Fascinated by the ongoing debate on the elected mayors issue (all published in previous Birmingham Mails, but also interesting blogs and message boards at thestirrer.com)
All involved at the Mail are pleased that it has gathered interest, debate and discussion.
However, we are also keen for the Mail not to be misrepresented in any way.
Therefore, a few points spring to mind atm:
1. Just to clarify... the Mail is not going to campaign for or against an elected mayor. We are, however, going to continue to campaign for a referendum that enables the electorate to decide.
2. If a valid petition is raised, and the council therefore holds a referendum, the Mail under my editorship will not campaign for a 'yes' or 'no' vote... but we will reflect opinions for both sides of the debate.
3. For the record, there are now several thousand signatures collected through the Mail's cut-out forms alone.
On top of these are several more thousands said to have been or actively being collected on A4 forms by various community organisations. Several hundred have already been submitted, but the majority are being collected by those organisations for a mass submission in a few weeks time.
The legal checking will be done by the council once the petition is submitted, but those committed to raising it felt it would be only right to at least try to pre-check a sample of the figures so as not to raise/dash hopes.
The validating procedure is an onerous and gradual one, and therefore it would be misleading to give an specific total to date.
What I can say is that a sample of more than 500 signatures have been put through a 'pre-validation' procedure so far, with the average 'valid' ratio currently running at around 95% of those checked.
This only represents a fraction of the signatures that exist in Mail cut-out forms, and only a few of the external forms.
But if the 95% average runs on, we are now defintely talking about several thousand valid signatures on Mail forms to date, plus an as-yet unknown quantity of thousands from externally collected forms. This figure is estimated and expected by outside organisers to be higher than that collected so far via the Mail.