Dear Sir,
Do you believe in democracy? I do, and for me that involves accepting that Labour lost the last local election, and that the Town Council is now run by Cllr Chandran and his Independent/LibDem coalition.
However, it also involves me accepting that residents voted me onto the Council to be part of a responsible and articulate Opposition, speaking out if I see the ruling group making what I think may be a mistake.
And that explains why everything Cllr Chandran told you in his letter last week should be viewed from a different perspective.
PARKING
It is true that, last month, the ruling group set up a working group with the task of asking all the people in the town to tell it all the town’s parking problems, in order to map them, liaise with DCC and livin, and finally “resolve and reduce” them. I did not oppose addressing parking. I did, however, worry that the proposal might overstretch council resources (especially officer time), and I supported a Labour suggestion to first gauge the extent of the problem. The ruling group dismissed this as ‘negativity’ and block-voted for a working group with its huge remit.
TOWN CENTRE
Similarly, I feared the Town Council might be exceeding its capabilities when the ruling group proposed initiating a second group, including the town centre owners, the MP and the government(!), to ‘regenerate and develop’ the Town Centre. Labour Councillors acknowledged the good intention of the motion and did NOT vote against it, but I suggested that the Town Council would do better instead asking for a place on any body which should be set up by the MP and the County Council. The ruling group, however, block-voted to initiate its working group.
COUNCIL TAX
In the election, there was a huge vote in support of the LibDem’s promise to reduce Council Tax by up to £400. Acknowledging this, I therefore proposed a small group, led by the LibDems, with limited access to officer time, to help them to bring forward their ideas in time for next year’s budget. I was honest that I do not think that there are such savings to be made, my motion left the final decision with the Council, and I explicitly rejected “slashing services and facilities”.
The reaction of the ruling group to this was an amendment by Cllr Fleming which set up instead a formal cross-party working group, with only one LibDem, full access to officer time … and a remit to reduce Council Tax (ideas Cllr Chandran is now calling “crazy”). I tried to warn them at the time that this would overload the officers and lumber the Council with a promise to reduce Council Tax it might not be able to fulfil … but the ruling group block-voted their amendment through, accusing me of ‘sour grapes’.
JUSTIFIED?
What Cllr Chandran did not tell you in his letter was that, the very next week, the ruling group had to call a meeting of Chairs and Vice Chairs … because the officers were overloaded with work! And out of that meeting came an immediate back-pedalling, as you can see in Cllr Chandran’s letter if you look beyond his attempts to blame Labour:
• The Parking group, he tells us now, will
“not start work until next year [and] is
likely to take many many years”.
• The Town Centre group, he now claims,
“is down to the County Council, and
our MP”, and all the Town Council wants
is “some input” (as I had suggested).
• And Council Tax? The ruling group has
now decided that “we don’t need any
more working groups, wasting staff and
councillors time and resources”, and has
referred back its own amendment
(presumably to be rescinded).
It is good to want to do something about parking, the town centre or, indeed, Council Tax. But if Cllr Chandran had only had the humility to listen to Labour’s suggestions for a more cautious approach, he would have been spared these embarrassing U-turns.
And that, readers, is an Opposition doing its job properly.
Cllr John D Clare
(Byerley Park, Horndale and Cobblers Hall)