Newcycling, Newcastle’s cycling campaign, resigns from Newcastle City Council’s cycling forum. This comes after the group attended numerous fruitless meetings with bad governance of the forum overall.
Katja, chair of Newcycling, says “Cycling deserves much better. We’ve tried to work with the council through the forum, but in its current form its not possible; it’s too frustrating banging your head against a brick wall all the time.
“Involved and active citizenship deserves much better. We knew we had to cut our ties, after we assessed the achievements of the meetings compared to the time we spent on preparing for the forum meetings, getting feedback ready, attending, then chasing up actions afterwards. No real change has come out of attending the forum and agreed actions were rarely closed down by the council. We don’t want to be part of that culture any more. We disagree with that attitude.
“The forum is dysfunctional and council have been in breach of its own Terms of Reference for a long time. The terms say that it wants to give the public influence to monitor and review policy and plans. This rarely happens. Instead we are used as council rubberstamps.
“We’ll of course keep this decision under review, and we will continue keeping other communication channels open. In the meantime, we want everyone to know that we no longer consider ourselves part of the Newcastle Cycling Forum. And that will remain the case until its governance is made effective.
“That means we must see a dialogue and culture of partnership and cooperation from the council. We asked Cllr Ged Bell and Cllr Marion Talbot to improve council transparency and decision-making relating to transport projects.”
Terms of Reference http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/wwwfileroot/legacy/regen/plantrans/CyclingForumTermsofReference.pdf
Letter to Newcastle Cycling Forum chair, Cllr Marion Talbot https://newcycling.org/news/20140828/position-statement-newcastle-cycling-forum
Our chair’s announcement to members https://newcycling.org/news/20140831/we-say-so-long-newcastle-cycling-forum
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