Saturday, November 29, 2008

SWRDA

Reports of my death have been exaggerated...

South West Regional Development Agency is no more.

Not quite.

"The assembly’s role is to be taken over by a combination of the South West Regional Development Agency and a new board made up of leaders of the region’s main councils.

This board is being called the South West Strategic Leaders’ Forum".

As we always seem to be slagging off our Councils - is this a good idea?



Posted by Anonymous to swanageview at 9:00 AM
Posted by at

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

SWRDA is frequently denounced for being "undemocratic" not least by members of councils who would have lost a lot of their power if the assembly had been elected. The English seem to have a very strange mentality, When there was a referendum in the north-east over having the assembly elected the outcome was a resounding no, yet many of the people who did not want it to be elected will be the same ones who grumble that it is undemocratic. Hypocrisy always was a national characteristic.

29/11/08 1:15 pm
Anonymous said...

One thing that occurred to me about this is that the decisions made by SWERDA are supposed to 'evidence' based.

By creating a board that has an elected element - presumably a majority - then democratically elected people will be presented with the evidence supplied by the Gov't whallas and make their decisions based on that.

In a way that's great, cuz once evidence is produced it can challenged.

One problem with that of course, is the Gov'ts evidence is verifiable; surely the elected reps counter-evidence will also have to be verifiable?

I wonder if our elected reps have the time - and for some the ability - to do such a thing?

29/11/08 5:24 pm
Anonymous said...

http://www.southwestrda.org.uk/news/release.asp?ReleaseID=2806

5 new appointees to the 15 strong board.

None of them in a democratically elected position.

29/11/08 5:59 pm
Anonymous said...

Teach me to believe the Echo!

So I've just written to them for clarification.

29/11/08 6:17 pm
Anonymous said...

Are the "Assembly" and the "Board" the same thing? The SWRDA website is not very forthcoming on this point. What I noticed about the new board members is that none of them run businesses but the orhanisation is supposed to support the economy. University vice-chancellors are very bright people and highly ski;;ed at warfare by committee but in a region that lives increasingly by tourism perhaps a hotelier or restaurantier.

30/11/08 10:43 am
Anonymous said...

The Echo haven't responded personally, but I think they've removed the article.

4/12/08 8:48 pm

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