The Wave

Nothing like a good tidy up. Thanks to all who made suggestions for improving the layout.

Busy at work and university but looking forward to this Saturday’s climate march, The Wave . If anyone from around Kingston / Surbiton is keen to go but doesn’t know anyone else going, a few TTK members and others are meeting up at 11.30am on Waterloo Station concourse by the ticket barriers closest to Platform 10. All welcome!

There is an ongoing debate amongst social and environmental activists as to how effective such marches are. Pessimists – or realists? – point to the million-plus people who mobilised in the UK alone on the first London march against the Iraq war in 2003, asking what difference they made to the decision to go to war. Harder-line activists might suggest that a family-friendly march, stewarded by the police, will never have the shock value or achieve as much as proper direct action such as stopping a coal train en route to a power station.

My take on this is that, given the extent of the national media’s role in setting the political agenda, and the fragmentation of media consumption as a result of technological and social changes, a single high-profile national action, appealing to as wide a demographic as possible and therefore reported by everyone, is sometimes the only way to show that a critical mass of people care about an issue. It’s oversimplistic to say that because the Iraq march didn’t stop the war, or the climate marches haven’t resulted in emissions reductions yet, these activities were pointless. Would the groundbreaking nature of the Climate Change Act 2008, or the heat felt by the government over the need for the Iraq inquiry to be public, have been as acute if not for these marches? We don’t know but I strongly suspect not.

So – see you there on Saturday?

To discuss any issues around Kingston, politics or both, just comment on this post and I’ll get back to you, or feel free to email me at any time at majeed@cantab.net

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Twitter: majeedneky

Social capital in action

I blogged here about Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking book on social capital, Bowling Alone. Since reading it, I’ve started to think about more of life through the lens of social capital: aware that it’s just one way of thinking, but nonetheless finding it enlightening.

This view of things coloured my experience of an evening hosted by Transition Town Kingston at the Mayo Centre, United Reformed Church last night. Entitled ‘The Power of Alliances’, it was organised by two intrepid members who brought the idea to the TTK steering group, asked for the support they needed, got on with it and did a fantastic job. The idea was to bring representatives of local groups – not necessarily environmental – together to explore shared challenges and see how TTK’s role as a Kingston-centred umbrella organisation could be helpful to existing groups.

Immediately I was keen on the idea: by helping each other out, we can make our social capital go further, particularly if it’s dwindling as Putnam says. In particular, the idea of formalising our social capital by forming associations was explored by the guest speaker, Peter from Ham United Group, who have attracted considerable funding for some very ambitious projects (some not mentioned on the website as they’re still coming together) simply by virtue of being a hard-working, visible, place-centred community group with a structure and regular meetings. Formed a year after HUG, this is starting to be TTK’s experience too, with an approach by ARTGYM leading to a joint bid for government funding and a very exciting project, due to come to fruition in March 2010 (website coming soon!)

The community garden at Ham Library. Photo: Richmond Environment Network

The new partnership orthodoxies of local government depend heavily on such formal, constituted groups as a consultation base. I’ve argued before that this can lead to views of individuals being overlooked – not everyone identifies with a faith group, or a charitable association, or an environmental group – and also to an excess of conformity, stifling new ideas. History continually demonstrates that the rebels of today are the vested interests of tomorrow.

But such groups are where much of the achievement and improvement in a community happens. They are a crucial way of giving people the confidence and desire to stand up and be counted in local politics. So as well as changing the structures by which we do things in order to draw in individuals by offering more power, perhaps society (as Putnam posits) would be better if more, and different, people were involved in groups.

Thinking about it, my anxieties about groups and the democratic process are in large part to do with the ways in which groups often position themselves. One of the many people I enjoyed meeting last night was a representative from a local residents’ association. He told me that it was in danger of collapse, with activists standing down from committee posts for a variety of reasons, and no replacements coming through. When I pressed him on possible reasons for this, he said that paradoxically, it was because the association had already achieved a great deal; what problems there were have either been solved to residents’ satisfaction or have proven intractable.

If they are to succeed, such groups must reposition themselves positively: my knee-jerk suggestion for the residents’ association was to ask residents ‘How do you want your area to be in 10 years?’ and draw up campaign priorities accordingly. This positive approach necessarily leads to a widening of scope: not so much an interest group, but an interests group. For example, around a core theme of sustainability – which, as legislation and corporate rhetoric constantly show, is interpretable very broadly – HUG have started a community magazine, investigated energy projects, created both productive and ornamental gardens, run craft and sport sessions for local children, and more. The key to their success, said Peter from HUG, was perseverence, but also the idea that whoever had an idea would run with it and be able to draw on the group’s resources for support. This was inspiring and affirming to hear: the way in which the evening itself had been put on was a major shift towards that model of operation for Transition Town Kingston.

This sort of thing is surely the resurgence in civil society that David Cameron cites. But to see volunteers as a substitute for funded programmes would be a mistake. Volunteers can and do burn out. Funding for projects often does not cover labour costs and so necessitates volunteer involvement anyway.

Decentralisation and community empowerment do not mean a laissez-faire approach – far from it. Cut too much and you risk derailing positive objectives in favour of negativity; After all, if everyone’s at the Poll Tax riots, who’s going to grow the veg?

To discuss any issues around Kingston, politics or both, just comment on this post and I’ll get back to you, or feel free to email me at any time at majeed@cantab.net

http://whorunskingston.wordpress.com
Twitter: majeedneky

Sustainable Communities Act mark II

I went to an excellent and interesting conference run by the Environmental Law Foundation earlier this week on community empowerment. As seems to be a running theme with this blog, this is another often-used but possibly seldom-understood phrase – a buzzword which could be so much more.

In the last couple of years the government has, to give it credit, produced some legislation to accompany the continual talk of devolving power that has persisted ever since Scottish and Welsh independence. The Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 and the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 have established a ‘duty to involve’ local people in decision-making, including under-represented groups, and a ‘duty to promote democracy’ and increase public understanding of governance structures.

The meaning and impact of this legislation is still percolating through local government, partly because councils are large organisations and this is a major policy shift, but also because the terms of these duties have been phrased deliberately vaguely. This is ostensibly to allow local councils to interpret and innovate, but there is some concern that this will end up perpetuating a model of local consultative governance which, at the moment (from what I read and also from personal experience both as a resident and as a consultant) largely favours representatives of formalised community groups with specific – by no means usually bad, but nevertheless specific – policy agendas.

The Sustainable Communities Act aims at ‘double devolution’ – from central government to local councils, and onwards to local people. Councils ‘opting in’ (last year I helped coordinate a petition to Kingston Council to urge them to do so) must use citizens’ panels of some description to generate ideas for national legislation that would help make the local community more environmentally, economically, socially or democratically sustainable – from tax breaks for local green or independent businesses to special protection for allotment land. Ideas from areas all over the country are whittled down to a shortlist by a board appointed by the Local Government Association and then presented to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (currently John Denham), who must enact them or tell Parliament a good reason why not. Information, including proposals submitted, can be viewed here. You can sign up to support the campaign here.

A project on the Act has found that panels were much more successful at submitting a large number of well-developed ideas before the deadline when they consisted of a new and often larger set of local citizens than when an existing group of customary, quasi-professional ’stakeholders’ was used. Hopefully this new research will influence the direction of local and national consultation policy in the future.

One thing I didn’t realise is that the Duty to Involve allows councils to devolve budgets to ward level. From a quick Google search, the use of this appears to be confined largely to street maintenance budgets, and within that, to capital spending; of course, money spent by agencies other than the Council is not involved. The Sustainable Communities Act goes further, stipulating that Local Spending Reports be published that detail all money spent in a given local authority area, by all public bodies – including quangos previously unencumbered with the need to be accountable to particular communities in this way. Once spending levels are established, the proposals process detailed above can be used to request the transfer of particular budgets to bring them under democratic control.

Unlike the proposals process, which is making significant progress, this commitment on Local Spending Plans has met with some difficulty. According to Steve Shaw of LocalWorks, who spoke at the Environmental Law Foundation conference I attended, the reports released thus far mainly included known spending by bodies such as councils and Primary Care Trusts.

Government inaction is a major threat to what, in a world where financial resources are the biggest constituent of power, may be the most truly empowering initiative that has been seen for some time. Of course, it doesn’t solve all our problems: there’s still the issue of how communities get together and decide how to spend what’s available. But unlike the participatory budgeting pilots held around the country from 2007 (see www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk) there is a sense that we could be moving away from tokenistic and towards genuine budgets. After all, ‘empowerment’ is about getting things done… right?

PS: Please consider helping the Act carry on working – whether there is regime change or not – and making sure that there are proper Local Spending Reports in the future by lobbying your MP: http://www.localworks.org/node/76. I’ve also been reading more about the work of the Environmental Law Foundation – another organisation well worth checking out / considering supporting!

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Old hat but good and relevant… um… hat

Just a quick one again to recommend a book. Been around for a few years but I’ve just got to it.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam explores and popularises the idea of social capital – the inherent value of social networks.

At first (like so much in this field) this sounds like a slightly abstract idea. But as I understand it, social capital is what gives a community its capacity for members to to identify with each other, build on successes or deal with problems – its social resilience and adaptability. The links and networks that they form are what gives people the support to go on through a bad time – or the human resources to mount a campaign.

Putnam explores the decline in numbers of people voting, campaigning or running for office, and in the numbers of people actively participating in local clubs and societies (as distinct from the model of signing up to a mass-membership national pressure group, which is becoming increasingly common) in the US. What implications might this have? Is it true that people nowadays are still ‘joiners’, just in a different way? What impact has the e-democracy concept had, if any?

Bowling Alone is impassioned and well-written whilst still being robust in its research (and, importantly, honest when there are doubts!) I recommend it not just because it’s interesting in itself, but also because it’s very possibly a beneficial new angle on some other problem or cause you might be working on.

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It’s how you get there that counts

After my robe and cat were such a hit, I’m loath to try to follow it up. So as they say, And Now for Something Completely Different.

Required reading for one of my lectures today (in Social Sustainability) was this paper by Dr. Silvia Gullino, a lecturer at Kingston. You have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, but you can see the abstract and get a gist by following the link.

Though I didn’t agree with absolutely all of the analysis, the basic premise really resonated with what I think and I feel that it ties together some of my previous posts.

Both British and US planning and social policy (increasingly being treated, I think rightly, by theoretical and political structures as two sides of the same thing) are very keen on ‘mixed communities’. There is no one definition but the idea is one of diversity – of ethnicity, class, age etc – within a local community. The paper gives two examples of regeneration programmes in the US, in Chicago and Baltimore, that set out to regenerate low-income, high unemployment areas by making them into mixed communities – gentrifying them selectively and rehousing or relocating some or all of the original residents to make space for a more diverse crowd with a mix of housing tenures.

In Britain we link this strongly to our other new favourite phrase, ’sustainable communities’. It is by making this link that the shortcomings of the two US examples become particularly apparent.

The idea of a sustainable community isn’t quite as buzzwordy as it seems. To me it conveys the concept that the community is self-sustaining, that it has the resources – physical but also social – to look after its members and to improve itself. The paper argued that not only did the US programmes underestimate the natural social capital in the neighbourhoods (which showed itself in the vigorous residents’ campaigns against the lack of consultation involved in the schemes) but that it also eroded this by relocating people away from their established social networks. This has similarities to the widespread practices that took place in Britain in the 1950s, which I read about recently in the excellent ‘Estates’ by Lynsey Hanley.

Silvia’s paper warns that we shouldn’t fall into the trap of treating the task of building a sustainable community – which is embedded into the new way of doing things in British local government – as a product, when in fact it’s a process. It’s not just about where we’re going, it’s about how we get there. If we fight off climate change, but do so through becoming a corporate oligarchy, is it a sustainable solution? How about if we restore trust in our democracy, but do so by reinforcing the idea that ‘politics’ is about who we send to Westminster every few years and barely think about in between apart from when we read about them (or more likely their boss) in the paper?

This is why I have misgivings about relying too heavily on consultation, as opposed to participation. A lot of the time, consultation is something we get involved in when our interests are threatened. By its very nature it can never be something we do every day. And so even when we get the outcomes we want, the way we do so entrenches the limited range of outcomes from which we will be able to choose in the future.

Direct decision making in whatever form has often been written off as impractical. But this is partly because it has become an anomaly in a system where the principle of subsidiarity no longer applies, if it ever did. Subsidiarity is the idea that any given decision should be made at the most local, smallest or lowest level that is competent to make such a decision. The idea is most often associated with the theroretical workings of the European Community, but you would be hard-pressed to find even the most ardent Europhile who thought that it was truly applied there.

The Lib Dems in local government have taken some steps towards this, devolving first Council committees and meetings and then sections of budgets to groups of wards known as neighbourhoods. It’s a good start and one of the reasons that I’m a Lib Dem is to argue that we should go much further. At the moment, neighbourhoods are administrative areas alone, little-known to anyone not interested in Council matters. But to my mind, when you have an area with its own identity and associated social capital that is also a decision-making force, empowering those within it and giving them an equal voice, that is the foundation on which a sustainable community begins the never-ending process of sustaining itself.

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Our new cat

Continuing the drift towards more lightweight posts, here are some pictures of our new cat, who we have named Æthelstan after the Saxon king allegedly crowned in Kingston. We got him from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, which I thoroughly recommend – they are amazingly well organised and very friendly.

He is around 2 years old and has been at Battersea for about a month. We were told that he was shy and he spent four hours under the bookshelf, before we brought out his dinner; since then, he’s been a different cat.

Eyeing my stripy dressing gown earlier this morning

Getting a little bolder

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Just a quick one…

I was just on the Council’s website to get some documents I needed to write a mock planning appeal statement for my course. The course is going well and the policy documents are genuinely interesting stuff if you’re a nerd like me. (If I meet people who aren’t nerdy about something, I don’t tend to trust them….)

Anyway, I spotted this – a new scheme to give Kingston teenagers a chance to shadow a councillor for a short time and get an idea of what they do.

To my own relief there is to be no tortuous analysis from me today – just wanted to say what a good idea I think this is. Not a gimmick (well, unless you think work experience is a gimmick too) and could genuinely get people interested. Some of my work involves engaging with young people and helping develop ways for them to get involved in politics. There are some great creative schemes out there, some with significant budgets attached to them, and simple but effective ideas like this one can only add value. Even if participants don’t want to become councillors at the end of it, there are a lot of other options for getting involved and it could be a good chance to gather information on what really interests them.

But if Kingston does this right, the benefit will be mutual: not only will the teenagers get an interesting experience, but they’ll be ideally placed to comment on how – or whether – the meetings, policies and practices that they’re learning about actually connect with their own perceived realities.

I hope they get this space to comment – and that when they give their views, they won’t hold back.

Is voting enough for a change?

Today I got an email from Vote For A Change picking up on Gordon Brown’s Conference speech commitment to a referendum on electoral reform.

Vote For A Change welcomed the announcement but wanted action to be taken in this Parliament – not least because there’s no guarantee that Labour will have the power to fulfil their promise come next June. Their open letter to Gordon Brown is available here and I think it’s worth signing – but also worth pausing to look a bit deeper into the background of Brown’s announcement.

The focal point is the way that Brown relates his proposals on democratic reform to the expenses scandal. Here’s the relevant extract from the Prime Minister’s conference speech.

Never again should it be said of any Member of Parliament that they are in it for what they can get; all of us should be in Parliament for what we can give.

And so where there is proven financial corruption by an MP and in cases where wrong-doing has been demonstrated but Parliament fails to act we will give constituents the right to recall their Member of Parliament.

And if we want a politics that is more open, more plural, more local, more democratic, then we will need to make big changes because the only way to ensure politics serves the people’s values is to make all those who wield political power genuinely accountable to the people.

There is now a stronger case than ever that MPs should be elected with the support of more than half their voters – as they would be under the Alternative Voting system.

(full speech here)

In four sentences, via the interesting proposals on allowing constituents to ‘recall’ their MPs, Brown moves from the expenses scandal to the need for electoral reform. Expenses brought ‘politics’ into disrepute by displaying its lack of accountability; electoral reform will increase that accountability. Sounds logical enough – but the two issues are completely unrelated. Did the size of an MP’s majority, or the healthiness of democratic activity in their constituency, have any bearing on whether or not they chose to cash in?

Campaigning groups have not tended to expose this fallacy, but have reinforced it. The first sentence under ‘What we’re doing’ on the Vote For A Change website states: ‘Politicians have let us down. They’ve abused their power for too long – it’s time for a change. ‘ In both the party political and the campaigning spheres, momentum in public relations has gone before logic. Electoral reform shouldn’t be a sop to the idea of democracy, but a considered move towards a more democratic reality.

I’m completely in favour of the proposed referendum, and of it taking place as early as possible. So why split hairs? Because I realise that just because this broad-brush, national-scale, extremely rapid and event-driven mode of action might have gone the way I wanted this time, mostly it doesn’t. A cynic might see our system’s lack of democracy reflected in the culmination of this breakneck process: a pronouncement made by a man who might be on his way out of a job, to cushion the fall from government of his party and containing a promise he will never have the power to keep, is scrutinised as if it actually means something, because there is little else that the system encourages people to do. Perhaps this is related to the idea that we are becoming a monitory democracy. This blog post makes me just as guilty as anyone in failing to stand up to this trend. And I don’t see the Alternative Vote system, brilliant as it would be, addressing this underlying democratic deficit.

Imagine being able to channel ideas on, say, electoral reform through local open meetings – not talking shops with free wine provided, or simple opportunities to ask questions of elected representatives, but forums which could discuss the pros and cons rationally and – crucially – make recommendations which would have force at some tangible and important level. That’s my ideal, in my current way of thinking, and I don’t know how to make it work, but I think it’s something worth spending some time working out.

Maybe, if we’re very good, we could get that free wine in after all to aid the thinking process.

What makes a place?

This morning on the radio, I heard about a pilot governmental scheme called Total Place. The report focused on one of 13 pilot areas, in Leicestershire, where £5 million is being spent on getting a huge array of agencies – health, policing, local county and city councils, quangos and regional bodies – together to assess the funding flowing into, and the work being done, in the Leicestershire area and investigate how the different agencies could better coordinate their work.

In many ways this sounds like a good thing – a logical extension of the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) approach to local government which has been embedding itself over the last few years. LSPs, in my understanding (feel free to correct me by leaving a comment!) are boards which bring together local ‘service providers’, including the Council, Primary Care Trust, Police, representatives of the business and voluntary sectors and others, to coordinate service delivery and, increasingly, public consultation and engagement in a particular area. Generally speaking, few would disagree that coordination is a good thing. However – and please bear in mind my relative lack of knowledge of these structures – two questions remain for me.

Firstly, why do we have such a proliferation of agencies in the first place? Historically, as I understand it, this can be identified as a hangover from the Thatcher era – and even from the Labour governments before her – during which considerable power was removed from local authorities. At the time, Militant elements of the Labour party were causing the Conservative government considerable trouble in areas such as Liverpool. The removal of power from councils has been argued, in this context, to have been a purely political move that ran completely counter to the supposed Conservative ideology of decentralisation and reducing the reach of the state. In his book Thatcher and Sons, Simon Jenkins covers these years, going on to argue that New Labour has in many areas reinforced and built on this trend, rather than scaling it back. Entities such as the regional Government Offices, Regional Development Agencies and others have been established or retained, with large budgets, a remit that is not well-known to the public and few checks and balances, either from elected authorities or from the media.

Secondly, and relatedly, the transfer of power to quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations) and central and regional government bodies has unarguably reduced democratic control over service provision. Boards of such bodies tend to be appointed, rather than elected. Whether they publish minutes or not, most meetings of coordinating, strategic or grant-giving bodies above the local authority level take place behind closed doors as far as most citizens are concerned. Certainly, people should take the time to find out about the shifting democratic landscape. But they’re hardly aided in this by the increasingly confusing blurring of lines between the political and the managerial. To take a crucial example, where does this leave someone wanting to get involved in local decision-making? Perhaps, if they could get past the barriers discussed here, they could stand for council, amidst increasing confusion about how much influence this carries. Who has power, the councillors or the Chief Executive? Who has power, the council (and, in many places in England, it is necessary to add ‘Which council?’) or another agency? Who has power, all councillors or just dominant groups of councillors? What could be decided above councillors’ heads by unelected managers of public service organisations? Where is the money coming from for initiatives? Who is worthy of praise and who of blame? It’s enough to put anyone off trying to help shape their local community.

As is continually pointed out by such well-motivated, erudite intellectual beacons as the Taxpayers’ Alliance, all this confusion is not only undemocratic, but wastes money. A good move on both counts, it would seem, would be to map out what’s actually going on, make this knowledge public, and then try to coordinate activities more effectively. That’s what Total Place is trying to do – but if it doesn’t solve the problems above, ‘Total Place’ will be a misnomer. Through its devolved government, though it has its own problems, London is on its way to becoming a ‘Total Place’ – with its own ethos, pride, identity and autonomy. Will the Total Place initiative help deliver that?

Things have been done this way for so long that they have come to acquire an illusory logic of their own. Low expectations have been entrenched and any coordination of efforts is heralded with fulsome praise. But an analogy may help illustrate the lack of logic. Say you took the HR, Accounts and operational arms of a business and made them into three different organisations. If asked whether those different organisations should have meetings to coordinate their work, rather than not doing so, any sensible person would opt for the former. But there’d still be a problem. There would still be barriers between people trying to do different parts of the same job. And by adding to the burden of coordination and strategy in this way, the organisations involved tend to become more top-heavy and move ever-closer to the paper-pushing, politically correct stereotypes of the New Labour public sector.

Don’t worry though – I’m not about to go all pro-privatisation on you. My biggest concern is the fact that customers and workers have no more say in the organisation than they did previously, and that this is glossed over by the rhetoric of ‘stakeholders’ and ‘partnership working’.

So: what is the solution? In most other countries they have a much clearer division of labour between the state at local, regional and national (and, with the steadily creeping power of the EU, international) levels. Maybe that would help us. Certainly, the Tories’ proposed cull of quangos seems unlikely to provide the solution, for three reasons. Under Thatcher and Major, the Tories created a huge number of arms-length bodies. Labour proposed a similar cull of such bodies when they entered office, and this has failed to materialise. (See this New Statesman article.) Finally, the plotting of cuts, mergers and shakeups gets us no further towards a new constitutional settlement that gives power to the people of this country.

In today’s domestic news, the talk is all of cuts, and the Total Place objectives are no exception. The summary here speaks of ‘service transformations that can improve the experience of local residents and deliver better value’ and the need to ‘deliver early efficiencies to validate the work’. This is as it should be – we’re talking about taxpayers’ money here. But as well as saving money, why not be bold? Let’s take stock of history, prioritise democracy, and stop tinkering around the edges.

Towards Transition

Morning,

I’ve mentioned Transition Town Kingston on here briefly, and there are a lot of TTK events coming up, so I thought I’d give some more background and some relevant dates.

Transition Towns is a worldwide network of unique, local movements aimed at helping a local area to face up to two key environmental challenges: climate change and peak oil. Two things make Transition Towns stand out in the crowd of green initiatives springing up at the moment. Firstly, peak oil is looked at alongside climate change. Peak oil is the idea that the world’s oil supplies will soon plateau: from that point on, available supply at a viable price of extraction will only fall. Combined with trends of increasing supply, due mainly to rapidly industrialising countries, this is clearly a problem. As well as raising wider awareness of this problem, Transition Towns seeks to relate it to the other problems we face. Looking at climate change but ignoring peak oil leads to a lot of energy-intensive, high-technology suggestions for mitigating global warming, which, given the fact that we can’t rely on cheap energy being available forever, is not necessarily the best way to go.

This brings me on to the second thing that I think makes Transition Towns unique, and which is really important to me personally. It is focused on positivity, local action and local decision-making. We can’t rely (or at least can’t rely solely) on science to save the day, so why not do more for ourselves locally? Not only does this make us more independent of external factors, we can build stronger communities whilst creating a ‘vision’ of what we want to see in the future, and working towards it. I’ve said a bit more about this on my company’s blog here and want to develop my thoughts on how all this ties in with the new local government structures, primarily Local Strategic Partnerships, that are forming.

Transition Town Kingston is trying to promote Kingston’s ‘resilience’ to peak oil and climate change, for instance by encouraging local food production, but branching out into contributing towards plans to reduce energy demand and find lower energy ways of doing things.

Even if climate change didn’t exist, we might as well try to make Kingston an even more welcoming and fun place than it is now, and one where all interested people work together to run things. In preparation for my MA course, I’ve been reading about the history of town planning, and it seems that the single biggest impetus towards more collaborative decision-making in that field has been the environmental agenda. Whether or not this is a coincidence, it’s a link that I think we should embrace and continue to progress; treating sustainability in its widest sense to encompass sustainable communities as well as a sustainable mode of living within our material resources.

Now for the dates! Visit www.ttkingston.org for updates and email TTKingstonSteering@yahoogroups.com to subscribe to our fortnightly newsletter.

Tomorrow (Sat 12th September) we are helping Plastic Bag Free Kingston to run a stall outside All Saints Church in Kingston Market Place from 10am to 4pm. Free cloth bags for all!

Next Saturday (19th September) in the afternoon, TTK and KUTLETS (Kingston’s Local Exchange Trading Scheme) are holding an Organic Food Extravaganza at Kingston Environment Centre, Fairfield East, KT1 2PT – come to share and swap produce that you’ve grown and meet like-minded people.

On Tuesday 22nd September, we have a short film and discussion on transport to mark World Car Free Day- this is from 7pm at C-SCAIPE, Kingston University, Penryhn Road, KT1 2EE. All welcome, refreshments provided and donations to cover costs appreciated!

On Thursday 24th September, from 7.30pm at C-SCAIPE again, we’ve invited a senior planner from the Council for a discussion on the South London Waste Plan, currently under consultation. Do come and have your say – no prior knowledge required.

And finally (for now) on Saturday 3rd October, we have a cold frame building session at the Environment Centre – so if you want to keep growing food over the winter months, come down and find out how. Keep an eye on www.ttkingston.org or subscribe to the newsletter for more details.