Meeting venues - Carlisle vs Kendal.

As I posted here yesterday the February meeting of the health scrutiny committee responsible for democratic scrutiny and challenge of the NHS in the county of Cumbria will take place at County Hall in Kendal from 10.30 am on Tuesday 26th February 2019.

The meeting will be open to the public. The agenda and reports for the meeting are available in the County Council website here.

I have just returned home to West Cumbria after a couple of days down south at my father-in-law's funeral and started reading the agenda.

I am more that a little surprised at the way that agenda has panned out. 

These meetings approximately alternate between Carlisle and Kendal. Mostly they contain a mix of North/West/East Cumbria and South Cumbria/Morecombe Bay items.

This time, except for the boilerplate agenda items like declarations of interest, committee briefing report, data of next meeting, every single major item on the agenda is wholly or almost entirely about North Cumbria. 

To be precise, there are five major items on the agenda, of which four are entirely about the NHS in the Northern two thirds of Cumbria with no relevance to the Barrow and South Lakes area at all, and the fifth is mostly about North Cumbria with some potential knock on effects in the south of the county. 

And it's one of the meetings held in Kendal!

Almost certainly too late to change the venue now without causing disruption which would be more trouble than it's worth, but I will be suggesting that next time we have an agenda which is this heavily weighted towards one side of the county we make that meeting one of the ones held in that part of the county, so as to avoid causing unnecessary travel time for the busy representatives of the NHS who present reports at our meetings and to make it easier for members of the public with an interest in the items on the agenda to attend.

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