More Progress in our Drive to Open up the Council

There was more good news in our drive to open up the Council to local residents last month, after we won approval for our proposals to remove the remaining restrictions on public questions at Full Council meetings. This means members of the public now have the same rights to ask questions at Council meetings as councillors, with the previous limit of six questions or 30 minutes scrapped from the rules within the Council's constitution.

This follows our earlier success in removing the requirement for notice to be submitted for a question in the week prior to a Full Council meeting. The effect of this change has been to transform public questions at Full Council meetings from an extremely rare occurrence to a regular feature with, typically, several questions asked at each meeting.

The removal of the limits on the amount of time or number of questions is extremely welcome, and a change that I hope will only encourage even more people take the chance to have their say and hold their elected representatives to account.

The previous system was plainly unfair, with the politicians able to question each other all night long, while residents could be turned away purely because six other people happened to want to ask a question at the same meeting. Removal of this unfair barrier is a common sense measure that will further open up the Council and make it more accountable to local residents, and I'm delighted the change is now in force.

This is another positive development as we continue to make the Council as open and accountable to residents as possible. Previous progress included our move two years ago to make Bedford Borough Council one of the first local authorities in the country to begin publishing individual payments to suppliers online, and our reform of the Council's use of its surveillance powers and the introduction of public oversight of how they are used.