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by Claire Young on 17 July, 2015
At Wednesday’s South Gloucestershire Council meeting the Conservatives used their majority to remove the rights of opposition councillors to force a rethink on bad decisions.
Previously the lead member for any of the political groups on a committee could “refer up” a decision to full council for further debate, if they felt a mistake had been made or more information was needed to make a properly informed decision. Only a few months ago this safety check was used when the planning committee initially decided to approve the planning application for Top Yard in Westerleigh. Given the chance to review their report and consider case law, officers changed their recommendation from approval to refusal and the application was eventually refused. If my former colleague Alan Lawrance had not had the opportunity to refer up the original decision the application would have been approved and there would have been no way to overturn that.
By referring a decision up to council it also gave a chance for concerned members of the public to go along and have their say. Almost every council in the country has some ability for minority political groups to force administrations to think again. Obviously ultimately the majority view will prevail, as you would expect in a democracy. Sometimes though, having heard differing views or got more information, they make a different decision from their original one. Isn’t that also something you would expect in a democracy? As we saw with Top Yard, referring up was one way to help the council make better decisions. Why is the new administration afraid of that scrutiny?
2 Comments
This looks like a retrograde step – has there been a history of this option being abused by the opposition?
Not really – we might all have opinions on which referrals were reasonable but the option wasn’t used very frequently.
For the three years up until the election in May decisions were made by committees where any two parties could outvote the other one and the Conservatives were the largest group. So there wasn’t really an opposition, we were all minority groups. There weren’t a huge number of referrals to full council and several did result in some change to the decision.
Prior to that we had 5 years of Tory minority rule with a Cabinet system. Decisions were made by Cabinet members rather than committees. The decisions were published and the opposition parties could “call in” the decision. This meant you had a debate at a committee and voted on a recommendation to the Cabinet Member. They were free to ignore the recommendation, but it was an opportunity to get them to have a rethink. Again, I don’t think it was frequently abused, there were only a handful of call ins in those 5 years.