Overview presented by Councillor Barrie Hargrove, Cabinet Member for Communities and Safety, and Stephen Douglass, Director of Communities, followed by an opportunity to give your views with feedback sheets.
Minutes:
Councillor Barrie Hargrove, cabinet member communities and safety, outlined the proposals for the changes to community councils. These would be going to council assembly on 30 November 2016 for agreement. The changes needed to be made in light of the continuing grant cuts that had been imposed by central government.
As part of a consultation about community councils in 2015, a large number of people had said that the meetings should be less formal, while continuing to give local people a possibility to feed into the council’s decision making process. Under the new proposals there would continue to be five community council meetings a year. At two of these, there would be formal, statutory decisions made at the start of the meeting, such as allocating Neighbourhoods Fund and Cleaner Green Safer monies. The other three meetings would be solely engagement focused. The new proposed process for making non-strategic parking and traffic amendments was as follows:
1. The proposals would be publicised with notices and letters being sent to affected addresses for important schemes, and ward councillors being notified.
2. Ward councillors could then ask for items to be discussed at a community council meeting (two out of three ward councillors would be needed for this).
3. After discussion at community council, representations could be made by the community council to the cabinet member for environment and public realm who would be the decision maker about whether the proposal would go out to statutory consultation.
4. There would then be a second chance for the public to make comments as part of the statutory consultation. By law, the council had to publish and respond to the comments received.
5. The cabinet member would then make their decision taking into account the comments received during the statutory consultation.
Addressing concerns raised about accountability, transparency and a potential centralisation of power, Councillor Hargrove said that the new set-up would give local councillors a larger advocacy role. It would also free up time for discussion and engagement at the meetings. The cabinet member would take the comments made by community council into consideration when making these non-strategic decisions. Councillor Hargrove cited the recent Quietway example, where the cabinet member had taken their decision after receiving detailed feedback from the community council. He emphasised that these changes would not be made, if there wasn’t a need to make savings on officer time and by delivering meetings in a different way. Stephen Douglass, Director of Communities, explained that this was part of making engagement with the council’s decision making process less formal. There would be a dedicated engagement officer for traffic issues in his department.
The meeting also discussed the potential impact of the proposed ward boundary changes and the introduction of some two-member wards on thresholds, how much would be saved under the proposals, and whether making decisions at community councils would not be more efficient. The meeting heard a suggestion to devolve budgets to community councils.
In response to comments about problems with the Southwark website which sometimes made engaging with the process more difficult, Councillor Hargrove said the website was currently being worked on and the new version launched before Christmas. In terms of the boundary changes, there would have to be some reconfiguration of community councils. Councillor Hargrove also explained that there was a proposal for decisions on CGS and Neighbourhoods Fund underspend to dealt with by the cabinet member in consultation with ward councillors.
The chair then invited attendees to fill in survey sheets about what they would like to see in future at community councils.
The meeting took a break from 8.30pm to 8.40pm.