Council surgeries are an outdated mode of connecting with your constituents, and you will probably find yourself being stood up more in the future.

One of the key reasons for this is sheer age demographics, 56% (159k) of the population are 34 years or under, a bunch thats increasing more on-line and plugged in than the older generation and just not used to rocking up to surgeries.

Also libraries are unheard of to most peole these days…who visits them anyway…er clearly no one if your video is anything to go by. Libaries, books, newspapers…all that printing on dead trees is old hat. If people aren’t visiting the libraries for books they are even less likely to visit for you.

Another reasons is advertising, people simply not knowing what a surgery is, what a councillor is, exactly what you can do for them. The only place i see an advert for a councillors surgery is on the door of the furzdown project in tooting. Typically a place for the older generation, further cementing the fact that the younger lot won’t look twice at it. You need to be where the problems are.

Maybe you should put something up in GP surgeries, universities, rail stations, coffee shops, or intenet libraries.

Using twitter and having a website is great but i think most people embroiled in a issue with the council simply wouldn’t think of coming to a surgery and escalating it oir asking for advice.

I don’t know about the politics of what you can do with surgeries. But like they say “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result”
So maybe its time to tear up the rule book, get out the drawing board, and change….get some feedback…change some more…get some feedback…and may be you’ll get there.
Do something totally off the wall.

Ok thats my 2c.

Regards
Nazim

I’ve never been to a surgery in my life, email, twitter (for the early adopters) and sites like http://www.fixmystreet.com are much better ways for me to connect and report issues to my local council.

That pushes me to refine the problem (and illustrates why I think it would be interesting to have a sensible debate about this).

The council surgery is very reactive. We are essentially getting involved when the problem has escalated to a level that the resident feels some extra clout is needed. I’d contrast this with Twitter when I will often intervene, or at least offer help, long before that stage is reached. If you operate from a basis whereby the earlier the intervention the better, then having fixed surgeries isn’t the best way to do it.

But when you start looking at moving the venue then you have a totally different style of surgery, which is probably going to be far more proactive and each to attract different people. The library is a fairly neutral venue, to which anyone can go. BAC is not, and the sort of people I’d meet there would be totally different. Asda offers a similar problem, in that while there’s a huge passing trade, it isn’t necessarily the right target audience! To give an example I often help – or hinder – the council’s community safety unit when they do a session there with the local SNT. What I often find is that I am having to offer generic crime prevention advice because the shoppers come from other boroughs and aren’t eligible for the services the council offers.

That’s not to say that these are bad places, but I think we’ve never thought about what we want to do. We just ‘do’ traditional surgeries in libraries and always have done. I don’t think we’ve ever had the discussion about whether we want to continue offering the current ‘last resort’ surgery, or whether we want to do something more proactive. And if we were to move towards the latter, then how should we do it, who should do and, most importantly, where would we do it. Surgeries only really help those in-the-know, and often they aren’t the ones who most need the help.