Special meeting of Cumbria County Council called for Wednesday 25th August

A special meeting of Cumbria County Council has been called on Wednesday at 10am at Carlisle racecourse, at the request of five members of the Conservative group.

This will be to consider the following motion which will be proposed by Dr Stephen Haraldsen:

“This council believes that launching a legal challenge against the proposed Local Government Reform in Cumbria will be a waste of public money and time and that the council should instead focus on serving local residents by working constructively with all partners to ensure a smooth transition to the new unitary authorities.”

To avoid any risk of confusion, this is a completely separate request from the one we had previously made in July for a special meeting to discuss an entirely different reason: we wanted to convene the DC&R committee to take a view on the West Cumbria Mining planning application prior to the planning inquiry.

I will explain in a subsequent post why we were unable to pursue that option: essentially due to an oversight in Cumbria County Council's constitution there is no way for councillors to convene a meeting of the planning committee. We had expected that if the actual full council voted to ask for one to be set up that such a request would be honoured but it was made clear to us that this would not be the case. This indicates serious flaws in the democractic structure of the County Council which we will attempt to address, but that is an argument for another occasion.

For this week the issue is try to prevent a legal challenge which can only increase uncertainty and loss of morale among council employees, as well as wasting taxpayers' money.


Comments

Anonymous said…
Carlisle racecourse?
11:46 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
A larger room than the Council Chamber was needed to fit in all the councillors and officers with the necessary distance between them to meet COVID safety advice.

I gather that the first floor meeting room at the racecourse was the most economical and accessible COVID-secure venue of sufficient size.
7:49 pm
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