Democracy in Action

And here's Cllr Sally Hatton, an independent councillor with whom I used to serve on the Country Park Advisory Group making the same point in much more detail in a letter to Cambridge Evening News on 18th January:

Councillors Roberts and Riley are right to point out that, far from improving the working relationship between the leadership and non-executive councillors, the effect of South Cambridgeshire District Council's "improvement plan" has been to ensure that non-executive councillors, elected representatives of the public, are increasingly ignored in decision-making.

Readers may be interested in the specifics of how this has happened:

• The numbers of members on the planning and licensing committees have been greatly reduced. This reduces the number of villages represented on vital planning and licensing matters. It also means that the expensive and detailed training received during the previous couple of years, by members now removed from these committees, is going to waste.

• Non-executive councillors have lost all say in the appointment of the cabinet members who make most policy decisions. Cabinet members are now appointed by the leader of council alone.

• All of the council's advisory groups have been scrapped. These were bodies where a cross-section of councillors, chosen by their colleagues, considered policies in detail before a final decision was made. A few were replaced, but only with "task and finish groups" appointed by the leadership.

• The council has stopped keeping detailed minutes of meetings, making it difficult for councillors and the public to keep track of who has said and done what.

Real improvement at the council will only come when the council reverses direction and starts restoring power to the public and their representatives, and using the full range of skills and expertise available to it.