Richard Baum

Last week I wrote that the Leader of the Council had opted out of attending an Overview and Scrutiny panel on Job Evaluation / Equal Pay, in favour of going to a swanky dinner in Manchester. I was angry about this, but confident that at the very least the meeting could be rescheduled so that employees could get some reassurance over a process which could see many of them lose thousands in salary.

Today the Leader has once again left me feeling extremely angry and disappointed, failing to agree a date for the revised meeting, and again depriving staff of their right to a public explanation. I have been working with the Chair of the Scrutiny Commission to make sure that this meeting happens. I know that the Chair has been forthright in his requests to Council officers and the Leader that he make himself available. This has not happened, and now the opposition to the Bury Conservative Council have had to resort to drastic measures to get this heard in public.

A motion has been signed, calling for an extraordinary meeting of full Council on this issue. This means that the Leader will be forced to come to a public hearing and answer questions on this issue.

It is a crying shame that it has come to this. Whilst it is obviously vital to get effective scrutiny of the process, a meeting of full Council is only fractionally as effective as a Scrutiny Commission would have been. The environment is nowhere near as suited to proper questioning, and the confrontational layout of a chamber with opposing members facing each other is not conducive to information gathering like the inclusive environs of a Scrutiny Commission are.

That this issue needed forcing at all is a damning indictment of an absent Leader who has shown nothing but a lack of interest in responding to questions which need answering.

Maybe I’m naive about politics and how the Council works, but I just don’t understand how the Leader of an organisation that is, for whatever reason, shafting a quarter of its staff, can just disappear from view and seemingly go out of his way to block scrutiny of the process.

He does himself and the Council as a whole no favours at all by not being utterly open to questioning, and nothing but transparent in his desire to share information. It is not good for anyone that we in the opposition have to strain every sinew on behalf of the staff to get the Conservative ruling group to answer questions about this process.

This isn’t about bashing the Tories. We don’t want to question them to make them look silly or to apportion blame for the outcome, which was not entirely anyone’s fault. We want answers about the process the Tories implemented, and about how we can all make it better for the staff.

I am incredibly frustrated that the Conservative response is to bury their heads in the sand and not answer. It took weeks to get the answers I posted on here yesterday. Weeks of uncertainty for staff, weeks of frustration for Councillors, and weeks of feeble inaction by the Tories.

This issue is massive. It affects thousands of people, leaving them helpless at a time when the wider economy is making things worse. Our role is to help them, and we can’t because the Conservatives led by Cllr Bibby are making the job of helping so much more difficult. They should genuinely be ashamed of themselves.

We don’t want a party political fight, we just want open answers. The consistent, inexplicable delays just makes me shake my head with dejection. It’s crazy and it makes me wonder what the hell I’m doing with it all. What is the point of trying when every avenue is blocked?

I hoped very much that yesterday’s answers marked the start of some new openness from the Leadership and the officers carrying out their instructions. Today’s ongoing unwillingness by the Leader to submit to the most basic scrutiny has convinced me that it wasn’t, and now the opposition has had to invoke this drastic step of a full Council meeting to try and get the answers we should have had long ago.

Rick