Rather than Cabinet members answering their own questions when challenged at council we have meeting after meeting of councillors just reading officer replies.
Reform UK gained a seat from the Lib Dems in Gosport.
Democracy is rarely convenient, and it doesn’t always deliver the outcome you hope for. But that is its strength, not its weakness.
Reform will continue to promise the earth with absolutely no plan to deliver it, and Labour will continue to tax, tax, tax.
As a deprived borough, we must maintain focus on delivering essential services in line with our agreed priorities. Residents expect and deserve this.
What training councillors on leadership across parties has taught me about how Conservatives win, or lose, local elections.
New unitaries will inherit high risk services, complex services alongside tightly constrained budgets.
Defending democracy means ensuring elections are credible, consequential and properly supported.
And we agree that the PCC role should not be immune from reform, but by scrapping the one form of genuinely accountable governance, the public’s voice in its local force is lost along, it would seem, with your local police force.
In Bristol and Brighton and Hove their record has consisted of hypocrisy and mismanagement.
If reorganisation becomes an exercise in scale for its own sake, producing larger authorities, remoter leadership and weaker local voice, communities will feel even further removed from the decisions that shape their homes and increasingly disenfranchised.
Children starting school have new demands placed on them both socially and in terms of learning. Reading requires them to focus closely on small details, and also to move their eyes.
Instead of being ‘Open’ they are making more and more financial decisions behind closed doors.
The clearest example of that drift is in their new policy to introduce a 100 per cent Council Tax Premium on second homes. Something we Conservatives refused to do.