Plan to restrict public questions to councillors

Herefordshire residents have reacted angrily to moves by the county council to restrict their involvement in key meetings.

A report for the annual meeting of Herefordshire councillors this Friday (May 23) seeks their backing to restrict public questions to the council’s five scrutiny committees to those that can be answered by the chair or by the council’s statutory scrutiny officer Danial Webb, the report’s author.

Follow-up questions from the public should also be vetted just as their original questions currently are, while questioners won’t be able to ask “very similar” questions again within six months, it proposes.

Independents for Herefordshire group leader Coun Liz Harvey, a critic of the proposals, said this last measure would be “simply a way to avoid adequately answering questions in the first place”.

In preparing his report, “nearly everyone surveyed or interviewed wanted to speak about how the current rules allowing public questions at scrutiny meetings was often a source of conflict or tension between elected members and officers”, Mr Webb says in his report.

It points out that the bulk of public questions over the past four years have been to the children and young people’s scrutiny committee, with three people each asking more than six questions.

“Public questions were either being used for party political purposes, or as a means to induce engagement by members of the public with longstanding grievances,” Mr Webb said, adding that at times these have also disclosed confidential information, or “been disruptive” to the meeting.

A spokesperson for the local Families’ Alliance for Change (FAC) group responded that the report “illustrates the toxic dysfunction in the way some council officers interact with the public”, and “fails to reflect on why so many questions are still coming to the children’s scrutiny committee”.

“When children’s services improve, or the dialogue between officers and the public improves, the questions will dry up,” they said.

James McGeown, a regular questioner of the council, said the proposed moves “will result in much fewer public questions being responded to, removing another piece of Herefordshire’s local democracy”.

Herefordshire is in a minority of English and Welsh unitary local authorities in allowing public questions at all at meetings, the report points out.