Topic: | New Councillors & new Lead Members | |
Posted by: | Andy Murray | |
Date/Time: | 10/10/14 15:27:00 |
The difference is this case was that Ed Mayne was made a Lead Member as a novice Councillor, and in becoming so, in theory had the power to make unilateral decisions. In practice, no-one expects a Lead Member to make decisions on local CPZs, which were, and remain, the province of local Area Forums, for good or ill, and no-one with any sense would do so without expecting to be severely criticised. The only reason that the Council's Constitution didn't forbid him from taking the liberties that he did, is that the Constitution's authors couldn't conceive that any Lead Member would be so irresponsible. The fact that this was the first time ever that a Lead Member had chosen to decide on a CPZ was bad enough, but that the Lead Member should also ignore the unanimous decision of the local Councillors, forget a petition of 2,101 names that he himself had signed off on, not show up to his own call-in, and (it was subsequently revealed) to have had meetings and much correspondence with interested parties, none of them in public, then ignore the most objections ever received to a scheme that he created without any empirical data, (while never submitting what he did use to public scrutiny), is an absolute scandal. And he wasn't even a local Councillor, representing instead a ward in Isleworth, so the voters affected by his decision have never had a chance to endorse or criticise his actions via the ballot box. So it's not about the parking, it's about the abuse of process, which, as we see, continues. |