out to 10 people.

I’m not optimistic. Roger places a good deal of faith in to the new website, which may or may not happen (it was due, I think, in May 2010). He says that it will take time to establish which RtR reps are still active, and didn’t seem to fancy my suggestion of turning the whole Council correspondence thing in to an open database, allowing people to pick up stuff as and when they wanted – but then again, we don’t do free-flowing information in the CTC.

It’s a few years since we had a ‘hit’. The 11,000 letters to MPs on the proposed revisions to the Highway Code was the last. Since then we’ve tried to tack ourselves on to the back of the 20’s Plenty and come up with a couple of catch slogans such as Stop Smidsy.

I’m not saying there isn’t purpose in lobbying, and I know Roger gets stuck in to the DfT via House of Commons committees, but the LCC has shown that you can make a big difference to towns by sustained local campaigning. Time and time again I go through towns and think ‘how the **** did this go so disastrously wrong?’ and wonder whether, just maybe, the CTC could have made a difference. It would be nice to find out, but I’m not counting on finding out for a long while.

 

[dellzeqq]

I'm sure you're right. But one of the criteria by which you judge the worth of money being spent is what it buys. Can you tell me what the £190,000 Campaigns budget is buying right now?

 

[summerdays]

...unless TPTB decide to redefine anyone who works for the Trust as working for CTC Campaigns, of course....

Who are TPTB?

 

[summerdays]

Thanks.

Do the CTC ever canvas the membership about which campaigns they would like the CTC to support? Or is that expecting too much from them?

 

[dellzeqq]

I think you are having a laugh. National Councillors don't get a look-in. What chance the membership?

 

[summerdays]

I'm a very new member still with my rosy spec's though I have to say that they are slightly faded already ... they have 11 months to convince me that it is worth our family membership!

 

[GrumpyGregry]

They had 11 years to convince me and have failed.