Thanet District Council Leader, consultation or chaos?

Over the next fortnight the council are asking you about how you want to select a leader of the council.

Do you want to vote for a leader when you vote for the councillors, or do you want the councillors to chose their own leader instead?

At the moment our national government seems to be supporting much more local consultation, I am pretty sure that they are sincere in this intention.

In this instance I take the national government to be the MPs who are part of the coalition supported by the government civil servants, represented by the cabinet and prime minister.

Locally things appear to be at odds with this, the council seems to be against local consultation.

In a way this depends on what you call the council or even what councillors and council officers mean by the word council.

If you take this to be the majority Conservative group, supported by the council officers, represented by the cabinet and council leader, then all is not well when it comes to public consultation.

To quote Bob Bayford the leader of Thanet District Council:

“This new government has promised to cut down on public consultation, decisions should be left to elected members because that is what we have been elected for, there is far too much of this consultation going on”.

I did email Bob to check that he wasn’t misquoted or quoted out of context there, click on the link for the email http://www.thanetonline.com/1110/id5.htm

He didn’t reply, I don’t know is this was because he approved his comments, is just plain rude or is a computer illiterate, so until I hear to the contrary I can only assume that this is the view of the council.

By the council in this instance I mean the officers and councillors collectively.

Back to the consultation about how the leader is selected, I posted about this last week see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/11/new-style-of-leadership-forced-on.html now I am particularly worried about how this consultation is being run, more so now in the light of the leaders comments on public consultation.

I have emailed the council’s democratic services about this see http://www.thanetonline.com/1110/id6.htm