Performance of Council and Councillors

Written for the blog by a Preston Resident.

There is a great deal of apathy and a lack of confidence in our local area when it comes to Local Government and local councils. We only need to look at the recent Police and Crime Commissioners Election turnout of something like 15% or a recent Town Council election in Withernsea, West Holderness with a turnout of a mere 5.4% to see just how desperately low confidence is. The apathy in Preston is in my view a direct result of the previous councils mismanagement of our Parish and their attitude towards and treatment of residents.

It is also a failure of the current council because they had a golden opportunity following the 2011 Local Elections to review council activity and management to identify all areas of concern. The council could then have formulated an action plan to address all identified areas where action was needed. Unfortunately that opportunity was not grasped and the new council made a conscious decision to simply follow the failures of the old administration and to promote their failed policies, demonstrating a total lack of leadership.

From early in 2010 many people voiced their opinion to me that it was a waste of time contacting the Parish Council because they wouldn’t do anything and writing to the council was a worse idea because the council almost never responded which merely resulted in frustration, little did I realise at the time that I was to experience this first hand in the very near future!

The previous council having presided over the near demise of the Preston Playing Field, despite we believe a healthy reserve balance is only one of their legacies, there are no positive ones. It is widely believed in some quarters that the road to the Playing Field dereliction was planned and intentional (a view which I support). That decay was organised in order to precede the handing back or sale of the land to a developer to be used for housing.

This makes a great deal of sense on the face of it because in such an event the council would stand to gain financially by the building of residential accommodation, not only in additional precept income but by the financial allocation to the council of a fixed amount per dwelling built, this would amount to many thousands of pounds. If we factor this into closing the Playing Fields Charity and transferring its reserve funds to the Preston Community Hall Charity the council would be onto a winner and would have been in a better position to progress their drive for a New Community Hall, putting Preston into debt probably for a couple of generations at least. A process the Parish Council purposely kept from residents, the inevitable hike in the precept would have been very substantial and would have impacted on the costs of every household in the Village!

The previous administration was wholly against a refurbishment of the existing Community Hall and spent approximately £8,000 on Planning Applications to demolish and build an impressive and imposing new edifice despite a survey report that gave the existing Community Hall a relatively clean bill of health structurally, residents were never consulted or asked for their views.

There was no consideration of residents during this process, in fact as far as the council was concerned the less residents knew of their activities the better. Despite the amounts of money involved with such a capital project and possible future debt to the Village, the council regarded residents as being no part of the process, even though we as residents were the ones who would have to service the burden of repayment, this was a ‘councillor glorification exercise’ at a cost to residents.

The council applied for grant funding knowing that such funding was not available where it could not demonstrate resident support via a village consultation, still the council would not consider a consultation, the council preferred to burden the village with debt!

Many Preston residents had high hopes of a refreshing change to our Parish Council leading up to the May 2011 Local Elections and following those elections expectations were buoyant. For the first time in many years we had an election in Preston to elect residents to the Parish Council by Poll and were successful in electing a number of new councillors, thus avoiding the normal cozy co-option process by old councillors following the election.

You can imagine our celebration at the result, although there were a number of the old councillors still in place it was hoped that the new members would tip the balance and bring true democracy and open local government to Preston. Although I withdrew from any election activity early in 2011, my understanding was that the aim of our new councillors was to bring into the open some of the misgivings residents had felt for some time.

The joint aim was to increase communication between council and residents, adjust the council to become a much more open and inclusive body with a much greater degree of participation by residents.

Unfortunately things did not quite turn out as we would have hoped. Our hope and anticipation in the success of the election very quickly evaporated and turned to sheer disappointment in our new councillors. Some now walked about the village with puffed out chests and an air of aloofness, no longer wishing to talk to or associate themselves with some residents, ironically it was those residents that organised these same new councillors as nominees and voted them onto the council.

Preston Parish Council is now effectively split into two factions, the old and the new. The old faction are experienced operators who are able to manipulate new councillors, who in some cases are content to follow their lead. Those councillors who now follow that lead have shed the trappings of their new and transforming role for openness to blindly follow and buttress the failed activities of those older members of the council.

The end result is that our new council has from day one simply carried on from the old administration with virtually no change in policy or direction. The new council and its leadership have followed the lead and guidance of the previous council members and adopted in large part their attitude towards residents.

When the time comes (and it will) when the old councillors decide to take the reins once again they will have little to undo and that which they will need to change such as any adopted procedures, which are a ‘copy and paste’ exercise and probably sitting on a shelf unused will not present them with any great difficulties, providing the current clerk remains in post.

There are three or four new councillors who have maintained their honourable intentions and endeavored to seek change but have been unsuccessful at securing meaningful change or improvement in the management of the Parish. The Parish Clerk, who could assist those changes has for more than a decade worked with and supported the actions of the old councillors and shared their aims and objectives. They are inextricably connected and that connection is not set to change anytime in the near future or without strong and independent leadership in the council.

As a resident I am resigned to accepting that the breakthrough in transforming our council into a more inclusive, open and transparent organisation has on this occasion failed and we are now basically stuck with what we have until the next local elections. The good point is that we are almost halfway there and we should now start planning for those elections having learnt crucial lessons.

Having reached the point of accepting the current position as unassailable there is little point in trying to further understand the current council and its methods, we need to look forward, while keeping a weather eye on the actions of the council.

If we are to change things we need to start planning a strategy and formulate tactics now in order to be ready and primed for the 2015 Local Elections. We need to elect councillors who actually care about the village and not just their own egos and bloated self-importance, there is much more to being on a Parish Council than using the title ‘Councillor’.

In conclusion I would suggest the current councils management of the Parish has not given rise to any significant improvement from that of the previous administration and consequently they have failed the expectations of residents.