TV newsreader Nicholas Owen tells residents to 'Get Involved' (From The Argus)

TV newsreader Nicholas Owen tells residents to 'Get Involved'

8:30am Tuesday 10th November 2009 in

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This month, Brighton and Hove City Council is holding a Question Time-style debate to give residents the chance to quiz councillors, police and health bosses about how local services are provided.

The event at Hove Town Hall is part of the launch day for the council’s Get Involved campaign, which aims to persuade people to engage in local democracy and citizenship.

Here, newsreader Nicholas Owen who will chair the debate, explains why he believes “getting involved” is so important.

And the main news ...

BONG ...

turnouts in local elections are falling.

BONG ...

young people are becoming increasingly disengaged.

BONG ...

membership of political parties is falling.

Sounds like a particularly depressing set of headlines, doesn’t it? Thankfully, no news bulletin I have presented has begun quite as relentlessly discouraging as this.

But that doesn’t mean these headlines are inaccurate or wrong. They are the truth.

Survey after survey has shown that most of us are not involved in local decisionmaking. Only a fraction of us serve as elected councillors, school governors or magistrates.

We are shunning consultation groups and questionnaires in our droves. And precious few of us regularly contact our MP, take part in a demonstration or sign petitions.

Yet research also shows we feel our voices are not being heard, our views not listened to, our participation is unwelcome and our activity unrewarded. Altogether, this is something that should worry us all.

Now, politicians at Westminster have been heavily criticised these past few months.

One thing most of them get right, I think, is cross-party support nationally and locally for the idea of getting citizens more involved in their communities, in health and social care and the many other services that affect our lives.

What they say they want is a kind of 21st century extension of civic rights and responsibilities, putting the service user at the heart of public provision.

All sounds very laudable. How can it be put into practice? My journalistic curiosity has driven me to try to find out more about the picture here in Brighton and Hove.

I wanted to understand how big the problem of non-involvement was, whether people care about it and whether anything could be done.

The recent Place Survey, a sort of temperature-check of local views, paints a telling picture of attitudes to local services.

A little over a quarter of the 2,225 participants in Brighton and Hove believed they could influence decisions in their local area, which means the rest didn’t believe they could – or, nearly as bad, didn’t know.

Only 15% said they had actually been involved in decisions that affected the local area over the same period.

But there was a huge ray of hope: 38% said that, generally speaking, they would like to be more involved in the decisions that affect their local area, an increase since the last time the question was asked.

Assuming this is an accurate reflection of views across the city, it means there are literally tens of thousands of people waiting to be given this opportunity.

So how can we engage this legion of willing residents? Every one of us has something useful to say, knows something the experts don’t and has ideas they haven’t dreamt of.

We are the experts in our local areas because we live there. We know plenty about our roads, our housing, our schools, our hospitals and so on.

Most people are not “engaging” because they are, frankly, turned off by politics. Most of us can’t get past the images of stuffy meetings, language we don’t understand and subject matter that doesn’t mean much to us.

In 45 years as a print and broadcast journalist I have often asked people, young and old, whether politics interests them. They usually say no.

However, ask the same people if they are annoyed that the local hospital is under threat of closure or whether they agree with the pedestrianisation of their local shopping centre or if there is adequate and affordable parking nearby then they have plenty of opinions.

These issues and many like them are the bread and butter of local politics. So, actually, most of us are more interested, more “engaged”, than we might think.

That brings me to what the city council here in Brighton and Hove is beginning this month.

On Saturday, November 21, it will kick off a nine-month campaign to increase engagement called Get Involved.

Its aims include encouraging more people to vote and to get involved in neighbourhood and city-wide decision-making.

And, most important, the council and its partners also want to obtain residents’ feedback on issues in the city important to them.

At the launch at Hove Town Hall will be “speed-meet your councillor” sessions and information stalls about community organisations.

Then there is a Question Time event, which I am looking forward to particularly – I am in the chair, making sure the questions get answered.

We want to hear from you. We want your questions. You don’t have to wait until the 21st to get involved.

You can submit your question to the panel of police, council, health service and community representatives today by emailing democratic.services@brighton-hove.gov.uk or calling 01273 291031.

This is an exciting start to what is hoped will be a steady increase in involvement by local people in local public services.

Now there is a really good news story ...