Clearly, the Bath City Forum is not an ideal solution nor does it go very far in addressing the Bath governance issue.
However, creating a subcommittee of the Council made up of Councillors with Bath city constituencies to focus on Bath city issues and make authoritative proposals to full council about the how to address city problems and opportunities does make some sense.
To assist in this work, it might also have made sense to set up links between key organisations in the city, such as the BID, CCAG, BTP, Police etc., and forum members. This might, in part, have been achieved by inviting groups to nominate representatives to sit in on Forum discussions.
We are considerably less clear why the council has gone down the route of appointing self-nominated individuals to sit as members of the subcommittee. The pool created are self-selected and represent only themselves.
This is a situation which has always concerned us but a new development concerns us more.
BANES are now using the forum to set priorities for spending the large amounts of money raised by the council through Community Infrastructure Levies.
How can this be justified?