With the Royal Holloway and Runnymede Consultative Group about to conclude the current phase of its ‘Working Groups’, we look at the background to these groups and what we can expect.
Long term residents will remember that, many years ago, Royal Holloway engaged with the local community through its Community Liaison Forum. Residents were invited to attend regular meetings of the forum in person and attend they did! For many were furious with the problems that they now had to endure as a result of more and more students living in the local community: problems which had clearly multiplied since the inception of Royal Holloway’s ‘Masterplan’. Problems that had all been predicted during Royal Holloway’s ‘consultation’ sessions.
The forum meetings continued for several years and the problems then – as now – centred on the issues of antisocial behaviour, parking, unkempt properties and excess rubbish. Royal Holloway representatives duly noted concerns, recorded the issues in minutes and offered platitudes; but nothing seemed to improve.
Frustration among residents increased as they now had no doubt that Royal Holloway’s expansion was having significant detrimental consequences for the community and the problems were blighting the lives of many local residents. Eventually, Royal Holloway responded to the complaints in a manner which it must have thought best – it stopped the meetings.
To give the impression that it cared about its host community though, Royal Holloway ramped up the rhetoric on its website and introduced phrases such as ‘Our relationship with our wider community is important to us.’ Also, by continuing with a series of meetings involving local agencies, local ward councillors and representatives from residents’ associations – the Royal Holloway and Runnymede Consultative Group – Royal Holloway could market the impression that its plans were being implemented in a consensual and co-operative manner. Local residents, though, were totally excluded from this forum.
Of course, the problems hadn’t gone away – it was just the residents’ opportunity to meet with Royal Holloway en masse that had been taken away. Now, those problems were being raised on behalf of residents by local ward councillors and representatives from residents’ groups.
Royal Holloway describes The Royal Holloway and Runnymede Consultative Group as:
‘a forum where topics of interest and / or concern to the communities in the Egham and Englefield Green Village areas can be discussed and debated by representatives from and stakeholders in those local communities with a view to identifying possible solutions, agreeing actions and allocating responsibility for those actions.’
While the issues of parking, student-related ASB and HMOs have certainly all been topics of concern for the communities of Egham and Englefield Green for well over a decade, the pace of discussion and debate – with meetings held only three times a year – can best be described as glacial. And the identification of possible solutions and agreeing actions has been virtually non–existent.
Royal Holloway has always maintained a tight grip on the chairing and minuting of these meetings and since the Chair was taken over by the university’s current Provost, Tracy Bhamra, in November 2022 there has been growing disquiet among some of the residents’ representatives about the effectiveness of these meetings.
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| Royal Holloway Provost Tracy Bhamra: chairs ineffective meetings |
When reading the minutes of these meetings, it is easy to come to the conclusion that Royal Holloway’s Senior Leadership Team doesn’t want to agree to any action that could help mitigate the problems that Royal Holloway’s expansion has caused – perhaps because it doesn’t want to concede that the expansion is, in any way, the cause of these problems. Indeed, one could speculate that the Senior Leadership Team’s strategy has been to allow the meetings to take place and placate our representatives into thinking that the meetings are constructive and meaningful while simultaneously pursuing their strategy of expanding to first 12,000 and then 15,000 students fully aware of the detrimental consequences this expansion is having for the community.
By late 2023 it was becoming clear that residents had had enough of Royal Holloway’s platitudes and prevarication. During the November meeting of the forum, Councillor Trevor Gates proposed setting up a dedicated working group. He argued that the regular meetings were not addressing the issues affecting the residents adequately and that, with the planned increase in further growth, ‘new thinking’ was needed.
In the meantime, some residents were planning to demonstrate their frustration by gathering outside of Royal Holloway’s main gate on the day of the University’s Open Day the following spring.
Royal Holloway agreed to the new meetings.
Following a pilot meeting, Cllr. Gates’ proposal was developed into a series of meetings – one for each of the main issues: ASB, HMOs and parking – and they were not to be chaired by Tracy Bhamra. They were to consist – initially – of up to six meetings over a six month period with a focus on both short and long term solutions with a progress statement published by the end of May 2025. Questions remained though: would Royal Holloway’s Senior Leadership Team be any more committed to finding solutions to the problems now than it had been in the last decade? Would they even be prepared to concede that the university’s expansion was the main cause of the problems that the groups were to address? Or would they simply agree to the new meetings as a means to continue their evasion and deferment and – as in the past – placate community leaders? If so, then that could be a big mistake.
We think that it’s about time that Royal Holloway’s Senior Leadership Team stopped the charade and acknowledged the problems caused by the university’s over-expansion: problems that don’t just affect the day-to-day lives of many of the residents but that have also damaged the whole community.
We think that it’s about time that the management team realise that residents no longer believe the rhetoric about it valuing its relationship with the local community. The team needs to understand that the residents are not fools and will no longer be deceived by such insincerity.
We think that it’s about time that they stop believing that they can ride roughshod over the community and remember that, when they applied for the planning permission needed to implement their ‘Masterplan’, the Planning Committee recognised that the needs of the university had to be balanced against the interests of the communities of Egham and Englefield Green.
These ‘working group’ meetings are the first significant change to the relationship between the university’s Senior Leadership Team and the community in well over a decade and a unique opportunity for the leadership team to repair the damage that’s been done.
With the first phase of these meetings now complete and the action plan imminent, we think that it is about time that the Senior Leadership Team stopped putting up barriers to initiatives intended to address the issues and started to act responsibly and co-operatively by ensuring that the plan includes clear actions, quantifiable benefits and specific completion dates all of which must, of course, be implemented as a matter of urgency.
If the leadership team fails to grasp this opportunity then the members are likely to damage not only their own personal reputations but that of the university for the next decade: if not for ever.