18 July (Part 2) - Fair’s fair. Maybe
As you will understand, @tonyofsidcup is still unable to go ahead with his proposed road safety petition because
Bexley Council reserves the right to
ignore it on any pretext they might invent at the time. He recorded a
summary of the unacceptable situation in a letter to Council Leader Teresa O’Neill and sent me a copy
for publication.
I told him that I would prefer to keep it under wraps until I saw what the
Leader had to say about it as that way BiB readers can better see both sides of
the argument. Tony persuaded me that playing totally fair is not how Teresa
works and reminded me that it was her who, according to police records, first contacted them
with a request that I be arrested for the heinous crime of “criticising Councillors”.
Maybe two wrongs do not make a right but this is what @tony wrote. It seems fair
enough to me. Will I be able to say the same for his reply? If he ever gets one.
Dear Teresa,
I have raised the issue with you in your role as the chair of Bexley’s
Constitutional Review panel - but given the lack of enthusiasm you displayed
in that correspondence, I feel that I ought to reframe the issue as a
council leader matter, and make it public.
Bexley’s Constitution appears to say that a residents’ petition with over
2,000 signatures is entitled to a debate and a vote by the full council.
This is not the case in practice. For example, in 2011, a petition mounted
by the Bexley Action Group, asking the council to limit executive pay,
collected over 2,000 signatures, but was denied a full-council debate and
“buried” in a committee.
Examining council rules regarding petitions, one finds two separate
documents, pp. 55-56 of “Codes and Protocols”, Part 5 of “Bexley
Constitution and Codes of Governance”, and a four page document named
“London Borough of Bexley Petitions Scheme”. The two documents contradict
each other on key points - for example, one says that 2,000 signatures
“would be sufficient” to trigger a full council debate, the other says “may
be debated by the full council”. They leave out essential details - for
example, allowing a petition to be dismissed as “inappropriate”, without
defining “inappropriate”. Where definitions are provided, they are sometimes
bizarre: for example, a “full council meeting” is “a meeting that all
councillors can attend”.
In correspondence regarding a FOI request, Bexley’s Director of Finance and
Corporate Services wrote that “the council has no criteria for officers to
follow when administering a petition”. A senior council officer -
incidentally, the same one who dismissed the 2011 petition, still in his
role - identified as the contact person for proposed petitions, refused to
assist with a petition, claiming that it was “hypothetical”.
Bexley’s Petition Scheme is broken. Is it broken on purpose, to let the
council leadership dismiss unwelcome petitions, and discourage
would-be
petitioners in the first place? I think Bexley residents deserve to know.
Will you commit to bringing transparency to the Petition Scheme rules, or
pretend that there is no problem? It’s time to step up, Council Leader.
Regards,