At the 1 October full council meeting, independent councillor Birgit Miller put forward a motion that was, on its face, fairly uncontroversial. It called for a publicly accessible online register of decisions from external regulatory bodies (the Local Government Ombudsman, the Information Commissioner, the Care Quality Commission, the social housing regulator, and tribunals), along with annual reports on recurring themes and lessons learned.
The idea being that residents and taxpayers ought to be able to find, in one place, a record of how the council has been judged by outside bodies. If you want to know whether the council has been pulled up by the Ombudsman for how it handled a housing case, or whether the Information Commissioner has issued a decision notice about a freedom of information refusal, you shouldn’t need to know where to look.
Labour voted it down.
Deputy Leader Jacob Taylor acknowledged the proposal was “not unreasonable” but argued that creating new databases and websites wouldn’t be worth the officer time involved given competing pressures. The motion had backing from Green and Conservative councillors, as well as independent councillor Samer Bagaeen, but it wasn’t enough.
Some of that information is technically available already. The council’s democracy portal publishes agendas, minutes and reports, but finding a specific regulatory decision requires knowing what you’re looking for and navigating a search that rewards persistence. The motion was proposing to make it easy on purpose.
It’s worth watching whether the argument comes round again. The previous King Alfred planning committee debate and the council homes solar power scheme both turned on questions of how clearly the council communicates decisions that affect residents. Transparency about what external bodies think of the council’s conduct is a different category, but the underlying question is the same.
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