Important issues of concern

We have learnt very recently that the career of Chris Juden at CTC has ended with redundancy after 31 years first class service and that CTC has made the role of Technical Officer redundant. Chris was widely respected in government and official circles for his understanding of cycle design standards.

Whilst there have been many concerns about the changes in direction and governance of the CTC in recent years, with emphasis drifting away from Cycle Touring, losing a source of such experience has provided a focus for and triggered a new round of discussions from among the national membership. This was launched by an open letter from David Wood and Angela Byrne at West Surrey CTC.

Their letter is available here.

Note that it is not necessary to have a Google account or sign in to read these documents.

Further to a vigorous round of email correspondence amongst your committee members we wrote a letter of support to David and Angela which you can read here.

In a response to the original letter Paul Tuohy has advised, without being specific, that much of the content of the letter is “factually incorrect” and he continues to summarise the recent staffing and other changes along with the rationale for these changes. Read his letter here.

The date of the CTC Council meeting (17th January) has come and gone. Our chairman, Dave Vine had planned to be present but in the event he wasn’t able to be there. However it appears that the business of the meeting didn’t allow time for the discussion these topics of interest, as we understand.

For the most part the continuing conversation is taking place online. If you use Facebook the best forum for further reading is on the public Group called “Where should CTC be going?” It was created by Chris Jeggo of West Surrey CTC.

Apart from being a member of Facebook to read the content you will have to ‘join’ the group to contribute to the discussion. If you are not a Facebook user you can see two of the best articles from the forum here:
From Chris Jeggo of West Surrey CTC
From Mark Waters, former CTC Touring Officer

There are also many contributions to the discussion on this CTC forum, 279 posts at last count.

For a full account of Chris Juden's activities in the CTC see this.

~ Tim, on behalf of the committee
   (CTC South West London)