Tories who changed committee structure deny key aims will fail

A TORY council accused of manipulating committee boundaries to increase its political dominance has dismissed claims a key aim of the move will fail.

North Yorkshire County Council replaced its seven district area committees with six new bodies based on parliamentary constituencies.

Opposition councillors claimed “political gerrymandering” as the council’s only non-Tory controlled committee, Richmondshire, was broken up and replaced with a Conservative-led one.

The County Council said the introduction of constituency committees would encourage MPs to attend meetings. But the first meeting of the Thirsk and Malton constituency committee heard that MPs would only attend the committees about once a year.

Meetings the MPs would attend would be arranged to suit the Westminster politicians’ diaries and councillors would be able “to raise one or two key issues” in depth with MPs.

Councillor Lindsay Burr said that while MPs had a busy schedule, she was angry that one of the main reasons for the changes appeared not to have been fully embraced.

She said: “When this new arrangement was sold to us at county council we were told it was because our MP was going to come.

“Quite clearly it’s not going to happen.”

But Coun Greg White, a member of the council’s executive, said: “The more relevant we make the committee to the work of the MP, the more likely he is to attend

“It is really not about getting people to turn up for meetings for meetings sake.

“Previous to this we didn’t have any attendance from the MP, so it has got to be progress. At the moment I am very happy with him coming once a year.”