Polling day

Here are three things that I think about district and county councillors. (Well, two and a half; the last couple are linked.)

1. Political parties have no place at the council level. I guess you could argue the toss a bit at the county level but ultimately councils spend the money they're allocated and allowed to collect via council tax on providing services to us. They organise rubbish collection, they repair the roads. The literature that I had through from the parties that have been campaigning here made no mention of large or small government, the virtues of public versus private services, there was no manifesto. If county councils are genuinely political bodies, that's disingenuous at best.

I voted today for a guy called Nick Cotton. I sometimes see him out on his own collecting litter and during the floods, he was out, knee deep in water, clearing the drains (successfully) with his hands. I would have voted for him regardless of party (up to a point).

I think having politics at the council level can only reduce the service that we receive from our councillors. It certainly complicates it. If you are a district councillor and your constituents don't want yet another superstore, you should represent them, not the party line on free enterprise. 

2. Why don't we pay councillors? They do a job, which, for a county councillor, can easily be thirty hours a week. Our MPs get paid, why not our councillors? As you can imagine, a time consuming job like that means the candidate has to be either financially independent or retired in order to do the job effectively. It hardly gives a broad or representative range of councillors.

3. Once maternity/paternity leave is over a lot of couples have one partner at home looking after their children. The cost of childcare makes this a bit of an obvious decision. But once their children are at school, those stay at home mums and dads have four or five hours a day in which they could do a paid, part-time job, like being a district or county councillor, if that appealed to them. There are a lot of bright, qualified people slowly going mad during those primary school years: let's use the ones who fancy the job.

Incidentally, while  I worked on a contract at Bradford and Bingley in the mid-nineties, they had three or four women in their IT department who worked, I think, nine-thirty to two-thirty, Monday to Friday. What I remember mostly about them is just how much work they did during the five hours they were in each day: as productive as some of the full time staff, I suspect. 

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