Take th@!
Councillors
rant over
e-mail flood

One might expect that the tumultuous events of the night of Wednesday 13th July – when five people died in an explosion at Broadfield Lane industrial estate – would have galvanised Boston Borough Council to act to do everything in its power to ensure that such an accident is never repeated.
And yes, the council has leapt into action – but not in the way that you might imagine.
Instead of looking at how it might stem the sales of illicit alcohol and therefore help stifle illegal manufacture, it is involved in a tangled internal debate about …. the sending of e-mails…
It started when Councillor Elliott Fountain, an English Democrat representative for Fenside ward - whose long standing connections with the Eastern European community in Boston has given him a particular interest in recent events - began sending fellow councillors e-mails on the subject.
To ensure that everyone got them, he employed a seldom used facility – the “Elected Members” button which meant that all 32 councillors received a copy.
This annoyed some of them, so they wrote to Councillor Fountain.
Among them was newly Independent councillor for Witham ward, Carol Taylor, who told Councillor Fountain: “I would be most grateful if you would refrain from sending me articles which you think I should read. It is up to me to choose the political/public concerns that I wish to pursue further. If at any time I need advice I will approach the person I think most knowledgeable on a particular subject regardless of political persuasion.”
This led to what can only be called a robust response from Councillor Fountain – which then led to interventions from the Independent group spokesman Councillor Richard Leggott, who wrote to English Democrat group leader Councillor David Owens saying he felt that the reply was “bullying” in tone. He added that if Councillor Taylor’s request to be left out of Councillor Fountain’s e-mails was ignored, he would want a face-to-face conversation – “hopefully to remove the possibility of a complaint to Standards being necessary.”
Another complainant is Conservative Councillor Gurdip Samra, a consultant at Pilgrim Hospital, who represents North ward. He has raised the group e-mails with the council officer responsible for such technicalities.
In his e-mail, he says: “I do not believe that it is reasonable use of group email to all elected members to send us links to web addresses to which we already have free access. I feel I am able to keep myself informed without the unsolicited assistance of a fellow councillor.
“I am not persuaded that it is reasonable conduct to copy all Boston Borough Council e-mail correspondence between members to Boston Eye.
“This would constitute professional misconduct in the NHS under our current email policy. I appreciate this is local ‘politics’ but there has to be fair and responsible use of Local Authority resources. I am obviously able to use the delete button as I have done with many of Councillor Fountain's recent emails. However I should not have my mailbox filled with unnecessary e-traffic.
“Maybe we should restrict the use of elected member group to administrative function as many other professional organisations have done.
This will mean the individual will have to decide the appropriate recipients of their email.”
And in another e-mail Councillor Samra adds: “We need to move on with serving our residents and stop wasting each others time."
Given what we’ve heard recently about the NHS in Boston we are not convinced that adopting any of its procedures as a role model would be a good idea – especially where the object appears to impose censorship on people.
Meanwhile, Boston’s Chief Executive Richard Harbord has written to Councillors Samra and Fountain as well as the council leader, Peter Bedford to say: “The recent usage of the all member e-mail has generated considerable correspondence.
“There is no guidance or rules to its use. In the past it was seldom used.
I have put it on the agenda of the next Group Leaders meeting for any views.”
We opened today’s blog by saying that we though that recent events might have galvanised the council into some sort of action – and it has.
But sadly, the response has Boston’s usual answer in the event of a problem.
It comes in an e-mail from Conservative Councillor Mike Gilbert, who represents the borough’s Central ward and who holds the portfolios for Housing, Community Transport, Property, Homelessness, Older People, Community Development and Voluntary Sector Support.
Councillor Gilbert, whose profile appears to be as high if not higher than the leader – and certainly more so than either of the two deputies – wrote: “As you may have seeen (sic) on Fake Britain (a BBC television programme) the distillery problem is not unique to Boston but is a serious national problem. I would like to make it known that Boston is like everywhere else in relation to this distillry (sic) issue rather than a place with worse issues than everywhere else. We must try and (sic) avoid giving ourselves a label we can't loose (sic) for having serious problems no one else has.”
Well that’s all right then. We just play the whole thing down and we’ve nothing to worry about, have we?

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