Last July the the Manchester A Certain Future Steering Group*, which has received cash and seconded staff in excess of £100k from Manchester City Council,  published its annual report.  In that report they promised newsletters (a promise they broke).

They announced that “by early 2016” stakeholders would be told how they could be involved in the creation of the group’s next strategic plan for 2016-20. Of course,  no such announcement was ever made, and there are no real opportunities, except rubber-stamping in May-June.

They also said they’d be overhauling their website.

“further development and ongoing maintenance of manchesterclimate.com, which has been hosted on the Greater Manchester sustainability website ‘Platform’ since 2013.”

That was in July 2015.  And they’d formulated that plan before then, obviously.  And in May 2016, a year later? The chair of the Steering Group tells MCFly;

I fully acknowledge that the website is not as good as it ideally would be. There is an exercise on-going at the moment to substantially overhaul & improve it – including adding more content & improving navigability.

So, what are the point of these promises in the annual reports then?  What do the staff get paid to ACTUALLY DO?  What does the money from Manchester City Council actually get spent on?  Why should anyone take anything the Steering Group says seriously?  Why should the Council continue to throw money down a hole?

All good questions, yes?  Maybe political parties that claim to be the opposition in this city might like to start asking them?

• Just to confuse and demoralise further The Steering Group overlaps with the Manchester A Certain Future Community Interest Company, which was established in September 2015. Its registered address is Manchester Town Hall Extension.  It is changing its name to the Manchester Climate Change Agency [they think they’ve got more chance of European funding with that name-

From the March 2016 minutes – “LL to send email to Directors RE CIC formal name change to ‘Manchester Climate Change Agency’, following agreement to use this as the CIC’s trading name. This will help with funding bids.”