So, I’ve been chairing Creeting St Peter Parish Council for eighteen months now, and the village hasn’t suffered a plague of frogs, or forest fires so, on the whole, I’d count that as a success. But there is a danger that you allow things to drift - carrying on the way you always have because, well, it seems to be going alright, doesn’t it?
On Monday night, Parish Council met, and there were two key items on the agenda, the draft budget and our communications strategy.
I would be the first to admit that our budget isn’t very exciting - having a precept of £5,500 or so is never going to allow us to build a skate park, or that high speed rail link to London that I’d had my heart set on. But there is an alluring comfort in simply rolling over last year’s figures, adding a little for inflation and shaking hands on the numbers. After all, we charge each household about 14p per day on average, an almost imperceptible amount, right?
But one of my colleagues raised the perfectly legitimate point that we have healthy reserves, and could credibly freeze our precept and use a slither of the reserves to meet any gap between income and expenditure. And I do find myself wondering. The solution was, in the next financial year, to have a meaningful discussion about our short, medium and long term goals as a Parish Council and as a community, and draw up a financial plan on the basis of that. It gives us a potential opportunity to engage with residents, and might trigger some innovative changes in how we work.
Ironically, we were missing one key figure, i.e. the tax base, and after the meeting, that emerged. Even more ironically, the figure supplied means that we can support a small increase to the budget yet leave the precept per household unchanged. That doesn't change how I feel about a more activist approach to our finances though.
The discussion on our communication strategy is similarly thorny. We have two possibly conflicting goals, to improve how we tell people what’s happening in a more immediate way than a quarterly newsletter, and to maintain cost control. Our thoughts so far revolve around the use of e-mail and a PDF newsletter, which would allow us to reach residents much faster than we currently can, or do, but would effectively create two "classes" of residents, those who have (or want) internet access to information, and those who don't. You could get around that ethical dilemma by calling it an opt-in process, but it doesn't avoid the fact that some people simply won't be able to.
It has been suggested that we commit to distributing any information both by e-mail and by leaflet, but that acts as a disincentive to communicate by making it more difficult to do so due to the additional resource (both financial and human) that would be necessary.
There is a danger of paralysis through doubt though, and we really must improve the way we reach out to residents. So, we're going to approach residents to encourage them to opt in to e-mail communication, and then work from there. It may be that we're worrying about a very small number of households, and that we can solve that problem in an ad hoc way.
Ultimately, our goal is to help the village to be the best place it can be, and engaging with residents enables them to take control of some, perhaps minor, aspects of their lives. It certainly isn't big, and it probably isn't that clever, but one ought to try...
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