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On 15th July 2023, Maria Antoniou (partnerships officer at Community Works and co-chair of CCAWG) sent an email to all the community representatives on the group saying :

"As the BHCC Sustainability Team is being disbanded, the Community & Climate Action Working Group is also being discontinued. "

This news came as somewhat of a surprise to us, even though the rumour that the entire sustainability team at Brighton and Hove City Council (BHCC) was to be made redundant had been doing the rounds for some time prior to the announcement. But the both the timing and the manner in which the CCWAG - which while not perfect represented a major step forward in Council-Community engagement on Climate - was summarily abolished left many confused and concerned.

A week before the announcement, certain events surrounding the proposed meeting between CCAWG representatives and senior BHCC Councillors (including the Cabinet Member for Net Zero Cllr Tim Rowkins) acted as a precursor to the abolition announcement. This meeting was scheduled for Monday 8th July and had been in particpants’ diaries for some time.

In the run up to this meeting concerns had been growing amongst some community representatives that CCAWG was becoming more of a token, 'top-down' process in which Council officers and their allies amongst the two co-chairs (Athol Halle of Trust for Developing Communities and Maria Antoniou of Community Works) saw it as a forum in which Council priorities and programmes could be promoted but not one in which critical scrutiny thereof would be tolerated. A more detailed exploration of the early history of CCAWG and the issues arising can be read in the 'Story So Far'.

In the days running up to the 8th July meeting with the Councillors, representatives of BHCA had drawn up a 'Position Paper' calling for a review of the governance of CCAWG. The paper had been forwarded to Cllr Mark Earthey, the independent Councillor for Rottingdean & West Saltdean who had added key information concerning how any engagement process could interface with the Council after it had adopted its new constitution after the switch from the committee system to the Cabinet + Scrutiny Committee structure.

A copy of the Position Paper can be read here. The initial idea was that it would be presented to the Councillors so as to initiate a discussion on governance reform of CCAWG to make it more inclusive and robust.

Initially the draft paper was shared with other community representatives on CCAWG but their feedback was that while the issue was certainly a salient one, it was premature to present it to the Councillors before the community representatives had discussed it. As a result, the draft paper was only sent out to the community reps, who were due to meet at 4pm for a pre-meeting prior to the meeting with the Councillors at 5pm.

Much to our surprise, however, 20 minutes after the position paper was emailed out, the community reps received an email from Maria Antoniou, partnerships officer at Community Works and co-chair of CCAWG, informing us that both the 4pm and 5pm meetings had been cancelled. No reason for the cancellation was given and subsequent enquiries by Cllr Earthey strongly suggested that no councillor invited to the meeting had been consulted on the decision to cancel, and that the decision appeared to have been made solely by 'Council officerss' and the co-chairs.

Cllr Earthey subsequently emailed Ms Antoniou to request an explanation for the cancellation of the meeting and received a reply to say that one would be provided. One month later (as this udpate is written), no explanation has been forthcoming. Rather than provide the explanation, the next communication from Ms Antoniou came on the 15th July to inform us that the entire CCAWG process was being abolished. At no stage were any of the community representatives consulted on this decision.Seeking an explanation, Cllr Earthey contacted Cllr Rowkins, who informed him that he had not become aware of the decision to abolish CCAWG until well after the meeting, but he too thought that the decision that it too had been taken by officers and the co-chairs. He did, however, advise that he remained committed to ongoing Council-Community engagement.

We are therefore left with a number of lingering questions :

Which Council officers participated in the decision to cancel the 8th July meetings and to abolish CCAWG ?

Why were the meetings on the 8th cancelled and can we reasonably conclude that the position paper, calling for proper and meaningful rather than token engagement, had something to do with it ?

Given the ongoing committment to, and appetite for, Council-Community engagement on Cllr Rowkin's behalf, how should the community reps respond ?

Cllr Earthey is adamant that the engagement process does need to continue, as the new Scrutiny Committee process does take heed of external, independent experts, who, under some circumstances, may be seconded on to the Committee or its work-group(s). Cllr Earthey believes that Cllrs Rowkins and Muten (Transport) are perfectly sincere in their interest to engage with Brighton’s wealth of expertise in energy, climate change, sustainability, and transport. He hopes that the new Head of Net Zero and their new team are equally sincere.