Petitions Policy Helping in Our Drive to Open up the Council to Local Residents

Just over a year ago, my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I on the Council fought a successful battle over the threshold to be set under the Council's new petitions policy for the number of signatures required before a Full Council debate would be granted on the matter. A report considered last week at a Full Council meeting on the petitions received over past year shows just how important that battle was.

To go back to June 2010 for a moment, Council officers prepared reports using a benchmarking exercise against other councils which had implemented such a policy, and recommended that the threshold should be set at 500. In many larger councils, for example, many thousands of signatures are required before a public debate a full council meeting is granted. However, we have an ongoing campaign here to open up the Council to local residents, including removing the barriers which used to prevent members of the public from asking questions of the Mayor and Councillors at Council meetings, and publishing online all payments of at least £500. We felt that we should make it as easy as possible for people to come to a full council meeting with their petition, and make sure the issues important to them and their community receive a public airing and consideration amongst all Councillors.

If we were implementing a policy which stated that communities could bring issues of importance to full council, then why a small community such as the village of Little Barford, for example, be ruled out of the process altogether by a threshold set at a level much larger than its entire population? Who is to say that their issues and concerns matter less to them than those faced by larger communities matter to their residents? With these questions in mind, my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I proposed a much lower threshold of just thirty signatures. This was met with dire warnings from other Councillors that elected members would end up 'wasting time' dealing with 'trivial matters' and even, as one Councillor put it rather inelegantly, 'opening the gates to dog poo!'

However, our proposal was successful, and the record of the past year shows just how valuable that victory was. Of the 22 petitions which received a full council debate since the introduction of the policy, only one featured more than 500 signatures. That means that 21 petitions which have been presented at Full Council predominantly by individual local residents and debated at a public meeting of the full council would not otherwise have received a debate had we not pursued the lower threshold.

For the record, there have been very few mentions of dog poo! And where it has been mentioned, such as in one debate in last week's meeting, it is causing a real problem for residents in the neighbourhood. The last time I checked, we were elected to help sort those out.