So I’m back from my holidays. Yes, thanks, they were lovely. And now that I’m back, I couldn’t wait to get stuck into the latest Glasgow City Council minutes, to see how they’re getting on with implementing the hundred pledges in the Labour manifesto.
This is not sarcasm, by the way. I was genuinely excited about reading the minutes. Send help, please.
When last we dipped a shoogly toe into the waters of the Council’s meetings, they were getting themselves set up with Committees, Baillies, delegated functions and all manner of other tedious but no doubt necessary tasks. That was back in May, so what have our intrepid cooncillors been up to since then?
Let’s start with the minutes of that May meeting. There was a lot of nominating and approving and handing out chains of office. Basically, nothing much of any substance happened. So my hopes were high for their second meeting, on 28th June. The minutes haven’t been published yet, so I had to look at the meeting papers. They seem awfully light – a proposal on delegated functions is literally the only paper, besides the minutes of previous meetings. There are some motions on nominating people to yet more committees, and some important stuff about extending the franchise to 16 year olds, mesothelioma, asylum policy and children playing outside.
But this Council is going to become a Co-operative Council, introduce community budgeting, refurbish all primary schools, integrate public transport, revamp George Square and achieve 95 other actions from their manifesto. So where’s the beef? Surely somewhere, there must be a plan to implement all of these 100 policies over the council’s four-year term.
I looked in the Executive Committee, the Finance and Audit Committee, the Operational Delivery Scrutiny Committee, and several others besides. I found plenty of individual committee workplans, but no overall document that sets out how the Council will achieve its aims.
So. Where does that leave us? Clearly, the full Council meetings are not the place to look for progress. Instead, I’m going to focus on specific pledges from the manifesto, and see what I can find out about the plans to implement them. I was genuinely delighted to find that there were some exciting actions in that manifesto, and I’m not going to be thwarted in finding out when they will come to fruition by the Council’s incomprehensible structures.
July 3rd, 2012 at 6:43 am
You’re quite correct: a workplan for the year ahead (a schedule of which policy papers are coming when) was presented at the Environment and Sustainability Committee, and it didn’t contain any of the proposals from Labour’s manifesto. The SNP group commented on this and asked for papers on various items to be added in. The excuse came back that they’d not had a chance to sit down with officers yet to discuss their manifesto! Bizarre…