Reform councillors in Nottinghamshire have opted to reduce workplace stress by making June a rest month.
Like the councillors in Kent, the ones in Nottinghamshire have decided not to bother doing any work. Even this pace of doing nothing was too much for one Reform councillor, Des Clarke (Newark West), who stepped down less than a week after being elected.
The controlling Reform group for Nottinghamshire County Council have taken the unprecedented step of cancelling all committee meetings. Meetings cancelled include the Senior Staffing committee (4th June), the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Economic Prosperity committee (6th June), Health and Wellbeing board (25th June) and Nottinghamshire Pension Fund committee.(26th June). These were scheduled as shown.
The committee meetings calendar for June now displays no meetings at all.
They have not made any attempt to explain the reason for all the cancellations to other councillors, council officers or their constituents.
The Broxtowe Alliance Party have highlighted this on Facebook and said, “We would be happy to work with them but they cancelled our meetings – not a great start”. They also mentioned, “we ( Broxtowe Alliance) have a County Councillor who received the email to say the meetings had been cancelled- no explanation”. Independent councillor Steve Carr has also highlighted the cancellations.
Ben Grey.(Green Party) commented on Facebook that, “Just in basic allowances this lot are trousering £643k a year between them, with the leader on £55k and portfolio members on £42k a piece. Month two in the job and they’re cancelling meetings?”.
There has been no comment from the Nottinghamshire County Council Reform group who have control of the council.
Many have been making excuses for them. One suggested that all incoming parties did this. A simple check of the meetings calendar over similar periods following local elections shows this not to be true. Reform show no interest in explaining themselves. It was suggested that they have cancelled. Several people tried to cover for them by implying that all councillors were the same. Again, simple checks available in the diary and committee reports show the reality that local councillors in the past undertake a lot of work to ensure the functioning and management of the large amount of business that local councils are responsible for.