By Cllr Pauline Jorgensen
Another week and again more evidence that the Liberal/Labour/Independent coalition are just not democratic.
Having ignored the voice of residents on the issue of four yearly elections, the council is now proposing to bury scrutiny by posting answers to council questions on “the relevant agenda page on the Council’s website”.
Rather than you getting to hear the question and answer in person it will be hidden away.
Utterly useless if you have no internet access. This is digital exclusion.
It’s part of a growing trend but it’s not right and it’s not fair.
The only question from a councillor you will hear at a Council Meeting will now be a supplementary question in isolation.
So, if you want to follow a Council Meeting you’ll need to have swotted up beforehand and done your homework just to be able to follow what’s going on.
But don’t expect to hear the answer to that supplementary, or potentially ever even read it.
The Liberal/Labour Coalition are proposing that you “Please note… supplementary questions may take longer to respond to …”
As a result, they want to upload the question to a far-flung part of the internet, sometime in the dim and distant future but with absolutely no timescale, meaning this could in fact be never. It also means we won’t get answers from the politicians responsible for the council’s actions we will instead get them from anonymous officers.
The result is you’ll hear far fewer questions and answers in the new sterile Council Meetings, and if you don’t have internet access you’ll get even less.
This goes against the very nature of democratic principles of people being answerable for their actions in a public forum.
The Coalition are also proposing to do away with the need for Executive Members to come to Council and account for what has been going on in their departments.
Instead, the Leader of the Council will be able to make statements as and when they see fit – and the Liberal Democrats will remove the requirement for the Leader’s speeches to be non-party political.
Strong and probing opposition is always an important check to any administration and to improve decision making. In this case the Liberal/Labour Coalition are trying to evade that at every turn and avoid public accountability for their actions.
Next week, two of the Council’s most significant decisions, which affect every resident, have been called in to the Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee by the Conservative Group.
One is the Lib/Lab decision to double parking charges at a time when families and businesses are struggling. The other is to scrap food caddy liners despite there being money provided for them in the budget, putting at risk the targeted increase in food waste recycling as the Lib Dem leader himself admitted in a local newspaper.
At both meetings we know that the Liberal Democrats will no doubt vote in favour of the decisions they have already taken, and in the case of caddy liners boasted they had taken in advance of the formal decision making Executive meeting.
It will be up to Labour’s Andy Croy and the Independents to decide whether more cost increases will be heaped on hard pressed residents.
If you want to have your say, sign our petition in local shops and independent businesses across the Borough or on our website.
Cllr Pauline Jorgensen is the leader of Wokingham Conservatives, and ward member for Hillside
