Council officers and others sometimes refer to public consultations as public engagement or public involvement. You can find a lot of references to these phrases in official documents and on websites that deal with national and local policy making and democracy alongside those key terms accountability and transparency without which democracy cannot function. Politicians at all levels are fond of referring to these frequently especially when criticising their opponents. Concerns about a lack of transparency in public affairs and its potential to disguise corrupt practices led in 2001 to the Freedom of Information Act. Suddenly it became harder for people employed by public bodies to get away with scams and pull the wool over our eyes.
Blacka is public land. It was given to the public and is governed by charitable trustees (our council representatives). It is used extensively by members of the public. Its appointed managers receive considerable sums of public money to use how they wish. This public money is spent on projects and goes some way to keep them in their jobs.
But the public are not allowed to see how this process is scrutinised or find out whether it is scrutinised at all. Once there was a public engagement process on Blacka called the Reserve Advisory Group. That was scrapped because it tended to expose plans and thinking to inconvenient public scrutiny, something managers would rather avoid. There are now two groups, one a 'users group' a haphazard setup attended by different people each time with no power to scrutinise and another a 'conservation group' which allegedly meets 3 times a year. This latter, if it exists at all, is a secret group supposedly one arm of this dual public engagement process, the members of which are hidden from the public gaze as are their deliberations: no notes from their meetings are allowed to be shown to members of the public outside the group itself.
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