The ongoing stakeholder consultation on harbour proposals, including the potential combining of Cowes Harbour Commission (CHC) and Cowes Town Waterfront Trust (CTWT) is generating plenty of constructive discussions, interest, and questions on both sides of the River Medina.
Consultation meetings
A number of organisations and individual stakeholders have already requested meetings with CHC and CTWT to talk about the proposals and have also been engaging with our Harbour Advisory Committee and their representative members. If you have not yet requested a meeting and would like to discuss the proposals in more detail, then please do get in touch with us.
Consultation Q&As
Following several initial meetings and feedback to both CHC and CHAC, we have collated a list of some of the main questions being raised along with our answers, which we hope you will find helpful in understanding the detail of these important proposals for the future of the harbour and leisure waterfront gateway. Please see the consultation page for a link to the Q&As.
Accountability
As a publicly accountable body, CHC strives to ensure that we maintain proper standards of transparency, accountability, integrity and honesty, as befits the important role we perform.
CHC has put very significant effort, investment and time into improving the Commission’s performance in these areas, especially over the last five years. Some examples would be our website, including safety audits, project documents and digital publications online, regular E-newsletters, consultation on the Strategic Plan, detailed Annual Reports, the Cowes Harbour Advisory Committee (CHAC), public meetings and presentations to stakeholder groups and more.
Stakeholder engagement with CHC is led by the active Advisory Committee that plays an important role in providing a conduit for two-way communications and consultation with our various stakeholder groups. If you do not know who the current stakeholder representatives are, then we encourage you to visit our website Advisory Committee section and consider asking questions or sharing your ideas with committee members. Additionally, CHC would like to suggest that if anyone wishes to be involved with the CHAC or sees ways of potentially improving two-way dialogue, then do get in touch with CHAC Chair John Corby or a representative.
CHC continues to work hard to ensure we provide stakeholders with good levels of visibility in all areas of our remit and we have a very good reputation on this with other harbours. Despite all of this work, there is clearly still some concern regarding accountability and transparency and therefore CHC needs to do more to address any concerns, whilst taking into account also that engagement is always a two-way process and both sides need to want to engage, listen and communicate. The current stakeholder consultation on proposals for Cowes Harbour presents a good opportunity to discuss these observations, and for CHC to ask you, our stakeholders, what would you like to see CHC do to further improve our accountability and transparency? CHC would be very interested to hear your views so please feel free to contact us by email to chc@cowes.co.uk.
