Change in the council

Watching Wokingham Borough Council’s annual council meeting, it was a real pleasure to see a packed house - every Councillor present for an historic occasion which was to see the first ever all female line-up on the meeting’s management bench - a lady Mayor, a lady Deputy Mayor and a lady Chief Executive.

My how some things have changed in Wokingham.

With a “hung” council with No Overall Control by any single party, I was keenly anticipating the voting to see who’d be Mayor.

Would it be different political groups for Leader and Mayor as is the case in at least seven NOC councils around the country, with a Tory Mayor to accompany a LibDem Leader in our case, or would we see single party rule again?

As it happened, this hinged on a single vote, which turned out to be for the Liberal Democrat candidate rather than the Conservative one, so the Borough falls under single control once again and the opportunity for real and significant behavioural change by Councillors was lost.

There was an opportunity for the new Leader to accept an amendment put forward by the Conservative Group, but rather than act in a statesmanlike manner and accept the proposal in the spirit of working together as he’d promised he would, he turned it down for reasons best known to himself. He had a chance to instigate real change and he blew it.

What followed was a long, boring and time-wasting set of votes on contested seats for the various committees and outside bodies, ending up with very poor political balance overall.

By the time the new leader stood up to announce his Executive, I was wondering if things could get any worse?

It turned out that they could.

As yet another Northern Parishes representative has been appointed to be in charge of the Local Plan - replacing the two Northern Parishes representatives who put forward the disaster that saw residents turn away from Conservatives in droves at the May elections because of the last local plan.

Between the spectacle of 33 houses in Hurst and 3,300 in Shinfield from the previous administration(s), the rest of the Borough is still shaking its collective head as to why nothing’s being done to fix the issues elsewhere.

If we want to be anything other than a place that floods when it rains, gets hosepipe bans when it doesn’t and gets traffic jams all the time, then we need a political leadership which sets nimby, short term self-interest to one side and starts to think about all the citizens in all the places - all the time.

I’d hope to be proved completely wrong, but seven years of closely observed Woky politics tells me it’s “no change here - business as usual” - just with a different name in charge.

Tony Johnson, Winnersh