April meeting of Copeland Council

Copeland Borough Council met this afternoon in Whitehaven.

Considering that this meeting was taking place in the middle of a general election campaign I was pleasantly surprised that the amount of party political point scoring was not particularly higher than usual.

There were several questions from Labour backbenchers to Labour executive members during the report section which appeared to have been asked for the specific purpose of allowing the executive member concerned to praise some decision by the Labour government.

At one point, one of the executive members concerned either mis-spoke or had misheard when told what answer he was supposed to give to one of these questions, and referred to an announcement of £6 million when the "indicative allocation" concerned was actually £61.5 million.

Items on the agenda included

* Reports on the "choosing to change" programme

* Changes to the constitution of the council designed to make the functioning of the council more democratic and accessible to the public

* Annual report of the standards committee

* An item about a safety hazard at the North Shore cliffs at Bransty Hill in north Whitehaven. The council has now agreed a number of measures to reduce the risk of anyone being killed or seriously injured by falling rocks in this area.

Comments

Anonymous said…
more secret meetings
7:28 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Nonsense.

The only part of the meeting which wasn't open to the public was at the very end, because part of the action recommended to deal with the safety hazard of falling rocks on the Bransty Cliff face included buying some land.

There is a very good reason why the law provides for decisions about buying or selling property to be made in private.

It would be totally against the interests of taxpayers if a public authority had to set it's negotiating position in public, where potential buyers or sellers could listen in and find out exactly how much the council would buy or sell the land for. Potential buyers or sellers could sit in and offer only the maximum a council would pay or the minimum it would demand.
9:30 pm
Anonymous said…
why are you getting all defensive Chris, it was a comment of fact.
2:39 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
I'm not being defensive, simply correcting your misunderstanding of the facts.

The meeting was not secret. The date, time, place, and agenda for the meeting were all published several days in advance, the press and public were allowed to attend 95% of the meeting, and the subject for discussion for the one agenda item held in private was also published.
6:47 pm
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