At the meeting of the Southport Single Area Committee held on 5th October 2005, The Southport Party requested that Committee Agendas and Minutes should be made freely available to everybody, not just our elected Councillors, on Sefton Council’s web site. We want ALL people in Southport to be able to view these documents without hindrance and that the pages should be kept up-to-date. The Council has, perhaps reluctantly, agreed that this will be done with effect from December 2005 in accordance with the “Democratic Renewal priority outcome”.
Now that one Department of the Council is set to act more democratically, the others should also be required to comply. As a start, therefore, we have written to the Director of Finance encouraging him to publish, on the Council’s website, the various public documents relating to his department. We can all therefore expect very soon to receive free and unhindered access to such documents as the Revenue Budget details and decisions, Capital Programme and perhaps even the Review of Charges and Actual/Revised Estimate comparisons. Currently the only financial documents available online are the District Auditor’s report and the Statement of Accounts.
The Southport Party wants you to have full knowledge of ALL council news and activities if you so wish. The ‘good’ news you now read each week has been selected for publication by Sefton’s ‘press officers’ who will obviously be under instructions to filter out the ‘bad’ news before speaking to the local newspaper editors.
Recommendation 17 of the Scrutiny and Review Committee of 18th October now requests the “assistant chief executive (communications) [to] develop a strategy and planned activity schedule to publish positive stories from the parking services section”. This is more akin to George Orwell’s 1984 “Thought Police” than to the actions of an open and trustworthy Local Authority. We believe that a properly informed and interested electorate will better be able to choose the most suitable candidate at the local elections.