Arguably the biggest failure of Brighton & Hove City Council over the past four years has been its inability to concentrate on the council issues that it has responsibility for – a problem apparent in newly compiled summary statistics detailing how the council has spent its time this term.
A full analysis of the issues raised by Councillors through their notices of motions from 2019-2023 demonstrates the point - and also shows why neither Labour nor Greens can be trusted to focus on basic service delivery for the next four years.
There were a total of 108 notices of motion brought forward by the council groups during the four years – the opportunity presented to elected Councillors to raise issues for attention and action.
Perhaps most ludicrous motions were on nuclear disarmament.
There were 29 each from the Greens and Labour - and a further 17 ‘joint’ Labour-Green notices of motion covering their ‘joint working’ areas, often linked to their coalition-style memorandum of understanding.
The analysis of these notice of motion shows that Labour and Greens spent the vast majority of their time - 78% - raising matters of national and international affairs, not within the responsibility or control of the council. In total they wasted 16 hours of time on national and international issues; compared to the just 4.5 hours of time they spent raising responsibilities that they City Council could address. In the process, the pair directed council officers to write over 50 letters to various bodies expressing ‘the council’s opinion’ on all sorts of matters, including to regional pensions boards, the prime minister - and even the UN Secretary General.
These statistics are no surprise to those of us who have sat through the debates, scratching our heads as Labour and Greens have brought forward more and more ludicrous topics for the Council’s attention.
Perhaps the most ludicrous of all were the motions brought forward on nuclear disarmament. Debates and votes were held on two separate occasions, which wasted nearly an hour of council time as Labour and Greens pontificated over the wording of their motions. In the end the council decided to: “declare its support for the obligations and full implementation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, to call on the UK government to work for global peace in a world free of nuclear weapons by signing and ratifying the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and working alongside other UN Member States for its full implementation; and to inform the UN Secretary General of all of this!”
Meanwhile, in the real world, residents’ rubbish and recycling wasn’t being collected properly. Is it any surprise that Brighton and Hove’s recycling rate is one of the worst in the country, half the level of neighbouring Conservative-run West Sussex County Council?
This waste of time under the Labour and Green Council of the last four years, which included all sorts of ‘treaties’ and ‘charters’ that they wanted Brighton & Hove to symbolically sign and even a debate on the US Supreme Court Roe vs Wade decision, extended beyond notices of motion and into running of the council itself.
Council bureaucracy is up 400% as the pair established all sorts of new groups, many of which either duplicated functions or investigated matters of national or international policy of no relevance to the city.
Examples include the Labour-Green ‘Brexit Committee’, which didn’t achieve very much in the end, other than wasting more and more time of council officers. The proliferation of such groups has reached such a scale, that Democratic Services Department is no longer able to write official minutes for all of them, as it lacks the capacity, reducing transparency.
Meanwhile, important working groups that covered issues that did need attention – such as the King Alfred working group - didn’t meet for over a year and Brighton and Hove remains behind every other comparable city when it comes to sports and leisure provision.
All of the above seriously calls into question recent claims by Labour and Greens during the election campaign that they want to focus on ‘basic services’. Four years ago, Labour also promised in their manifesto that they would ‘get the basics right’ - but they have not spent their time bringing it these matters when they had the chance and will not this time either.
For our part, our Conservative team is very proud to have spent 100% of our time on our 26 notice of motion raised fighting for residents on local issues that matter and fighting for local results – whether that was fixing Victoria Fountain, establishing a register of heritage assets, getting litter collected on the A27, or securing reviews of allotments toilets and Madeira Drive.
If elected on 4th May, a Conservative-run City Council will make the city better – mainly because we will bring back a focus on issues the city council is actually responsible for, and stop the council wasting any more of residents’ time.
ENDS.
