So who's paying for mediation visit?

It came as no surprise to learn that non-Conservative Boston borough councillors did not know - because they were not told - that a Home Office team was in town last week to discuss issues arising from the now postponed Boston protest march.

Instead, they read it in Boston Eye, and we read about it on the protest marchers’ Facebook page.
When tackled about this failure to share information, Boston Borough Council employed  its usual line, which is to deny everything – as they did last week with the Market Place meeting.
Whilst there was no denial that the Home Office gabfest happened, our mention of a meeting this week between the march leaders and an organisation called the Centre for Good Relations,  produced the response that the council was unaware of such a meeting and that Boston Eye was misinformed.
However, according to the march organisers, the meeting was “set up” by the council - “to establish people’s concerns.”
“They will then take all the info and questions and put these to the right people, hopefully getting us the answers we need. It’s just another step on a path on the way to sorting Boston’s migration problems out.”
We understand that the group will be meeting a lady named Sam Tedcastle - a former managing director of something called Participation Works, who was also listed as Commissioner on Integration and Cohesion a couple of years ago at a conference jointly staged by the British Council and something called  iCoCo  - (yes, really … not “I should coco”) - the Institute of Community Cohesion.
The Participation Works website is currently suspended, so we do not know whether it is still in business – but it was last year, when the website Openly Local reported that it charged Burnley Borough Council almost £50,000 for its services.
Therefore, it comes as a relief to learn that – since Boston Borough Council has nothing to do with this meeting – there will presumably be no bill to pay … although the borough is not a stranger to stumping up big money for such services.
A couple of years ago it commissioned a £10,000 study by the selfsame Centre for Good Relations for “a scoping assessment” to apply their working methods to Boston “to try to improve cohesion issues in the town.”  
The brief included developing an understanding of current relationships in Boston that impact on cohesion: identifying cohesion issues to do with the presence and impact of migrant workers; developing recommendations for strengthening existing approaches, and putting in place new approaches so that agencies could improve engagement with ‘hard to reach’ members of the community -  and finally to develop recommendations for a “set of interventions” which would support the building of better relations in and around Boston on issues of cohesion and migrant workers.
A big - and expensive - job.
But the outcome is anyone’s guess, and there are no signs that anything was done apart from a couple of desultory mentions in the minutes of the Boston Area Partnership last year.
At least two Boston borough councillors have told the protest march group what they think about this week’s meeting in no uncertain terms.
English Democrat Councillor Elliott Fountain has made several posts to the group’s Facebook page, and in one of them says: “Do you not see you are being given the run around?  I have also been asked to meet them this week, but I have met this group before and showed them many areas of town and the problems with houses and schools and parking. Do you know what got done?  Nil, zilch, zero, nothing. The only people who can change this town are the council and the police, but they must have the willingness to do this. People say that talks must take place and meetings must take place - well there are at least 50 meetings a year inside the council and all they do is talk, I don’t see anything getting resolved or action being taken, The Boston Protest March has been fobbed off and the bigwigs of Boston can go back to their nice cosy houses and keep denying that there are problems in Boston, while the normal working class folk and pensioners of this once great town will just watch it slide down the pan.”
Councillor Fountain’s colleague David Owens agreed.  “I had a meeting with these people years ago when first elected. It’s just another talking shop and nothing gets done … meanwhile the wheels keep rolling and nothing changes! As for the Burnley outcome, well when you dig deeper into what these people have actually achieved up there, it is all talk, the big divide is still there and growing.”
Meanwhile whatever happens, we are in for a long wait. The Home Office will doubtless take several months before it has anything to say - and the same is likely with the Centre for Good Relations, which will probably want lots more meetings.
That leaves the borough council's Task and Finish group as the piggy in the middle. These committees usually work to a fairly short timescale, and this ought to be the case anyway, given the pressures and high level of feelings involved. But the group will surely not want to say anything until after the Home Office has spoken - and probably not until after the Centere has had its say as well.
Anyone hoping for ideas within a sensible time frame should prepared for disappointment.

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