I have just returned from the annual Local Government Association Conference in Birmingham. I am a distance from being a committed “conference go’er”. ( others I accept have a different view on conference attending ) There are pluses and minuses.
I found this year’s rather better ( more interesting? ) than last year’s equivalent in Bournemouth. My own view is that many of the conference speech’s ( and make no mistake, there are an awful lot…some less awful than others ) are usually much as you would expect them to be. Leanne Woods the Plaid leader told us how wonderful everything in Wales will be when Plaid come to power and Ann Widdacombe reaffirmed her total commitment to Brexit. “There is no such thing as a soft or hard Brexit, just Brexit.” “We will take back law making from Brussels”. Well Yes Ann, that could well be the case, but I for one prefer many of the laws that have come out of Brussels as opposed to those coming from Westminster… and anyone with an ounce of concern for the environment, for instance, would say much the same. So we will spend an age destroying much very good law making in various areas such as the environment and employment law while destroying the economy and struggling to find workers to run our NHS, care services and agriculture. Standards of living will drop, cost of living is already rising…but we will be able to make our own laws in splendid isolation from external influence, where greater intelligence and humanity seems to reign. I digress.
The main benefit from my perspective of these bun fights is the networking the goes on. A vast number of different organisations take stalls and engage with conference go’ers. Just about every interest area you can think of is represented, and the whole of conference could be taken up with visiting the stalls and engaging in discussions on topics ranging from highways to health care, from local government to landscape design.
I spent a disproportionate time with the Woodland Trust, and hope that the investment of time will ultimately produce a significant number of trees coming to Teignbridge.
I also attended a very informative seminar about air pollution.
A passing observation about Birmingham.
My visits to Birmingham, I confess, have usually been of a sporting nature. Villa Park has been a regular destination ( ‘though less so of recent years)I have watched cricket at Edgebaston and played rugby , I think twice, at Moseley. Both of those visits were nothing short of disasterous if memory serves, but more of that another time.
As a student I undertook a field study on the city centre, but I hadn’t until this week really engaged with Birmingham in a meaningful way for many years. What a transformation. Here is a city confident in its future. Major regeneration work is evident everywhere you look. New shopping areas, new hotels and new infra structure abound. They are investing heavily in building council housing and also the council is building starter to homes for sale. “Way to go” IMO.