The Rivermont Youth Assembly has met six times a year since 2019. It elects two representatives to the district’s education committee, and those representatives vote.

That last clause is the whole design.

Why a vote and not a voice

Youth forums are common and mostly ceremonial. They are consulted, they are thanked, and their papers are noted. The word “noted” appears in the minutes and nothing follows it.

The assembly was set up with a narrow remit and a real vote instead. Narrow, because a body with a broad remit and no power is a suggestion box. Real, because a vote you can lose teaches something a hearing never does.

What it has actually changed

• The 2021 school transport review, which the assembly forced back to committee twice before the routes were redrawn.
• Study rooms in all sixteen libraries, staffed until seven. An assembly proposal, costed by an assembly member, adopted unamended.
• The careers fair moved to a Saturday, after the assembly pointed out that the people it was for were in lessons on a Wednesday afternoon.

Thirty-one papers tabled in five years, four of them withdrawn. The withdrawals are published too, which was the assembly’s own rule and not one we suggested.

The commitment

A second voting seat, on the planning committee.

Planning is where the decisions with the longest shadow are made — a consent granted this year shapes a street for sixty. It is also the committee where the people who will live with the consequences longest have the least presence.

What it costs

Nothing, in money. It requires a change to the committee’s terms of reference, which is a full council decision, and the political will to be occasionally outvoted by a seventeen-year-old with a better paper than yours.

That has happened to me twice. Both times they were right.