October’s meeting of Bradley Stoke Town Council’s Planning Committee, which was inquorate because only three of its eight members turned up, has submitted the following consultee response to South Gloucestershire Council for each of the seven planning applications it was due to consider:
“Bradley Stoke Town Council has ‘No Comment’ to make on the above mentioned planning application.”
Draft minutes of the (non-)meeting explain:
“Councillors agreed that, as a response was required from the town council, to all the above planning applications, before the next town council meeting, a ‘No Comment’ response to all the above planning applications should be lodged with SGC Planning Department.”
Of the five absent committee members, three are recorded as having submitted apologies (Cllrs Keir Gravil and Tony Griffiths were the ones who didn’t).
Agenda topics that had been scheduled for discussion at the meeting included an “update on Road Safety concerns on Bradley Stoke Way”.
The Council’s standing orders permit any Councillor to nominate a substitute to attend a meeting.
Another attendance fiasco was narrowly avoided at Wednesday’s Full Council meeting (16th November) in Bradley Stoke.
By the time the meeting was supposed to kick off (7:30pm), only four or five of the fifteen Councillors had arrived. Mayor Ben Walker was seen pacing around the outside of the Jubilee Centre trying to summon more members on his mobile phone.
The meeting needed a minimum of eight Councillors to be quorate.
By the time eight Councillors had been found and the meeting got underway at 7:55pm, the assembled audience of around twenty members of the public, press and representatives of local organisations had been waiting for nearly half an hour.
One Councillor present, who is understood to have just got home from an intercontinetal trip, seemed to be in danger of falling asleep towards the end of the three hour meeting and had to be reminded to raise his hand to vote.
What an absolute joke these wasters are! Obviously there was no personal advantage to be gained from the submitted applications!
Do we really need this unnecessary tier of local government?
Most councillors it would seem have their own agenda and its not one which obviously Bradley Stoke features very highly.
Its time local government was apolitical and councillors were peoples representatives and not political representatives