At full council in Gateshead last week, the ruling Reform group put forward a motion calling for meetings to start at 4.30pm and be limited to a maximum of two hours. The aim of the changes is to make it easier for people to become councillors and attend meetings. So let's look at this in detail.
In days gone by, most people would have worked standard 9 to 5 shifts. Daytime council meetings therefore are difficult for working people to attend. But...nowadays, more people are working flexible shifts, work weekends, enjoy flexitime, work part time and so on. In other words, people are more flexible in their working arrangements. For me personally, working 9 to 5 is not an issue. I am a farmer and can fit meetings around mucking out the goats, feeding the sheep and so on. The problem for me is evening meetings in the ward. I attend lots of local community and volunteer groups typically from 6pm onwards. Moving council meetings to the late afternoon will make it harder to do the task of local representation.
The Lib Dem group however were more inclined to support the proposal so I accepted the need to support the change. If it works, that's fine. If not, we always have the opportunity to go back to day time meetings.
The other Reform proposal however was more controversial: meetings are to be restricted to 2 hours maximum. For all the time I have been a councillor (39 years now!) there has never been a need to limit the length of a meeting. Indeed, I have attended lots of meetings that were so short that councillors were still signing the register as the meeting ended. Meetings lasting more than 2 hours are unusual but typically there is a good reason for exceeding such a time limit. Here are some relatively recent examples.
A few months ago, corporate resources scrutiny committee discussed the demolition of the flyover as well as other issues relating to the failure to regenerate Gateshead High Street. Members of the committee grilled chief officers and the then leader and deputy leader of the council. This exercise brought out a great deal of information and threw light on how the council was dealing with the key issues in the town centre.
Another recent example was the scrutiny by corporate resources of Regent Funeral Services, again with senior officers attending. As with the previous example, the meeting lasted more than 2 hours because there was a thorough analysis and a great deal of questioning by members.
And a further recent example was the cabinet meeting that debated the proposed closure of leisure centres in Gateshead. This issue alone took up 3 hours of the meeting's time because members of the public, interest groups and volunteers attended and put forward their views, as did ruling and opposition councillors alike. Restricting the whole meeting to 2 hours would have severely curtailed the debate and probably would have excluded the public from being able to speak.
So, while a general rule on restricting meetings to 2 hours will in most circumstances have no impact, on big debates about crucial matters that require more intensive and extensive discussion, a big hole will be blown in democracy. And for these reasons, the Lib Dems voted against the time limit.
