Issue - meetings

Report of the Cabinet Member Corporate Services.

The item was introduced by Councillor Jon Walklett, Cabinet Member Corporate Services. The report set out the findings of a Cabinet Member working group set up to review the Council size and electoral cycle. Following three meetings of the working group and a member seminar, the group concluded that they did not wish to make any recommendations regarding initiating a review of Council size at this stage. A similar argument applied to the community governance review where their recommendation was that further work should not be progressed at this stage.  Regarding the future electoral cycle, the group could not reach a consensus. In order to facilitate a debate by Council he proposed that recommendation 3 in the report should request Council to resolve not to commence the process to move to a four-year electoral cycle. In proposing this recommendation, he highlighted to members that the proposed annual savings of £26,000 p.a resulting from the move to four yearly elections would not kick in until 2018. He indicated that those members on his side of the chamber had considered all the pros and cons set out in the report and had put the needs of the people of Cheltenham before party politics in deciding to give their support to maintaining the current two-year cycle.

Councillor Garnham requested that a separate vote be taken on each part of the recommendations and indicated that members would be requesting a recorded vote on recommendation 3.

Councillor Seacome, speaking as a member of the working group, said that he had originally been in favour of a two-year cycle but he had been convinced by the arguments that a four-year cycle would be more advantageous. He could not see any justification for the frequency of borough elections being different to those for parliamentary elections. He considered that the by-election issue was almost an irrelevance in view of the number of by-elections that had been required in recent years.   He was convinced that the four-year cycle would enable better planning and would be better for officers supporting the implementation of Council policy. The move to a four-year cycle would also provide savings for local parties as well as savings for the authority. The issue of member continuity had been raised but he felt that if the right candidate had been chosen they should be able to slot into their work on the council fairly easily. He encouraged members to have a full debate on this issue and not be constrained by party politics.

In the debate that followed a number of members spoke in support of four yearly elections.  Councillor Garnham, as leader of the Conservative group, had been a member of the working group and he felt it would encourage a greater turnout at elections and address the current decline in voter turnout by giving the public something to vote on as parties set out their four-year manifesto. He encouraged members not to sit on the fence and to take what he saw  ...  view the full minutes text for item 9