Sutton Councillors Missing In-action
What is expected of a Councillor? Honesty, integrity, casework… turning up to meetings?
What happens to an area when well paid and well connected Councillors have the worst attendance record among their peers?
The answer's simple, you get the mess the poor folk of Hackbridge, Carshalton and St Helier have been left to deal with when the Wandle Valley Councillors, their local representatives, are missing in-action!
Missing in-action: Two of the three Councillors had the lowest attendance record among all their peers at their Local Committee Meeting.
Children are expected to attend school, employers expect their staff at work, why is it acceptable that a 66% attendance record is part and parcel of being in the 9 person strong, Lib Dem ruling clique of St Helier, Wrythe and Wandle Valley?
Digging into the data, Wandle Valley has the unfortunate accolade of being represented by 2 councillors in the bottom 3 for attendance of their Local Area Committee!
They're only asked to attend 4 face to face meetings a year with residents and answer their questions.
Does an attendance record of just 66% justify their generous pay cheque? With a combined salary for their 4 year term at approximately £120k. When does that become squandered public money? Attendance really matters, here's why.
Residents expect their Councillors to attend influential meetings and be on top of the things that matter locally.
An example of why attendance matters is what happens when being absent leads to profit being put before people. When the massive, 2018 Felnex development in Hackbridge was underway, locals demanded that planning conditions were scrutinised. So the things promised, like fair parking, green spaces and housing density were kept. When Councillors go missing, locals lose out.
‘[The] NDG requested that these meetings were set up to be able to update the group and local residents. The Planning Committee acknowledged this request and made it part of Barratt’s planning conditions. Local Councillors have been invited to attend all the meetings and only once has a Wandle Valley Councillor attended’. as of the 2018 statement from the NDG, at which point, the site was well under way.
Original designs for the development included features Councillors could have fought for.
You'd hope that picking up £20k a year on top of a day job or someone retired, helping themselves to £10k as a top up to their pension might want to get stuck into local issues and turn up to meetings as a sense of duty?
When residents wonder why developers and the Council's commitments to fair parking, bus routes, road maintenance and open air cinemas never materialised they should asked the absent Councillors why they were missing in-action.