With Conservative Councillor Robert Nemeth having announced that he is stepping down as a Councillor in May after eight years on the City Council, many have been paying tribute to his strong contribution to opposition politics in the city, including through the letters to the editor page this week.
It is worthwhile reflecting on Cllr Nemeth’s contribution; as it highlights the high importance of opposition work in bringing issues to light at on behalf of residents – and in turn of having a strong opposition presence on the City Council.
Quite simply many significant issues would simply have not come to light over the past few years without the work of Cllr Nemeth behind the scenes - with the taxpayer of the city in his mind.
Robert has packed a lot into his short time as a Councillor. He was first elected in 2015 and then re-elected in 2019 with an increased majority, both times alongside the late Cllr Garry Peltzer Dunn. He had previously stood for the Conservatives as a Candidate for the Regency and Withdean Wards.
Robert has led for the Conservatives at the City Council on a number of key policy areas, including Tourism, Equalities, Communities & Culture; and more recently as Conservative Spokesperson for Environment Transport & Sustainability. In these roles, his forensic opposition and scrutiny of the Council has exposed several major issues to the public eye, some of which have gained national and international attention.
Through his work on the Environment, Transport and Sustainability Committee, Robert exposed the Bus Gates scandal, where the City Council was issuing a fine every 2 minutes to unsuspecting motorists from a new experimental traffic order in central Brighton. The disguised bus gates had been brought in by Labour without any vote at all. The four cameras policing this traffic order, stationed at Marlborough Place, St Georges Place, St Peters Place and York Place, issued 9,618 tickets in one month (October 2021), with 5,400 of these fines were linked to one of the cameras alone. Despite the figures Labour and the Greens voted to make the Experiment permanent with only Conservatives voting against.
Cllr Nemeth also took on the issue of the city failing in its statutory duty to clear weeds from the pavement. The weeds have overrun City pavements since Labour unilaterally banned the use of weedkiller in the city in 2019 - without putting any alternatives in place. The issue has impacted many different groups: people with a disability, mothers with prams, elderly people, tourists and even dog owners with big vet bills from barley shards getting lodged in pet’s paws. Cllr Nemeth’s questions revealed that the City Council has only been employing three members of staff to manually weed 900km of City Pavements, with two manual strimmer’s stuck on order in France. The matter was not only picked up by national press, including Radio 2, but also international media as well and served as a warning to other councils of poorly thought through policy.
Cllr Nemeth also took responsibility for the Conservatives’ scrutiny of the joint Labour-Green development plan for Brighton & Hove ‘City Plan Part 2’. At the beginning of the pandemic, in the first virtual meeting held, Labour and the Greens pushed forward a joint plan to build on 16 precious urban fringe sites, including Benfield Valley and Whitehawk Hill, in direct contradiction to their manifesto commitments a year earlier. Through investigation Cllr Nemeth produced evidence showing that the Council was in fact well above its Housing Targets and that there was no need to build on the urban fringe at all. Cllr Nemeth’s work in this area have energised many groups to campaign against the Labour-Green proposals, including the Benfield Valley Project and Sussex Wildlife Trust.
Through determined work, Cllr Nemeth also helped expose the contents of the Coalition-style ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ between Labour and Greens – a secret document signed in 2019, which both parties refused to release to the public. This memorandum, which was eventually leaked to the press after pressure, showed Labour and Greens has agreed not to oppose each other on many key council policy areas such as housing, while at the same time still allowing the other to claim Opposition status for the purposes of expenses. The official opposition at the council (currently Labour) has not been doing the job residents are paying them to do.
Cllr Robert Nemeth said that after 8 years, the time was now right for him to step away after two terms so he can spend more time with his very young family and work on his businesses. We thank him for all he has done for the city, wish him well and hope one day he will back!
