The agenda has nine items. It could easily have had thirty. Everything that was cut was cut against two tests, and it is worth setting those out, because they explain the absences as much as the inclusions.

Test one: is it ours to do?

A district council of 94,000 people has real powers and a great many things it can only write letters about. Health provision is regional. Policing is regional. The rail franchise is national.

Every one of those matters enormously to the district, and a manifesto commitment on any of them would be a promise to write a letter.

So the first test is: can the district decide this? Where the answer is no, the item can still appear — as health and wellbeing does — but as organized pressure rather than a promise.

Test two: does it have a number?

The second test is harder and it removed more items. A priority without a figure is a mood.

• “Better school transport” is a mood. “Reinstate three routes cut in 2021, $94,000 a year” is a commitment.
• “Support small business” is a mood. “Raise the empty-property occupation threshold from six weeks to six months, recovering an estimated $780,000 on Manchester Row alone” is a commitment.

Several things I care about did not survive this test, and I would rather say so than pad the list.

What got cut

Three items, in case anyone is keeping score:

1. A district-wide cycling network. Real, worth doing, and I could not produce a credible cost inside the term.
2. Bringing waste collection back in-house. The contract runs to 2031.
3. A youth center in every ward. Six wards have no suitable building and no capital budget line to buy one.

All three may be right. None of them is a commitment I can keep in four years, so none of them is on the list.

The point of the exercise

An agenda you can be held to is shorter than an agenda you would like to have. The nine items are on the agenda page, each with a cost, and each one is something you can ask me about in four years’ time with a number in your hand.