Parish Council Meetings - have they always been like this?

[harman]

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How will going to a PCM get you a house?!!

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I used to be a Parish Councillor...

You know that they have bugger all power really, especially with regards to planning.

I'm a parish clerk! so have to attend these meetings but I am the only one in the room being paid to be there, so that always make me feel better.

Are your meetings really formal Furball? At ours it was all "through the Chair" and "Madam Chairman". My mum is also a parish councillor and they use first names.

oh my god, when I worked as a junior reporter on a weekly paper I had to go to these things. Absolute hell sitting through them, and even worse listening to the councillors' petty spats. The less power they had the more important it seemed to TALK REALLY LOUDLY over each other and bring up arguments between factions that seemed to go back generations.

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Not really formal no, but everything is proposed by and seconded by etc.

I used to be a parish councillor and left because I kept falling asleep in meetings! The chairman used to think it perfectly acceptable to let the meeting run until after 11pm on a Monday night. The others were all retired so obviously it never entered their heads that i'd need to be up early for work the next day and it always proved a bad start to the week.
They also felt it necessary to go through every single piece of correspondence that had been received by the PC since the last meeting.
And they were all nuts!!

the borough council always send planning applications to the parish for the councillors/and the public to view and comment on. The parish wouldn't be able to say how they wanted the houses to look say, but they could comment that maybe they weren't in keeping with the parish. Whether the borough council take note or not is a different issue.

The parish council cannot AFAIK be picky about who might live there or whether or not somone has left their van on the road. (like noone else does ever!!!) but obviously the housing association have rules and regs of their own for such things.

Well harman, you'd only be allowed 3 minutes at a set point at the beginning of the meeting here .

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