Thursday, 1 March 2007

On the Stupid Table

Today was the great East of England consultation conference on Destination 2014, the draft strategic plan of CapacityBuilders (the quango set up to oversee the ChangeUp programme to improve voluntary sector infrastructure).

The plan has come in for widespread criticism, principally for being too close to government and for treading on the toes of established national groups such as NCVO and NAVCA. But CapacityBuilders deserve some credit for raising issues, and they do seem genuinely content to revise their draft plan.

So much better than the EU. I once attended a "consultation" event in Brussels to be told by someone from the European Commission that our job was to "sit and listen" and that nothing we said would lead to the proposals being revised and if we didn't like it, he suggested, "you can write to your local newspaper". He also said that if the European Parliament didn't accept the proposals, they would be resubmitted to Parliament "time and again" until they did. Ever since I have held a deep suspicion of the EU and of "consultations" in general.

So today I had fairly low expectations as I went to learn more about what is in store and to put in my two pennyworth. The event was held at Newmarket racecourse. Very plush. There were about 90 people attending divided between nine tables. After hearing introductory speeches, each table was asked to talk through some of the issues raised.

I am not sure who was responsible for the seating arrangements, but I will have to ask questions: due to some administrative cock-up, I was unfortunately put on the Stupid Table. There were people on my table who had not the slightest idea what “infrastructure” meant, people who thought that all voluntary groups by definition were infrastructure organisations, people who thought that private sector companies should be part of voluntary sector infrastructure. How did they get into the conference? What were they doing there?

Also at the conference were plenty of good intelligent people. At the coffee breaks I got to hang out with the cool kids and I did manage to have some useful exchanges.

Thankfully, there were one or two others who had also been misallocated to the Stupid Table. We were very discrete about it; we accepted out misfortune stoically and made a fair fist of things although it was very very hard work. But from the other tables, we heard the laughter and the animated discussions, and we all knew.

Home again

I arrived home about 5:00 pm and then worked through to about 8:00 pm trying to produce a first draft budget for 2007-08. I think I succeeded.

Meanwhile, Jackie had finished washing our quilt. It is absolutely beautiful and measures eight feet by eight feet; Jackie designed and hand-sewed it herself. It contains 2,500 hexagons held together with 200,000 stitches and it took Jackie a year to make. And something went badly wrong in the washing process. A disaster. Over the weekend, we will conduct a solemn post mortem to see if it can be saved.