Hustings with a difference to focus on York congestion

The My Future York Collaborative Hustings takes place at Spark:York in Piccadilly from 6pm on Wednesday.

Co-organiser Phil Bixby said the event sought a more collaborative approach, saying: "While there are significant differences between political parties in how we might tackle traffic congestion, there is cross-party and widespread public recognition that congestion is an urgent issue."

He said candidates from all parties would be asked to talk about how they might respond collectively to key issues.

"Having heard plenty of each party saying why they are better than all the others, we’re asking if we can create a more collaborative approach," he said.

"We plan to reframe hustings – or, in fact, tap into its more ancient meaning. While today ‘hustings’ immediately evokes a series of candidates making speeches and answering questions for an audience, its arcane use, from Old Norse, is ‘an assembly for deliberative purposes’.

He said congestion had 'only the vaguest of boundaries,' touching on transport, urban planning, environmental issues and the nature of the city centre.

"Traffic congestion is also an issue that cannot be fully understood or simply fixed top down by politicians," he said.

"It is linked into everyday experiences, actions and choices made by all of us who live in York. It is, therefore, an issue that we need to address collaboratively.

"We’ll start the hustings by collectively identifying the key issues which contribute to creating traffic congestion and then coming together to map out the issues, seeing how they might connect and identifying where the leverage points for change might be. "We’ll then ask candidates from all parties to talk about how they might respond to these issues and leverage points and look for the commonalities in approach. We will then work together – councillors-to-be and citizens – to set out how all of us can contribute to putting a long term collective approach into practice."