This is just a quick post to fill in on what has happened.
Unfortunately we did not gain any councillors in the Mansfield North by election last week, despite a heroic effort by many people there. Canvassing there made it clear that Labour has a lot of work to do to win back people’s trust and engagement. I am very sorry that we have lost Anne from the Labour Group as she is an excellent councillor across all parts of the job.
We have selected the different committee we are on,
- Overview Committee – Liz
- Adult Social Care and Public Health Select Committee -Penny
- Children and Families Select Committee
- Place Select Committee -Penny
- Statutory Health Scrutiny Committee – Helen
- Governance & Ethics Committee – Liz
- Joint Committee on Mineral and Waste Planning- Helen
- Nottinghamshire Pension Fund Committee -John
- Planning and Rights of Way Committee
- Senior Staffing- All
- Corporate parenting panel-Penny
- Mental Health Guardianship- Liz
- Fire Authority-John
But we want to try to make sure we are on top of all issues across the whole of the Council’s areas of responsibility and geography, so we are hoping that Labour members might keep an eye on the council papers and their ear to the ground, to warn us of upcoming issues. Get in touch if you are able to help in a particular area.
Cancelled Meetings
Not much of note has happened because a couple of weeks ago the Reform leadership cancelled all council meetings were for June, as reported in Nottinghamshire Live. This is an issue as meetings are stopped in the run up to an election, as it isnt appropriate for outgoing councillors to be making significant decisions at that stage. Having virtually no meetings from start of March until the end of June must have a knock on effects on services as it leaves lots of things waiting to be resolved for ages (including our local survey on matchday parking).
Reform were either never ready for power or scrutiny- or they had been told to sort out their approach to DOGE by the central organization of Reform before they did anything else. If Farage wants to save councils’ money maybe he should look at the allowances paid to his councillor leaders. We are paid to scrutinise the council amongst other things, and right now we cannot do that, although we are ready and willing to get on with it.
Internal DOGE
Last week there was some concern that Reform were going to send in the national DOGE “group” to Nottinghamshire. However, it turns out that they plan to do this internally (as described on BBC), which is better. Credit where it is due: The Nottinghamshire Reform leadership seem not to be doing some of the silly things that are happening in other Reform led councils.
Who wouldn’t want to ensure any organization was running efficiently? (Of course efficiency can look different if you step back and for instance consider staff wellbeing and its impact on both services, and staff themselves). The trouble is that the councils are already cut to the bone, and in many cases because are doing things inefficiently, they can’t do them properly (eg bodging the roads as they cant afford to fix them properly). This review must not be a distraction for staff who are already over stretched.
In my opinion, the councils need to be better at commercialising some of their services and resources. County Hall should be making money every time there is a game on (once upon a time there was a restaurant there staffed by students training at the College). Why is Serco running the Water Sports Centre? If the review looks at that I will be pleased!
There are some technical questions about this review but Ill leave them for another day.
Locally
We are still looking at how to take forward a Town Council. More on that soon.
So in short..
Not much has happened yet at County Hall. I have asked questions of officers on whether things are waiting to be decided but I haven’t had a response. If there isn’t clear action by the time of July Full Council, we will start calling this out.
Sadly because of the small size of our group, we have lost our amazing researcher Tyler who only started about 6 months ago but has been transformative in his time with us. We are also losing our very long standing Labour Group Administrative Assistant, Sally. Sally is the fount of all knowledge with matters related to County Council or the Labour Group and I am not sure how we will manage without her.
The Labour Party in Rushcliffe 