We had a very enjoyable evening before the recent local elections, and a good chance to ask party representatives from the Conservatives (Council Leader Lynda Needham), Greens (Mario May), Labour (David Billing) and Lib Dems (Steve Jarvis) a question relating to local resilience. In true transition spirit we wanted our elected officials to spend as much time listening to us as we did to them. To make sure everybody got a chance to ask a question we had the candidates rotate, speed-dating style, around small groups of about 6 people. The down side of this was that there was not long to delve in deeper to each question or to press the politician to actually answer the question!
Some useful threads came out of it, and I hope the party representatives have taken away some useful transition messages and will engage with us productively from now on to consider Letchworth’s future with resource depletion challenges in mind.