Agenda item

The Council’s Head of Regeneration provided Members with a summary of the published report. 

She said that an early engagement process in 2019 had taken place to look at the road network around Western Harbour. Since then the Council has been in conversation with the Western Harbour Advisory Group (WHAG) and the approach the Council was taking now was to take a step back and use some time this year to solely focus on engagement for the next stage of the project.  Officers want to take an inclusive, collaborative and creative approach and to listen and hear the voices of residents, businesses, other stakeholders and the wider City.  The aim of that approach is to create a co-produced vision for Western Harbour which would set out what type of place it could become in future. That vison will then unpin any future design work for the next phase for the area.  She then went on explain how the proposal was to undertake a procurement process for urban design work that would facilitate the creative engagement process and place-shaping vision.

There would also be pop-up events to speak to people across the city. 

Members asked for further information about the benefits and themes that had arisen from officers meeting with WHAG.  Officers said the themes were from the original engagement work and the conversations provided opportunities to hear first-hand what was important to people and what concerns they had.  The meetings had provided opportunities to learn and reflect on where the project needed to go next.

Members commented that the process officers described was positive but there was a lot of work to do to gain trust back from the local community and were not sure why the Council hadn’t used this approach from the very beginning.

Some Members also said that they agreed with the public forum statements about re-naming the area ‘Western Harbour’.  It was suggested this had potentially alienated the local community from the beginning because it was not a name that people associated with the area and it had not been discussed.  Officers said if there was strong feedback from the community about the name that would be reviewed.

Another Member said they also liked the approaches officers were now outlining but in their view this was two years too late.  Also, with regards to the ‘vision’ it wasn’t clear what was now on or off the table so to speak.

Members asked who the key groups were that had been identified that would be involved going forward.  Officers said they would be working with target audiences and would share that information with Members. ACTION: further information about target audiences to be shared with members.

Another Member said they also liked a lot of what had been described by officers including that no options were currently preferred.  However, the previous Cabinet Report it was said had expressed a preference for Option E and that needed to be rescinded. He concurred with an earlier point made that it was not clear if some things that had previously been ruled out were still ruled out. 

Another Member agreed what had been said was positive and he hoped the damage that had been done could be repaired.  He asked about the role of councillors in the process.  Officers said that councillor input was very welcome and they believed they had an important role to play including ensuring that the Council was engaging with the correct people in the community. 

The Chair stated that it was her view that the Advisory Board should include local councillors, and this should be re-looked at going forward.  It would be a democratic deficit if they were not involved and she would therefore make enquiries about this.

ACTION: for the Chair to raise councillor representation on the Advisory Board  with the relevant people.

The Commission thanked officers for their time.