Online meetings to stay at council

A return to the council chamber in Livingston’s Civic Centre has been delayed again.

The first meeting of the newly elected council was held online and agreed a Labour motion to delay the return to the chamber and hybrid meetings until August 16.

This meeting is the first of the Executive - the main decision making committee - after the summer recess.

Until this week the meetings were scheduled to begin again on Tuesday with the new Education and Council Executives

being the first committees

to meet in chamber since

March 2020 and the start of the first lockdown.

The motion noted council: “Agrees the move to hybrid meeting arrangements should be postponed until the meeting of Council Executive on 16 August 2022 to allow newly-elected members and newly appointed chairs and members to be briefed on the technology and procedures.”

Councillors will not return to the old set up where up to 33 - the full council - could be in the chamber.

At the turn of the year they agreed to hybrid arrangements which will see meetings of larger committees such as education and council executive, as well as the full council, meeting with two representatives from each party along with the Independent,and now Lib Dem councillor.

Other committee members will join on screen through the new AudioVisual (AV) system which has been installed in the chambers

The installation of a new AV system will cost £150,000 - with ongoing annual costs of £42,000 for maintenance. The Televic Confidea Flex audio visual system which will replace the current audio only system in the council chamber.

Meetings are currently

live streamed, without vision via the Audiominutes platform.

Initial plans were to have the system installed and ready for testing before Christmas. However, supply chain delays for the technology pushed that

deadline back to March,

with tentative plans to start training in April.

With the election on 5

May it was decided by the

council to wait until new members were voted in to start training on the system.

The system will encourage greater public scrutiny than the existing Audiominutes audio system which is prone to transmission breaks.

The new system will allow electronic voting and allow for a range of different connections to councillors and council officers who would normally have to be within the chamber to address meetings.

The chamber occupies

the first floor of the rotunda

at the front of the civic centre and is made up of a public gallery and an inner and outer circle of desks. In full council the outer ring is occupied by councillors and in the inner by officers from where they deliver reports.

The future of other meetings such as Local Area Committees which usually take place in council buildings in various towns and villages will also face decisions in line with the national Covid restrictions.

In November last year we reported a global shortage in IT equipment has stalled councillors’ return to the Civic Centre chambers in Livingston.

West Lothian Council had hoped to hold hybrid meetings in the chamber from December.

This delay in installing equipment led the delay running into February when work began to Work has begun to transform West Lothian Council chambers for the new meetings.

Contractors were in the civic centre to begin the installation of the new £150,000 audio visual system which will bring councillors back to face to face meetings in the chamber.

But it will be one month shy of a two-year gap before that meeting takes place because of a global delays in the supply of IT equipment largely down to the knockon effects of the pandemic..