Parish councils’ tarnished image
ONE of the lots of the trainee reporter used to be attendance at parish council meetings: often tedious affairs in draughty village halls or church rooms where the minutiae of village life were debated exhaustively.
Potholes, broken street lights, overgrown hedges, missing road signs, planning permissions: all were discussed in enormous detail, often leading to circular arguments which required firm intervention from the chairman to halt. These gatherings were quite accurately parodied in The Vicar of Dibley: though many were themselves more of a parody of local democracy than anything any scriptwriter could ever come up with. But in my day parish councillors conformed to a pretty clear set of stereotypes: a few retired majors, a farmer or two, a clutch of local businessmen and a small, blue-collar group representing the left wing of local politics.
For the more ambitious a stint on the parish council was a springboard to a seat on a district or county council, though many were content to limit their horizons to parish politics, particularly since the monthly meeting was inevitably followed by an enjoyable couple of pints in the Bull or the Crown.
But the single merit parish councils and those who served on them shared was that they were all pretty straight. Rule and protocol were observed. Everything was conducted above board and very strictly minuted. Standing orders were rigorously applied and observed and there was no room for cronyism, backhanders or book-cooking.
The same, sadly, cannot be said today. Complaints about questionable parish council activities are piling up. In Somerset alone charges of bad or dodgy governance have been laid against 18 parish councils. There are allegations of secret deals being done to award contracts without all the inconvenience of a tendering process; substantial payments made for councillors’ ‘expenses’ without proper scrutiny or authorisation; incomplete, inaccurate, missing or doctored minutes; an over-enthusiastic fondness for unlawfully excluding public and press from meetings; and a refusal to address public demands for explanations.
It’s this last issue which is causing the greatest concern: not only are some parish councils apparently content to flout the rules, they don’t even see any obligation to defend themselves when accused of doing so. But then, perhaps it is hardly surprising that standards in local politics have slipped so much. Local politicians have looked to Westminster and realised we have been led (until recently) by a Prime Minister with an MA in duplicity and a thoroughly relaxed attitude to rule, process, responsibility and telling the truth. So if he could get away with it, why shouldn’t they?
This situation is already worrying enough but under reorganisation plans Somerset is about to get a unitary authority and thus more responsibility – and funding – will be devolved to grass-roots level.
Are all parish councillors fit and proper people to be wielding even more influence, disbursing even larger sums of public money? In all too many cases in Somerset the answer to that would appear to be a resounding ‘no’.