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IS THIS WHAT YOU CALL "COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT"?

11-02-2008

"Community engagement" is one of those phrases bandied around by officials who want to persuade us that they really care about what ordinary people think. This shocking account of a mother of four from Birmingham who tried becoming an active citizen tells a different story.

There aren’t too many inner city mums putting themselves forward for public bodies – but Naveed Akhtar, from Alum Rock, is public-spirited enough to want to make a contribution to her city.

As a Muslim woman, the cultural pressures on her to keep quiet and remain in the background should not be under-estimated, but she’s willing to resist them to stand up for what she believes in.

That’s why, when she was invited to become a member of the Healthier Communities and Older People (HCOP) forum in East Birmingham, she readily accepted.

Naveed - who had already been put forward as a Community Advocate in her local Neighbourhood Forum - works part-time for a mental health trust, so it seemed a natural fit.

“I’ve got no political axe to grind” she says. “But I’ve lived all my life in this area and I just wanted to have a say and make a difference.”

Her credentials were so impressive that in May last year, Naveed was elected to become Chair of the HCOP – but that’s when her problems began.

At the following meeting, in July, a local councillor Ansar Ali Khan started questioning whether she was entitled to hold the position. He claimed that only a member of the local Primary Care Trust could be Chair.

This was news to Naveed who carried on regardless, but although she chaired three meetings with PCT representatives sitting alongside her, she was aware of an undercurrent of dissent.

It got worse in September, when she was snubbed by the Constituency Strategic Partnership (CSP) an umbrella organisation whose meetings – as Chair of HCOP – she was supposed to attend. They failed to send her an invitation.

The same happened in November but Naveed turned up anyway – as she was quite entitled to - and made her feelings known.

“I had been fairly and openly elected, and I asked for my objections to the way I was treated to be minuted” she recalls.

By now Rob James, an officer of Birmingham City Council – who organises the strategic partnerships in accordance with government diktat - had got involved.

He (like Cllr Khan) told Naveed that she couldn’t be Chair of HCOP becaue she wasn't part of the health Trust, a claim he eventually confirmed in writing last month – but only after the letter had been seen by other members of the organisation and the PCT.

A pattern emerges of officials riding roughshod over due procedure and conspiring to exclude a willing participant in “community engagement”.

Not surprisingly, Naveed is angry that having put herself forward, she’s know been knocked back by a sneaky bureaucracy.

“I can’t help thinking that if it was somebody else it wouldn’t have happened” she says, and her paranoia is understandable.

The Stirrer took up her case and went first to the Council, whose Press Office told us that “it’s a matter for the Primary Care Trust”.

Cllr Ian Ward, deputy leader of the Labour group in the city – who had somehow got wind of our investigation - then approached us with the same message.

He said there was an “informal agreement” that a representative of the PCT should always chair the HCOP, although he admitted this was only officially adopted as a rule on October 18 – a full five months after Naveed’s election.

Again, he tried to push responsibility towards the Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust – who, not surprisingly, shoved it straight back in the Council’s direction.

Caught in the middle is, of course, Naveed Akhtar, a community-minded individual who now feels thoroughly pissed off (though she wouldn’t express it that way) at having been fairly elected and then bounced out of her position by an unholy alliance of councillors and officials.

So will her experience encourage more Muslim women to come forward to speak up?

Does it persuade anyone to believe that “community strategic partnerships” are real partnerships with community engagement at heart?

Not according to Naveed.

“I look at what I’ve been through, and I just think am I stupid to have even tried to get involved?”