At the last local elections back in May Labour lost overall control of the council but managed to stay in power after doing a deal with four out of the five Green Party councillors. It seems the deal was never ratified by the Labour Party at a national level. Consequently, last week, Labour removed two Green councillors from cabinet and replaced them with Labour councillors. This puts Labour in a precarious position controlling a minority administration.
I believe council leader Paul Barnett when he says he wants better cooperation between the parties, and to take collaborative decisions, however this is very difficult when the combined opposition majority have no say in policy and decision making at cabinet or beforehand.
For the Labour group to get any of their agenda through council they will need support from either the Conservatives or Green Party councillors. But it is extremely difficult for opposition councillors to vote for important policy decisions when they do not have a say in how those policies have been formulated.
There are alternative ways of doing things - two ways of running a council.
The current structure is the Leader/Cabinet system. This is where the largest political group form policy and vote it through at cabinet. These decisions are then put before a meeting of the Full Council for ratification. The advantage of this is, you can drive policy forward faster. However, the disadvantage of this system is, a minority administration could push policy through to Full Council only for the opposition parties to vote it down. This would be a huge waste of council and officer time.
The alternative is a committee system. Under this system councils are divided into politically balanced committees that make all the decisions.
At a ‘question the leader’ meeting of the council’s Overview and Scrutiny committee Cllr Barnett was asked about moving to a committee system of governance. He was less than enthusiastic, citing the system slows down decision making because, “everything gets discussed in great detail and decisions are made at a snail’s pace”.
I am open-minded about both systems, but at first glance it would seem very difficult to have the collaboration Cllr Barnett seeks with a Leader/Cabinet system of governance.
Up until the previous leader, Kim Forward, kicked Conservative councillors off cabinet, opposition councillors were given a place on cabinet without portfolio. This allowed for greater discussion and scrutiny at cabinet meetings. Instead, cabinet meetings are now just ‘rubber stamping’ exercises.
It is all well and good Labour making noises about better collaboration and ‘working together for the good of the town’, and I do feel Cllr Barnett says this with integrity, but their past and current track record of doing so is very poor indeed.
