Membership Review
To receive an update on the membership review.
Minutes:
NOTED
1. Councillor Katherine Chibah as the Chair of the Forum had received advice from Jeremy Chambers (Director of Law and Governance) on how to widen the forum membership to enable more representatives from more environmental groups to be involved. She had been approached by several groups asking if they could become members.
2. The Monitoring Officer had advised that this could best be done at Annual Council next May. Before then a transparent process to select groups for inclusion in the forum would be put in place.
3. In the meantime, the Chair had discretion to invite representatives from other groups and would always be happy to consider requests to speak and present to the forum.
4. The three groups who had had representatives on the former Conservation Advisory Group had been invited to send representatives to meetings and they had been attending. The formal membership however had not changed.
5. Errors had been pointed out at Annual Council and it was regretted that the membership had not been looked at in more detail previously.
6. Officers were working with IT to find a solution to the problem of not being able to fully involve members with outside email addresses in Live Events meetings. It was hoped that this could be resolved soon.
7. The suggestion was made that the meeting could be held as a basic teams meeting. This would be investigated.