Attendance should

be a matter of record

We wrote yesterday about the momentum being gained by opposition parties on Boston Borough Council, whilst the Conservative leaders apparently sit around the tea table crunching their digestives and sending out for more hot water.
And whilst it’s probably just co-incidence, we’re pleased to see that many issues are the same as those where we have pressed for similar action.
The council’s Labour group has posed an important question which we have also raised before - that of attendance.
“Are we going to allow councillors to get away with the awful attendance record that was so prevalent during the last four years?” asks Labour.
“To help solve this problem Labour councillors will be urging the council to adopt an electronic record of attendances, available for all to look at on the Boston Borough Council website.”
This is something that is long overdue.
Several times in the past four years Boston Eye highlighted the attendance record of councillors.
A number of them were getting money for jam – if you’ll excuse the ongoing allusion to the tea table.
And we suspect that a poor attendance record is doubtless replicated at ward level, as we know of several cases where councillors who failed to turn up to meetings were equally invisible in public in the areas they purportedly “represented.”
Other authorities round and about publish the attendance record of their councillors, and we think that it is essential so that voters can have the chance to see how well served – or otherwise – they are.
Boston’s joint deputy leader Councillor Raymond Singleton-McGuire told us in his parting message - before descending into the bowels of Worst Street to confront the council’s accounts - that he had arranged and instigated to have cameras in the council chamber to stop “any future personal bravado or outbursts and to retain the respect and diplomacy expected.” He began organising this before the election, and told us that he hoped it would be approved,
We hope so too – and we also hope that the full council meeting will be shown as a live webcast – just as Lincolnshire County Council meetings are.
Somehow, though, we doubt it.
Already, and despite promises of openness and transparency, the Tories have shown a preference for the shady side of the street rather than the sunny side, and for their work to go on without taking the electorate into their confidence.
Going back to Labour, interestingly, they want to go one step further with the information they give to the public.
“Let’s also include attendance at outside bodies, so that over the next four years, we will be able to see whether councillors are fully engaged in representing their communities on behalf of the borough, and show us their declarations of interests as well - what is there to hide? “
Again, we would agree – particularly after the recent news that one former BBI councillor could not even manage to attend twice yearly meetings of the Rural Commission - not once, not twice, but six times … a non-attendance record spanning three of his four years in office until he was replaced on the committee. And even then his replacement was because of a change of office, rather than a Damascene conversion.
The Boston Labour website sums it up nicely.
“When we have our peer review in the autumn, let’s show the Improvement Board that we have gone the extra mile, but more importantly, let’s show the people of Boston that we are now an open and transparent council.”
Again, it should be hard for the Conservatives, who are key to all this as only they can make it happen, to disagree – but somehow, we feel that the workings of Boston Borough Council will remain as mysterious as they were before.

You can write to us at boston.eye@googlemail.com  Your e-mails will be treated in confidence and published anonymously if requested.