Why does cardiff council see citizens as ‘outside influences’ who should be kept in the dark?
By Tamsin Stirling
Photo by CreditDebitPro
‘It is in the public interest to allow the council to proceed with the additional required work without outside influence’
The above quote from Cardiff Council is taken from a recent Wales Online article titled Cardiff council is exploring options for finishing Eastern Bay Link road but won’t say what they are.
To me the sentence means ‘leave us and the consultants we’ve employed alone to get on with our work. We don’t want to have to spend time explaining things to citizens and answering their questions. We’ll tell citizens what’s going to happen when we’ve already made up our minds in a ‘consultation’ paper’.
This is yet another example of a lack of transparency between the council and citizens of the city. If the Council thinks that citizens of Cardiff can only be told things once a formed view from technical experts comes out for consultation, what does that say about its view of citizens? Citizens are not nuisances to be locked out of processes as ‘outside influences’, nor are they stupid. We are council tax payers, interested in the future of our city, with legitimate concerns about the environment and inequality, just to mention two issues. Does Cardiff Council not realise that locking people out of processes leading to important decisions will undermine trust in the council and our elected representatives?
In addition, when it comes to transport, as with so many things, providing a technical solution doesn’t mean it will necessarily work. People need to be engaged in discussion about problems, concerns and options for the future. Cardiff Council is a co-operative council and was actually co-operative council of the year in 2018. Why do we see so little co-operation in practice?
As well as process issues, both the article and the particular quote beg a number of other questions. Why is Cardiff Council:
looking at options for new roads and expecting the Welsh Government to finance them when the Welsh Government declared a moratorium on new road building in June 2021 pending a review?
even considering building new roads when its own One Planet document makes a commitment to a carbon neutral city by 2030 and the risks to the city posed by climate change are so clear?
talking so much more about ‘finishing’ the Eastern Bay Link road rather than investment in crossrail and other public transport?
Let’s hope the report from consultants Arcadis takes a proper, holistic view of how transport might be improved in south east Cardiff. I guess, as citizens, we will see when the consultation paper is published in due course.
Tamsin Stirling
November 2021