End of year update on that petition...!

Well it has taken a while, but my e-petition which proposes to "Prevent Councillors from serving on several Councils" has now amassed 50 signatures. There's still a long way to go, a very long way to go, but my thanks to everybody who has helped to get it this far, particularly Cllr Dan Clarke who has helped enormously with the last ten signatures, which have accumulated in less than a week...!

50 signatures is an important milestone.

Important because the petition has now reached the point where it falls into the first few pages of the e-petitions website, particularly if you filter down to view only those petitions for the Department for Communities and Local Government. That should mean that it is viewed more often when people are scrolling through the list of petitions. Sooner or later, it will gain momentum and attract signatures just through being somewhere near the top of the list...

My original posting on this subject can be seen here.

One thing that I hadn't realised at the time I launched the petition, is that there are other problems with Councillors serving on several Councils.

One of them quite unexpectedly came to light at a Council meeting I attended recently. It was something of a gift actually. I couldn't quite believe my luck.

One of the Councillors at the Town Council meeting quite innocently queried the minutes of the "Community & Culture" sub-committee, which appeared to be missing, whereupon it emerged that the meeting had to be abandoned because a quorum (of three) couldn't be raised. It then emerged that at least one of the Councillors due to attend had thought it more important to attend a Borough meeting which had been scheduled for the same evening.

Cllr Bloom clearly noted my presence and made the connection to my petition. I noticed that she tried to limit the damage (well done Louise, honour is due!), but Cllr Dan just walked straight into it. Any citizen journalist or professional hack worthy of their name would have reported this, maybe not on the front page, but it was an obvious story.

The full story is here, on Eastleigh News, which has blown up into a much bigger discussion than I ever expected when I reported the story. It is currently the second most commented-upon story in the history of Eastleigh News.

Which is amazing, because I just wrote about what happened at the Town Council meeting as factually and as neutrally and as boringly as I possibly could, and posted a link to the petition without any sort of promotional comment. I thought I had been quite restrained...!

What I hadn't realised, was that Cllr Dan Clarke was the Labour PPC for Eastleigh who defected to the Lib Dems in 2009, clearly annoying the hell out of his Labour colleagues who still have a few scores to settle. I don't blame them actually, as they'd clearly invested a lot of time, money and personal support into their PPC...

As you'll see in the discussion, I concede that it probably was the right decision for Cllr Dan to attend the Borough meeting, but the key point is that because the Town Council couldn't raise a quorum for the "Community & Culture" sub-committee meeting, it was unable to get its business done...

My argument is that if Councillors were only permitted to serve on one tier of Local Government, this sort of situation would be less likely to arise. Hedge End Town Council would have been more likely to raise a quorum for this meeting if it didn't have some of the Borough Councillors in its ranks...

Though to be fair to Cllr Dan, in this particular case the problem seems to have at least as much to do with some of the other Town Councillors simply not being bothered to attend...

But that's another story.

Things aren't quite as they should be in Hedge End...