Civic Affairs Committee

The fight for transparent local government was taken up yesterday evening at Cambridge City Council's Civic Affairs Committee.

I had sought and been granted permission to film the committee meeting. Thank you to the committee chairman, Cllr Boyce.


Cambridge City Council Civic Affairs 15 November 2010 from Andrew Bower on Vimeo.

The main business of the meeting was agreeing the calendar for the year's council meetings and the outcome of a review of polling district boundaries. Top psephologist Cllr Colin Rosenstiel was in his element at this point, although fortunately we were spared a treatise on the single transferrable vote. The polling district boundary review is important to ensure that it is convenient for everyone to vote and that excessive queueing leading to people not being able to cast their votes is avoided. Some changes were agreed.

There are also knock-on implications for candidates' tellers when overlapping sets of polling numbers are in use at the same building but the chief executive made it clear that she would only consider the impact on voters, even though tellers play an important role in increasing turnout at elections.

The interesting part of the meeting, however, was a public question from Cambridge resident Richard Taylor. Mr Taylor had been influential in getting a recording protocol put in place at the city council and sought to ask why he had been singled out in being banned from filming meetings while a complaint against the council was being investigated and to offer some insights into the restrictive nature of the agreed filming protocol and how that is likely to put off broadcasters and other journalists from participating.

I fully support Mr Taylor's campaign for openness and transparency in the way that the proceedings of meetings are recorded. As he points out, the minutes often omit key factors in deliberations such as which councillor said what.

I also believe that members of the public who seek to influence public policy by addressing such meetings should be accountable for their contribution; if they wish to raise a confidential concern that can be done directly with their councillor but the determination of policy ought to be public. However, as with Mr Taylor, I was of course willing to take all direction given by the chairman of the meeting. In this case I was allowed to film public questions although Cllr Boyce kindly advised me not to for the sake of not being dragged through the courts by members of the public. As the only public speaker Mr Taylor indicated his willingness to be recorded, although having agreed a position for the camera in advance I didn't have an opportunity to pan to capture Mr Taylor's contribution visibly.

The Chief Executive's answers to Mr Taylor were not entirely satisfactory and the ruling Lib Dems had little to say on the matter although he was supported by helpful contributions from opposition councillors.

I hope that we will see more meetings recorded in future - turning up to long meetings to hear individual items is a time consuming occupation so we should find ways such as this to increase participation in local politics.

Also available: Higher bitrate Flash video download (Main - 449MB) (End - 49MB)

Council meetings are public. Full stop.

I wrote this letter to the Cambridge News in response to a strange outburst objecting to private recordings of public council meetings.

Dear Sir,

The letter from Lil Speed, 7 October, misses the point about council area committees. They are public meetings on the public record to determine public policy, not police surgeries. It is questionable whether the city council even has a right to restrict recording; it certainly should not.

Any confidential matters should be taken up directly with the police.

It is a shame that the Liberal Democrats (whom Mrs Speed endorsed at the recent by-election in East Chesterton) are so cagey about the recording of public meetings. It would be better if they lived up to their party name and encouraged this enhancement to local democracy.

Yours faithfully,

Andrew Bower
Argyle Street

I fully support the right of anyone to record council meetings, which are public. I am glad that the city council relented in allowing any recording to happen at all and welcome the fact that they are considering doing it routinely. If it can be afforded then it would be a very welcome enhancement to local democracy.

Meanwhile I do not buy their justifications for making it difficult to record the meetings - the recording of meetings makes it much easier to hold representatives to account than is currently possible based solely on the necessarily-terse official minutes.

County Conservatives lead way on opening the books

I am pleased to see that the county council has not dragged its feet over the government's call to publish online all items of expenditure over £500 and will start on 20 September. David Cameron had already opened the national books for spending over £25,000.

It is to be hoped that the city council will follow the Conservative lead and publish their expenditure ahead of the goverment-imposed deadline of January, as we had already some time ago been campaigning to get them to do, but the local Lib Dems do not have a good track record on openness.

This is very welcome news although we will have to wait to see how well the information is represented and in what detail.

Opening the books will help council taxpayers to get better value for money and help local firms to compete for council contracts.

County Councillor John Reynolds shows that the spirit here is not just to tick the box:

We are committed to being as transparent and accountable as possible. We were one of the first authorities to publish details about our senior management pay and I am pleased that we are in the first group of councils to put this information about spending over £500 on line. We have a good national record for managing finances and we are eager not only to publish this long before the Government’s deadline of January but to eventually exceed Government expectations by publishing spending below £500 as well.

Councils told to publish expenditure over £500

The Conservative decentralisation, or localism, plan does not just mean handing powers down from central government to councils, it also means handing power directly to people. Conservatives believe in treating adults like adults and understand that people will rise to the opportunity if given responsibility. That is why Conservative policy is being enacted by the new government to publish all items of expenditure over £25,000 and why Eric Pickles is requesting councils to publish all spending over £500. This ties in with another Conservative campaign on transparency and openness in general.

By publishing expenditure freely for everyone to see people will be able to scrutinise public bodies to such an extent that it will be difficult for the bodies to get away with wasting public money so easily as they currently do. The change will also make it easier for local suppliers to bid for contracts which will be great news for the small businesses which have been so badly hit during the recession and on which our recovery will depend.

Chris Howell had already urged the city council to follow the best practices showcased by Conservative-run councils like the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, which already publishes all expenditure over £500.

It will be important that councils release the data in a format that can be manipulated systematically and I am sure that groups such as mySociety will be quick off the mark with interesting and useful tools for analysing the data.

It seems that the new policy is due to be effective by January, but why wait? Coleridge Conservatives call on Cambridge City Council to end its culture of secrecy and start publishing the data as soon as possible. The Openness motion of which Chris supported the strengthening last year already called for change but what progress has been made?

Transparent public contracts

David Cameron's promise last week to open up all government contracts worth £25,000 or more to public inspection is welcome. (See the transparency plan from our draft manifesto.) It's not just an obscure point or even just a matter of principle. This sort of transparency is crucial if the taxpayer is to start getting good value for money. The government just keeps showing itself to be inept at negotiation, as letters to the Cambridge News this weekend on GP contracts remind us.

We can see this problem on a local level with eye-popping costs for the local councils to undertake tasks such as installing fences behind Davy Road or painting some double yellow lines. These sums may not fall within the threshold of Mr Cameron's policy but the policy is going in the right direction. We encourage any suppliers who think they can give our council better value for money on their contracts to inspects its contracts in the statutory audit period this summer...

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant", or so I tried in vane to argue to one of our Labour friends at last year's count in relation to MPs' expenses (just see how the bureaucratic quango-based solutions are costing millions more than is being saved for the taxpayer), but it seems Labour just don't get the post-bureaucratic age.