In a world far away and a long time ago I used to go along regularly to meetings of Brent Council committees culminating in a mass lobby of the meeting at Brent Town Hall where, after an intense campaign we watched as a District Nurse (Tory) voted against the party line and the Mayor, having been doorstepped by me a couple of days earlier as he left opening a new nursery extension at a school. abstained, thus allowing the motion, which was to cut £1 million from the budget for the social services nurseries in the borough, to fall.

By contrast the shenanigans at South Kesteven District Council full council meeting this afternoon were no more than mildly amusing.

Each full Council meeting at SK House has a 30 minute slot at the top of the meeting for a Public Open Forum. The agenda for today's 2pm meeting was published on 21 February 2024 but was missing the real meat of the meeting - the Council Tax resolution. The budget was there, but the resulting Council Tax figures based on the budget proposed were not given. These figures were finally provided in a Supplement report which contained the actual Council Tax resolution, published on 27 February 2024, just 2 days before the meeting.
The reason for the late publication of this Supplement report was given as the lateness of the provision of figures from Lincolnshire County Council who only set their figures last Friday.

I made representations to the Monitoring Officer of the Council quoting s100B(4) of the Local Government Act 1972. This requires the agenda and papers for the meeting to be published 5 clear days prior to the meeting. What SKDC did was to publish the agenda with the item on the agenda, but with the resolution and the report "to follow". As I read s100B(4) the council has to publish:

"a) ... at least five clear days before the meeting or, where the meeting is convened at shorter notice, from the time the meeting is convened; or(b) by reason of special circumstances, which shall be specified in the minutes, the chairman of the meeting is of the opinion that the item should be considered at the meeting as a matter of urgency."

I asked whether the chairman of the meeting was going to specify in the minutes the special circumstances as to why the item should be considered as a matter of urgency.
The rather unhelpful response was that other Councils routinely use the "to follow" route to which I replied, "just because other people are doing it does not make it right or legal".

So back to the meeting. After the usual fire alarms introduction the Chairman (SKDC insist on using Chairman rather than "Chair") of the meeting read out some of the rules of the meeting and then turned to agenda item 1, which was Public Open Forum. I had given the necessary 24 hours notice of my wish to speak and to ask a question, and, out of courtesy, I had provided a copy of the question I was going to ask enclosed with that notice.
So the Chairman called me up to the Microphone marked Public Speaker and I had five minutes to address the assembled Council members. Meetings are recorded and are broadcast live on the SKDC webcast site. So you can see my speech here.

Having read our my prepared question, I then read some extracts that I had highlighted in the Code of Conduct towards the end of the approx 350 page constitution of the Council. And then I had a list of 9 items that I wanted to touch upon, and I just spoke to that list.

As you can see, the upshot of my address to the Council was that the members passed a resolution to set up a working group which would report to the Governance and Audit committee to address the openness and transparency issues I had identified. The working group can include participation from the public and I hope that I might be invited to join that group.