Preston Parish Council Website

PRESTON PARISH COUNCIL WEBSITE

Written for the Blog by a Preston resident.

Hi there

You didn’t leave a name but that’s fine, your welcome and your comment is appreciated.

To be honest I really don’t know who’s responsible for the web site and its contents but I do agree there’s very little on there considering the length of time its been active. I think we’re beginning to realise, giving information is definitely not the council’s strong point but that is probably because they don’t want to give any information. You will see from my previous posting that I have a difficult time getting information as a request under the Freedom of Information Act, unless your prepared to push the issue you simply won’t get anywhere.

Almost all people who try to get information are put off by the difficulty they normally encounter and that seems to suite the council but, I think you should compare their site with someone else’s. There is a village near to Preston called ‘Paull Parish Council’ (without the quotation marks), as I’m sure your aware, Paull is roughly a third of Preston in size with something like 650 on the electoral register if I recall correctly. Having said that compare Preston’s website with almost any Parish Council website in the country and you should have a different experience.

I don’t know why its virtually full of empty pages but I don’t think they developed the site, I believe East Riding did it for them so maybe ‘therein lies the problem’.

I happen to know there are web designers who would have done a wonderful site for the council and very user friendly and free of charge but they normally shun that kind of partnership.

The bottom line seems to come down to ‘they are really not interested in putting anything on their site that might inform the public’ otherwise they would have done it before now. I must say however, that is only a view I have come to because I do know that this subject has been raised during at least one council meeting but that hasn’t made a great deal of difference, well, no difference actually.

What can you do about it? maybe get some councillors elected that are actually interested in doing something for the village over and above just attending council meetings and being able to call themselves ‘councillors’.

The one thing that is covered on the website is council meetings and minutes, I can see they have updated the minutes, that was probably after being prompted to do so by a resident during a recent council meeting.

Can I suggest you look at the agenda’s and minutes and you should get a feel for the content of mainly all council meetings, that may raise flags as to why there is such little interest in residents attending these meetings as commented on by someone else. There is simply nothing there for them.

If the council were interested they could recruit help from within Preston and have the site managed and added to by residents working under the guidance of the council, it really isn’t that difficult and I know of residents who would gladly be a part of that process. Not that it is likely to happen.

Hope this helps and again, thanks for reading the Blog.