Sunday 19 August 2007

Reserve Advisory Group


The council wanted the RAG set up in response to concerns that the disposal of prime council amenity land to an outside organisation was a new venture. The council would have preferred not to do it – i.e. it would have been preferable if the council had been able to afford to manage the land itself. The RAG was seen as a safeguard against the lessee doing unacceptable things with the disposed land. So the RAG was a condition of SWT getting the site on a lease.

The exact responsibility of the RAG has never been satisfactorily defined as far as I know. Was it supposed to be a committee that made decisions or simply an imprecise group making recommendations that had no official standing? The answer seems to have been that if people in the RAG chose to agree with SWT then it was presented as if it had a certain authority but if they did not agree with SWT then it had none and could therefore be discounted. In other words some kind of hybrid - part focus group and part rubber stamp.

The usefulness of the RAG for SWT was the part it played in getting grants. SWT lives by grants and needs a supply of public money to be able to operate. It’s a bonus card to be played in any grants application these days to be able to show support for your plans from the local community.


This makes it doubly awkward for SWT to have to admit that despite all sorts of manoeuvres there remains strong local opposition to much of their policy. This leaves them having to invoke distant faceless bureaucracies like Natural England and European Directorates to justify what they do. Definitely not in the original script.

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