Today I was back in City Hall for a 'Proud Capital' conference organised by Cardiff Council, aiming to seek the advice of people from 'partner' organisations about shaping its plans for the next decade - plans that now have to be made in the light of major cutbacks in public funding to reduce the National Debt, as it used to be called before the more elaborate phrase 'budget deficit' was invented.
I think I was invited because whoever operates information services in County Hall has yet to eliminate my name from the invite list on which I landed as the Bishop's delegate on the City's Strategic Planning Board (aka Vision Board, since the most recent makeover) seven years ago. My successor as Bishop's delegate, Archdeacon Peggy, was among the conference invitees, I'm pleased to say. Some of my emails from the Council still arrive second hand, having first been sent to my old Tesco.net address, discontinued in December 2008. Both my most recent email addresses are also on the Council's information system. If Tesco.net didn't have auto forwarding of emails from a defunct account, I might miss out on all sorts of interesting things, but fortunately so far, not this kind of event.
Heaven knows why, since Cardiff Business Safe is a key stakeholder in the city's crime reduction strategy, no invitation was sent to any member of the team involved in its work. A culpable omission in my view. Suitably indignant, I sent back two conference registration forms - one for the director and one for me as 'administrator', well invoice clerk by any other name, as that's what's most needed to support him in the remarkable work he's doing keeping the city's security radio network up and running, day in, day out. CBS has had a rough passage over the past three years, its presence and intentions mismanaged by senior officials reluctant to take responsibility for an organisation developed in response to a need identified both by the Home Office, the Police, and the business community, to mitigate the impact of crime on the retail industry.
CBS has had to reform itself and overcome huge problems issuing from the collapse in 2005 of Cardiff Chamber of Commerce, its backing organisation at the outset. City government chose not to extend the same patronage to CBS as it extended to City Centre Management, a more obviously 'mission critical' organisation, also the offspring of Cardiff Chamber of Commerce. After the demise, CBS re-invented itself as an arms-length not for profit company run without financial backing by volunteers, whilst maintaining day by day a secure radio communications network relied upon by over 200+ different traders, the Police, the Council and other organisations in and around the city centre. It has never failed in its duties.
Sometimes I think that 'arms-length', though intended to mean independent and disentangled from Council politics and economy, really infers dis-ownership - some officers would push us over the edge into oblivion if they could. Why do I say that? Because there exists an almost cultural jealousy on the part of some officials, who resent the success of CBS in delivering all it is meant to. Its success rests on self sacrificial effort far beyond the realm of duty as defined by the average local government job contract. This the troublesome frictional interface between voluntary enterprise and statutory undertaking.
The sad thing is, that officers of government, used to measuring and controlling everything within their scope, tend to be deeply suspicious of initiative, free creative energy and imagination at work, too readily interpreting it defensively, as being driven by self-interest and personal gain. Ideas of working for personal satisfaction, or for the common good, are unintelligible to those weaned on a culture in which every jot and tittle has to be accounted for, or disguised as something else. I don't see this makes anyone happy, but it's the way things are in the world as we've made it today.
That's a big digression - what's important is, although CBS was not invited for whatever reason, we turned up, and made ourselves known in a modest way. Lots of other voluntary and public service organisations also seemed to have been left off the invite list which should have been there, or else it was not explained to them how important it was they should be there, so they gave it a miss. The biggest contingent were local government officers from a range of Council service areas. So were the rest of us really interlopers on a Council in-house training day?
I'm glad we were there to gain a small measure of understanding of the disciplined efforts being made to identify the kind of social, economic, environmental and technological changes that will steer the way our common life unfolds in the coming decade, even if the day's process of acquisition was pretty turgid. I hope nobody believes any of today's deliberations should be regarded as definitive, as so many different sections of civil society were absent. I understand there will be future opportunities to involve citizens in the process of formulating a strategic plan for the City, before it is finalised.
I enjoyed being there in quite a different role, meeting people with whom I'd sat at other tables when I was Vicar of St John's. As I said to Archdeacon Peggy over coffee - no I don't feel at all lost outside my former role. This is my city, in the sense that it's the place where I am, after all my years of restlessness, at home, and a citizen - something I now have the opportunity to take seriously on my own terms, as equally as I've always taken my duties as a citizen of heaven.
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