A panel created by the Welsh Assembly has been looking at how to achieve the laudable aim of getting a more diverse and representative mix of people to become councillors. But what will be expected of people eager to serve their communities?
In the next two weeks, the corridors of power at Calamity Hall will see a number of bodies in session - there is no such thing as recess in Swansea. Most will meet behind closed doors and very few will deal with issues that affect the wards that members were elected to represent. The scheduled meetings, according to the official diary, are:
Constitutional Working group – meets in private
Area 1 Planning Committee – meets in public
Joint Consultative Committee – meets in private
Planning Committee – meets in public
General Purposes Panel – meets in private
Area 2 Planning Committee – meets in public
Member Support & Development Working Group - meets in private
Councillor Forum - meets in private
Cabinet – meets in public plus a private session
Overview & Scrutiny Co-ordinating Group - meets in private
General Purposes Panel – meets in private
Of the eleven meetings involved, councillors will only be making actual decisions in four (Cabinet and planning). They can only talk to matters on the agenda written by officers. It is actually illegal to raise matters of any other business. The other bodies are specialist discussion groups who are only concerned with the internal running of the council. As one insider told us it, “it’s where they make half-way intelligent speeches, applaud loudly and report each other to the Ombudsman afterwards”.
We’ll leave you to work out the disturbing percentages of meetings that are held in private.
There may well be some people who will quite like this brand of abstract governance that requires its democracy to be done in secret but it is just as likely to be a turn off for the rest - if they're given the full picture, that is. For ourselves, we're left pondering whether the job actually could be done just as effectively by a certain councillor's cat.
2 Comments:
Billy Connolly once observed that just the desire to be a politician should be grounds to prohibit someone from office. You sound like you are of a like mind.
The post merely highlights that a remorseless process of so-called reform over the last two decades has ensured that councillors have become the local authority's representatives in the community when we as electors would much prefer the relationship to be the other way around.
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