SLC meetings to go live online

After almost a year of coronavirus restrictions, South Lanarkshire Council is set to pilot live streaming virtual meetings this week.

Today (March 17) the council’s finance and corporate committee meeting is due to be live streamed after councillors agreed in December to make council business more accessible during the pandemic.

Since the turn of the year, meetings have been recorded with a view to putting them on YouTube.

So far, only the special executive committee meeting from January has been uploaded as equality legislation requires a BSL interpretation or subtitles.

Head of legal and administrative services Geraldine McCann updated councillors last week meeting after Liberal Democrat group leader Councillor Robert Brown asked why meetings had not yet been uploaded. She said:“The backlog of recordings are all now with the company for subtitling. They will be online before the end of the month.

“We negotiated the contract for the subtitling then had to send all the information to the company.That took several goes because of the size of the MP4 file.

“We should start to receive the ones from batch one next week, but the date to get them all back is March 24.

“Once we have all the recordings we are going to put up a link and do some publicity to alert the public to where it is. We have been talking about setting up a specific YouTube channel.”

Council leader John Ross added it was“important we get this done as quickly as possible”and that publicising meetings being uploaded was“a step in the right direction”.