COLUMN: ‘county council’s speedy action to deliver real changes’

Freedom of speech is something I value enormously highly so I accept that people are free to say what they want to about me. It’s part of the job of being a politician and a Council Leader and I absolutely accept that. However I don’t believe in personal attacks. Personally, I don’t attack people – policies, decisions, views – they are fair game, but not people.
Louise Goldsmith.Louise Goldsmith.
Louise Goldsmith.

I enjoyed Mike Glennon’s column. As much as anyone can enjoy reading such words about themselves! And I agree in many ways with his views that this job is a mixture of the very satisfying, the challenging the cantankerous and farcical - although how we both come to arrive at those views might be very different.

I’ll not make any reference to the personal attacks but I will challenge some of the misleading information in Mr Glennon’s column.

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Mr Glennon had tabled a motion on Friday when West Sussex County Council’s Full Council met that called on changes to be made to the way the authority makes decisions. Currently, like the vast majority of Councils across the country we have a Cabinet system. Mr Glennon wanted to return to a Committee system. He argued that decisions were taken behind ‘closed doors’, that there was no transparency, and that members of the council who were not on the Cabinet, or who were not members of the Conservative party, were not involved in the decision making process.

Regardless of political colours, I believe the one thing that unites all West Sussex County Council members is that they are where they are to try and make things better for the people of West Sussex. How they go about it is all about the politics.

But we do not make decisions behind closed doors. The Cabinet system allows for fast decisions to be made about things that are important to our county, our communities and in some case individuals. Under the old cumbersome committee system it could take up to six months for a decision to be made, nothing was certain.

As for transparency, we publish for all to see a forward plan of key decisions for the coming four months – anyone can raise questions about those key decisions before they are taken. Under the old Committee system, with the exception of the Chairman and Vice chairman of the Committee, nobody knew what was on the agenda until it was published a week before the meeting. When a decision is taken it is published again – this time with all the details and working out - to allow it to be challenged and scrutinised. Very often this happens before the decisions are taken –and that is the best way.

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All our committee meetings are open to the public. Full council meetings are webcast.

We have a robust scrutiny process with 4 committees that look at and challenge decisions or proposed decisions– that’s down to the individual members of the Committee and as far as I am concerned good challenge makes for good decision making . We have a ‘call in period’ where, for eight days after they are published, decisions can be ‘called in’ by other councillors for further examination. When this happens, the meetings are held in public. No decisions are taken behind closed doors.

Earlier this year I was really proud that we became the first county council in the country to publish our performance data on a new digital platform that gives everyone access to it.

Anyone who has viewed performance.westsussex.gov.uk will see that we have as many red and failing indicators as we have green. We’re not hiding our need to improve and yes I would welcome any comments from residents about our performance.

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Leading an open, transparent and accountable authority is and always has been really important to me.

Yes, the Conservatives hold the majority of seats at West Sussex County Council – that’s the way our democratic system works.

No, I do not make members of the party vote one way or another- as previously declared we don’t ‘whip’ our members .

We’ve got a total of 71 members at West Sussex County Council. They are involved in day to day business in many different ways every single day of the week. We have many different groups looking at issues all the time. We call these groups task and finish groups and invite members from all different political parties to sit on them, to help work through some of the more difficult issues, of course it is up to individuals if they chose to sit on these groups.

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There are different ways of communicating and engaging and we are always looking at how we can get better at speaking to and listening to our community – and I don’t exclude councilors from that - and I’d certainly like to see more people at our council meetings.

Over and above everything else, I think that speedy decisions are what matter most to people, not waiting three to six months for something to happen.

Speedy decisions that allow speedy action to deliver real changes that help make a difference where it’s most needed. Am I wrong?

So while there are lots of different ways we work, behind closed doors is certainly not one of them.