The county council-convened Devon Climate Emergency Response Group (DCERG) has continued its apparent commitment to avoiding public scrutiny of its decision-making by simultaneously publishing the minutes of six of its meetings (which are held in private without published agendas) at the end of May — despite some being held in March.
The DCERG’s minutes, when it does publish them, are not exactly full and frank accounts of what was said and done.
This batch included references to new governance arrangements for the county carbon plan, which were explained at the meeting but omitted from the minutes, and a governance structure diagram that was discussed but nowhere to be seen.
Given its determination to keep people in the dark, perhaps the DCERG should not be surprised that the public consultation on its response to the Devon Carbon Plan citizen’s assembly outputs received just 209 responses (from a population of 1.2 million), only 2% of which were from people under 24 years old.
