You know how it is: you wait for ages, then two come along at once, right? Much-discussed (and much-deferred) plans to set up a campaigning association for the Kennedy/Alma/Victoria/Argyll Roads district of Fort William went live this week, at least to the extent of instituting a body to publish community news-and-views online. Mohandas ('Mahatma') Gandhi once wrote/said something to the effect that "without a journal, no-one can unite a community," so with that in mind the first action taken by the new Plantation & Alma Road Campaign Assoc (PARCA) was to set up an online webmaildrop at <https://NoseyPARCA.WordPress.com>. I hope to have more to say about the 'Nosey' journal project in a few weeks time but, as the name suggests, much of the reportage will certainly have a strongly investigatory slant. Nor will the first actual PARCA campaign come as a surprise to anyone who read my ad-hoc post on Sunday: I shall return to that in postscript below - not least because a correction from me is due. However, and at about the same time, HRC's Inverness-based Tenant Participation Officers (TPOs) were out and about surveying Plantation residents (see <https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/RYPPlantation>), and for those who have yet to participate, the final question they've been asking Plantationers is this:- "14. The Plantation Community Association is a long standing group of residents who have worked to improve the Plantation and provide the park - they now desperately need new members. Would you consider joining the PCA to help out?" The PCA fell into abeyance a couple of years ago because of seemingly intractable legal problems to do with the Pine Grove playpark, so when I was shown the (draft) survey back in late March I was quite surprised to see the old PCA referred to in the present tense. I was also slightly worried, for reasons that will become clear. But at the time I was rather more bothered by the sheer number of free-text response boxes, because free-text replies cannot be analysed statistically - someone has to go through them one by one and somehow turn this raw data into a coherent picture of what people think - a tall order if it is to be done well. So I dashed-off a quick email to the TPOs in Inverness requesting "Hi, please could you provide the document describing how the results will be analysed?" I never got a reply and then, for my sins, I promptly forgot all about it. Me all over: I've got a memory like one of those things with holes in, er, you know, them... So it wasn't until the beginning of June that the Plantation survey came to my attention again when I learned, by virtue of my being asked to publicise it, that the actual surveying had now begun. This time I replied at some length, explaining in full why I'd requested the analysis document back in March. I began:- > Here's the problem: merely providing ratings on a scale of one to seven in > vague** accordance with the Place Standard is absolutely fine, but I cannot > in good conscience encourage Plantation residents to spend time completing > the free-text sections of the survey without having a reasonable degree of > confidence that the results will be put to good use. > > [[ **the Place Standard (<https://www.placestandard.scot/place-standard.pdf>) > actually mandates fourteen categories; HRC's Housing Team have apparently > condensed these to eight, at the price of omitting important categories > like, notably, 'Influence and Sense of Control' - which seems like a bit of > a shame although, admittedly, it's hard to know what they'd do with the > results. ]] By the way, if you found last week's Wed-Head so gripping that you couldn't help but read the Christie Report for yourself, you'll know that the Housing Teams's merging and condensing of the fourteen Place Standard metrics down to eight flies directly in the face of the Christie Commission's decade-old exhortation to adopt common benchmarks throughout Scotland so as to enable areas to be compared and thereby improve accountability. "Often, effective challenge and external scrutiny is frustrated by [..] the incomparability of basic information about the costs, quality and performance of public services" (in Ch.7, nos. 12-15 on p.63-4). Anyway, moving on: at this point I'd perhaps better make clear that, at some point, a new question was inserted into the original list of thirteen - this became the new third question ("3. Who is your Landlord?") so that all the subsequent question-numbers went up by one. I have therefore adjusted the question numbers in the next two extracts, viz:- > All of the eight 'rating' questions (nos. [4-11]) include a free-text "Why is > this?" box. Question [12] ("If you could change three things about where you > live, what would they be?") has three, logically enough - and question [13] > ("Do you have any other comments you would like to make?") adds one more for > a grand total of twelve. So that's a fair amount of information to digest > and it seems very reasonable to enquire how it will be taken into account > before I/we start twisting people's arms to participate in what many people > feel is too often "simply a 'tick box' exercise," as the last FWCAG survey > discovered from responses to the now-infamous 'Q20'. Exceptionally loyal, attentive and probably slightly autistic readers of these posts might vaguely recall that Q20 of the FWCAG survey was the subject of my Wed-Head of 14th April. Anyway, and getting to the point at last, I concluded by raising the ante on the TPOs with this:- > Finally, on my understanding question [14] ("The Plantation Community > Association is a long standing group of residents who have worked to improve > the Plantation and provide the park - they now desperately need new members. > Would you consider joining the PCA to help out?") seems to rest on an > outright falsehood: the old PCA has been in abeyance for well over two years > - it does not function, it has no participating members, it persists as a > legal entity in a purely technical sense only. Furthermore, because of the > legal quagmire, even suggesting to someone that they involve themselves with > it, let alone entreating them - as [Q14] implicitly does - seems to me to > border on the reckless [..] At this point my second email brought to light a mix-up back in March within the TPO team: a reply to my original request for the analysis document was drafted but not dispatched, seemingly because the two TPOs involved each thought the other was going to send it to me. The draft reply that came to light in June pretty much speaks for itself:- > Sent: 25 March 2021 11:00 > Subject: RE: FW: Housing Estate survey > > Suggested response: > > Hi Mark, > > This survey is designed to give a high level view of how residents feel > about living in an area. This will establish a base point, and highlight > what the issues are, which will inform more in depth discussion on issues > and possible resolutions. Results are presented in a graph (see examples > below) and give a visual impression of what people think - very similar to > the Place Standard consultation model. Any comments will be collated > separately and fed back to the group. The June email forwarding the March draft concluded with the incomprehensible "Tia was discussed" - presumably a typo for "This was discussed" but making no sense at all dangling alone at the end. Naturally, I couldn't resist making a joke of it before returning to the main subject, most especially to my all-to-serious concerns about encouraging Plantationers to join a new playpark-linked Registered Tenant's Organisation (RTO), let alone the old one (the PCA):- > If Tia Maria was discussed that might at least go some way towards > explaining why I never actually received [the drafted] "suggested > response". With respect to the point at issue, perhaps I'm being > sceptical to a fault but assurances that "any comments will be > collated separately and fed back to the group" doesn't do an awful lot > to assuage my nagging doubts that sufficiently careful thought has > been given as to how free-text responses will be worked through so as > to improve services, let alone enhance transparency, accountability, > or community-lead. > >>> "We all want the same goal here Mark" > > Unfortunately, that is not self-evidently true - indeed, I presently > think there is real room for doubt about that, too. If it were the > case, for example, that the old PCA was negligently advised to become > legally bound-in to the Pine Grove playpark project, or that members > who were encouraged to join the PCA subsequently were similarly > negligently advised, then the interest of Plantation residents and the > interests of the culpable public servants would be likely to diverge > fairly sharply. Furthermore, regardless of the truth of those matters, > it could plausibly still be that case that the only way to allay > financial and legal (say) fears in the minds of potential participants > in a new RTO might be to refer the playpark debacle to Audit Scotland > for a thorough cleansing of the stables to ensure a complete break > with past deeds** and/or misdeeds. > > [[ **no pun intended. ]] > > Less specifically, my 'goal' is broadly to see advanced a radical > embrace of the Scottish Government's community empowerment policy > agenda, neatly summarised in the January 2020 SCDC/Nick Wright > Planning 'framework paper' on Local Place Plans which reported, > perhaps following the lead of the 2011 Christie Report, that: "In the > case studies and the [2019] focus groups participants told us that we > need a new way of working to 'flip the system' so that all public > sector policy making, and service delivery is led by the needs, > aspirations and priorities identified by the communities they serve." > [[ source: <https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5943c23a440243c1fa28585f/t/5e314cbcde9c0144fe95f4f5/1580289216924/Local+Place+Plans++Challenges+and+opportunities+-+January+2020_.pdf>. ]] > So I hope we all want that same goal, do we? Not surprisingly, that was the end of that conversation: subtlety has never been my long suit and, besides, HRC need another Audit Scotland enquiry like a hole in the head. All this apparently gave rise to rumours abroad, however, that I had discouraged participation in the current survey. That is not so. For the reasons given above I was basically agnostic, so I stayed quiet: my questions about the free-text analysis had not been answered to anything like my satisfaction, but I have said nothing about that publicly until now. As far as I can tell there is no really very good reason not to provide the eight ratings requested in the survey; if you choose to comment on your answers you might like also to save copies of what you write for later use. As always, I will read any such remarks you are prepared to share with me - so they certainly won't be wasted in that case, I can promise you. PS: Finally, returning to PARCA, on Sunday I wrongly described the new resident-led campaign against landscaping charges in the Planny as simply a "non-payment campaign." Clang! Non-payment is only one possibility: Jennifer Seitz and the others (including me) will support whatever forms of protest (eg petition) folk want to try. I myself will - among other ideas - seek to win residents the right to maintain green areas ('adopt plots') for themselves and hence, in time, to obtain a permanent reduction in the charge levied. This is pretty much just another aspect of my 'Patchwork' project of putting our green patches to good purposes, about which see my Wed-Head of (among others) 19th May particularly. Similar and/or related ideas seem to have occurred independently to Brian Green on this platform - see his reply to my post on Sunday - and to Morag MacPherson of the Plantation Community Group (formerly the Plantation Coronavirus Group) over on Facebook. I'm not myself a Facebooker because I don't trust the likes of Mark Zuckerberg any further than I could comfortably excrete him, but I did speak to Morag last week about one scheme. People are really starting to come together over this which is great news: very encouraging. PPS: Next Tuesday (22nd June) is the 80th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's insane 1941 decision effectively to lose the Second World War by repudiating the Nazi-Soviet Pact and launching 'Unternehmen Barbarossa' (Operation Barbarossa) to invade Russia. Amazingly, offered the chance of a truce in September 1943 - the year of serious German defeats in the battles of Stalingrad (January) and Kursk (July) - the demented dictator was still telling his foreign minister: "You know, Ribbentrop, if I came to an agreement with Russia today I'd attack her again tomorrow - I just can't help myself." Mad! But if only every threat to human freedom was as overt as Nazism: The Soviets repelled the Germans, but the dismal grey men who succeeded Russia's own dictator, Stalin, from his 1953 death until 1985 (when Mikhail Gorbachev took over at the Kremlin) inflicted an insidious bureaucratisation both on their compatriots and throughout much of Eastern Europe - something I alluded to in my second Wed-Head of 24th March. Freedom is much more susceptible to corrosion than theft; that is what I will be contemplating on Tuesday.
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