28 January (Part 2) - Hocus-Pocus
I decided a couple of weeks ago that I
should attend a wider variety of council meetings. Total attendances have dropped significantly following leader
Teresa O’Neill’s assault on scrutiny by reducing the number of those meetings by more than half.
The resolution has not started well. I was unable to attend last night’s General
Purposes Committee meeting because it was the first time it had been possible to
visit a close relative who came close to death at the hands of the NHS.
(Consultant was sick, no one else knew what to do.)
All I have been able to do is read through the Agenda. Do senior staff really
put their right hand in, take their right hand out and then turn around? Could
that be what it is all about?
The reason
that paragraph caught my eye is because of the persistent stories (if two
sources can be persistent) leaking from Watling Street to the effect that
senior staff are paid off
and re-employed on a consultancy basis almost immediately.
With no confirmatory evidence, names are best kept beneath the proverbial
hat but the expenditure must Tot up to quite a lot. Maybe that is why the
subject came up at General Purposes; not that the resolution above does
anything to stop the practice.