Hello! If you’ve been following the campaign to allow council meetings to be held online, here’s an update and action.
Currently, local councils in England cannot hold their meetings remotely. This was temporarily relaxed during the covid lockdown in 2020/21 but that ended in April 2021 when the temporary statutory regulations expired.
You may have seen our open letter last year to Robert Jenrick, then Secretary of State, in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government asking him to allow councils to keep the option of holding their meetings online. This was signed by over 200 councillors who are also parents.
A consultation was also held in the summer of 2021 but we haven't seen the results of that yet. Unfortunately a court case in November 2021 then ruled that only a change in primary legislation would allow meetings to be held virtually.
So now a new petition, created by Lawyers in Local Government and the Association of Democratic Services Officers (ADSO) asks the government to create Parliamentary time (i.e. emergency legislation) to agree a change in the law to allow councils in England to meet
remotely if they wish.
Why is this important?
We think that running statutory council meetings exclusively in person, in the middle of the pandemic and when a councillor’s average age is 60, doesn’t make sense.
Holding meetings remotely was also a huge step forward for democracy: modernising our system and improving participation of underrepresented groups like women and parents of young children.
It led to benefits such as:
- Increased attendances at remote meetings by both councillors and the public
- Significant cost savings for some authorities arising from much less travel to meetings (plus environmental benefits of less travel)
- A better work/life balance for councillors
- Improved equality of access to meetings for all and opening up opportunities for more people to stand for election as councillors
- More transparency and openness for the public to see council meetings
As Jackie Weaver has said "It is completely unreasonable that we are having to cancel council meetings or hold them only in emergencies for goodness knows how long. Where is democracy?”. We think YANBU Jackie Weaver.
Please note: This doesn’t force councils to have everything online (sometimes in-person meetings, as some of you rightly pointed out on our first post about this, are preferable) - it just gives councils the choice to.
Let us know if you signed the petition.
We've got more on women in politics coming soon!
MNHQ