July 23: 12,000 signatures: what you'll need to call KCC to account
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FANCY petitioning Kent County Council about school
standards, the state of the roads or plans to shut old peoples
homes? Or even executive pay? Maybe you’d like to call for Jeremy
Clarkson to be given the chance to run County Hall.
Well, from September you’ll have
a new way of doing so when the county council lauches its own
e-petitions website, in line with a government edict aimed at
encouraging greater public involvement and interest in what
councils are doing.
Calling
KCC to account:read our story here>>>
If enough people sign, the
council will have to agree to hold a public meeting to say what it
is doing and respond to the petitioners.
The only stumbling block to what
is a commendable scheme is that if you fancy petitioning KCC about
a county-wide matter, you’ll need to get 12,000
signatories.
The threshold for matters
affecting a smaller area – say a district or borough – will be
lower at 1,000 and multiplied if it covers more districts or
towns.
Now, I am not a betting man
(well, hardly ever) but I am prepared to wager a significant sum
that in the first three months (after which KCC has promised a
review of the thresholds) that County Hall will not have a single
petition on a county-wide matter to respond to.
I will be happy to be proved
wrong but securing the support of the equivalent of the entire
student population of a dozen secondary schools strikes me as a
tall order.
Admittedly, the fact that
signatures can be added online makes the process rather easy but
even so, it seems to me the 12,000 figure may deter people from
initiating a petition rather than attracting them to do
so.
I concede KCC
has a predicament. Deputy leader Cllr Alex King
(Con) talked about it being unchartered water and has concerns that
a lower threshold might see the authority inundated with calls from
residents to do this, that and the other and compelled to arrange
all manner of additional meetings about vexatious
subjects.
Far better – politically – to
start high and go low rather than the other way round, which might
look even worse in terms of public perception
At yesterday’s full council
meeting, the opposition Lib Dems suggested the
thresholds be halved although it is worth noting that they were
part of the informal members’ group that originally agreed to the
12,000 figure, which equates to less than one per cent of the
population.
Either way, the move towards
people power and the Big Society is one that looks like starting
cautiously at County Hall.
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Actually, there is one precedent
for a county-wide petition. When anti-grammar school campaigners
sought to trigger a ballot on scrapping Kent’s selective system,
they used the former government’s legislation to try and secure the
necessary number of signatures.
They secured 7,000 signatures –
well short of the 46,000 they needed, or 20 per cent of those
eligible to vote.
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I’VE always thought that the custom of allowing county
councillors to table questions at full council meetings was a bit
of a waste of time, not least as it is frequently used for
politically-motivated ends rather than what it is designed
for.
I’m even less enthused by the
procedure after KCC issued a press release on the back of a
question tabled by Conservative backbencher Julie
Rook (who cropped up in my blog yesterday, by coincidence)
to Cllr Nick Chard.
I have never known the authority
issue a press release about a member’s written question before and
I’ve been around longer than I care to admit.
The press release contained the
question and answer – about KCC’s lobbying over rail services –
which helpfully allowed Cllr Chard to detail the various
steps the authority has already taken in relation to its
lobbying over timetable changes and the impact of High Speed
One.
The question itself asked what
the outcomes were of a rail summit held by KCC in March.
Now it may be that some
councillors were unaware of "the outcomes" but they shouldn’t have
been. KCC issued a press release on the "outcomes" pretty soon
after it hosted its summit in March - hailing it as an exercise in
"passenger power." There have been several references to it in
various committee meetings I've attended.
Just in case they'd forgotten,
you can see the original release
here.
Incidentally, the purpose of
written questions is to elicit information not disclosed or made
available before.
As the constitutional rules of
KCC say, questions may not "ask for information already in the
Member’s possession or which has been published to Members either
in a Committee report or otherwise."
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Friday, July 23 2010
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