Is This The Last Nail in the Coffin of Democracy!

At the next meeting of the council on the 28th of July 2009 the Deputy Chief Executive, at the request of the leader, will present a report seeking to change the times of monthly council meetings from 5pm to 10:30am, with a guillotine of 4 hours long maximum.

The majority of the labour supporting councillors don't work (in fact at least one has never worked). The majority of the opposition have full time jobs and will find great difficulty attending meetings that will interfere with both halves of a normal working day. For the leader to suggest changing the times of meetings at this point in the life of the current council can only be seen as an attempt to stifle democracy.

Leading Labour councillors did not know about this until recently yet rumours have been circulating for some time amongst the opposition that this was on the cards. The last meeting on the 30th of June was exceptionally long, finishing at 11:15 pm but this was certainly unusual and the agenda was ridiculously long, maybe deliberately so. Meetings are often 2 hours or less.

An email was received from an opposition member on the 1st of July saying that there were rumours that this was going to happen. This being the case it seems unlikely that the decision to move the meetings to the morning was taken after the marathon meeting on the day before the 30th of June (11:15 finish). It is far more likely that the decision was taken earlier and the meeting Agenda was deliberately made long. The agenda for this meeting was exceptional, 29 Agenda Items, many of them with lengthy reports. The meeting before had 17 items, only a couple of those with reports. The one before had 19 items, no lengthy reports. Never has a meeting had so many items and so many lengthy items on the Agenda.

Is the inclusion of 29 items in the last meeting another one of those amazing co-incidences? After years with a full labour majority with meetings starting at 5pm, and everyone was happy, there is now something like a balance of power. The majority of the opposition have other jobs and the majority of the leading group supporters only do councillor work. The proposal to change the council meetings to 10:30am comes at the latest the day after the very exceptionally, predictably long meeting! Hmmm!

IF YOU THINK THIS IS WRONG contact your councillor NOW and try to attend the meeting on Tuesday the 28th at 5pm!

UPDATE

At the meeting on the 28th of July the 4 hours guillotine idea was withdrawn by the leader before the debate but the proposal to change the meeting times was supported by the "Usual 23" and got through. See Minutes here, page 13

See a report from Ian Williams on the Peoples Voice Website here on what happened at the meeting.

Comments from people of all opinions are welcome here.

MAKING ALLOWANCES

(Leader finds an £8K extra allowance for yet another Labour Councillor)
With all the media attention focussed on politicians allowances and expenses, perhaps the last thing you might expect is for a cash strapped council to create a new committee with the primary purpose of giving an extra allowance to one of their councillors. However, on the basis of evidence received, that is just what has happened in Torfaen.

The reply from Torfaen County Borough Council to a freedom of information inquiry indicates strongly that the primary reason for forming the new Policy Co-ordination and Development Committee at the Annual Meeting on the 19th of May was in order to create an additional Chair with an allowance of £8,304 per annum. If the new position had not been created then the leader would have been in the embarrassing position of having to choose just one labour councillor who would be denied an SRA (Special Responsibility Allowance).

FULL REPORT HERE

Conclusion

Accepting that some form of collection of councillors to discuss some sort of issues had been in the leaders mind for some time, and that the MCWP (Members Constitution Working Party) had touched on it, it is clear that the preparation, timing, haste, lack of consultation and short cuts used to present this report at the Annual Meeting were because of the SRA (Special Resposibility Allowance) involved. The willingness of all those 23 councillors who receive an SRA to accept, without question, the recommendations of their leader (and paymaster), is sadly an indication of a much wider problem.


The above extracts from the full report are added here to allow everyone to comment on this subject. Please have a good read of the full report first! We are particularly interested in comments from councillors who voted for the new committee, what did they know beforehand and so on.