Do we need a special town committee?

The silly season on Boston Borough Council committee meetings has come to a close, and September opened with a whimper with a meeting of the Boston Town Area Committee.
The agenda was slightly iffy, with a number of verbal reports.
One was and “update on land owned by Network Rail” - which might have something to do with the much vaunted road improvements, and  if so ought to have appeared as a written report so that members of the public unable to attend the meeting might be able digest it.
There was also a verbal update on the Placecheck scheme - again, a major piece of spending on local improvements which the wider public ought to be able to access.
One of the few “real” items on the agenda was to offer approval for Boston Community Showcase Partnership to spend £359.19 on fifty steel fencing pins, five rolls of fencing and five reels of rope. Alternative options were not available as approval was given before the meeting.
Verbal updates at meeting seem increasingly common.
If nothing else, they guarantee keeping information away from the press and public in less draconian and obvious means than employing Section 100(A)(iv) of the Local Government Act 1972.
Let’s be honest - who in their right mind is going to attend or send a reporter to a meeting like this with an agenda that’s as dull as ditchwater, and about as interesting.
Which brings us on to a wider issue.
Do we really need gatherings such as the Boston Town Area Committee?
Looking at the last available set of minutes, the major items under discussion seem to relate to litter, and it must surely be possible to deal with items like this without the need for a full blooded meeting.
That meeting started at 6-30pm and ended an hour later. A total of eleven councillors and officers attended, and no doubt there were a couple more there as well.
That equates to more than a working day devoted to-  by and large  - discussing the replacement of a few litter bins. Surely this could be done without the need to sit around a table for an hour - somehow the approval for spending by the community showcase manage to gain approval without a meeting.
The other reason to challenge the need for the committee is quite basic.
How different, how worse off, would Boston be if there was no Boston Town Area Committee and its work was absorbed into other committees?
The answer, we suspect, is not a lot!

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