Is Northumberland about to become Margaret Thatcher’s Dream Council in Reverse?

Margaret Thatcher was a secret supporter of open government. Well, open local-government, anyway. One of the very first things she did as an MP was to introduce a Private Member's Bill to open council committee meetings to the press, thus shining a light on these hitherto murky gatherings. It was the Public Bodies (Admission of the Press to Meetings) Bill in 1960, a year after she was elected MP for Finchley. She introduced it in her Commons maiden speech, which is something no MP has done before, or since, for a Bill which became law. She said then: "The public has the right... to know what its elected representatives are doing”

Since May 2017, Tory run Northumberland County Council has become more secretive, ever more murky and less open by halving the number of meetings it holds and housing a single party cabinet to keep their secrets all too themselves as much as possible.

As the Conservatives in the County move towards the end of their third year in office having delivered diddlly squat apart from fairy tales, they have decided to part the ways with democracy altogether and go ever more secret by embracing a new corporate model that is distinctly the ‘Liverpool Pathway’ of Local Government, the probable end for the need of its shady Audit Committee and lead to the other aim of Margaret Thatcher, the privatisation of services through a centralised Board of Directors holding its own limited companies to ransom on cost, (or is that returnable profit through underspend on budgets that can be siphoned off by the Central Committee). A completely different operating model to Advance Northumberland.

A number of the current Tories on the County Council have dabbled in departmental privatisation previously with the former Castle Morpeth duo of Cllrs Sanderson and Jackson presiding over a refuse service undertaken by the contractor Cory who under the specification it worked too, tipped their waste at Lynemouth and as we have seen on TV the County Council will now have to cover the costs of the duo’s debacle.

By harnessing the model they are sending to their single party cabinet for ratification they will effectively bypass Margaret Thatchers ‘admission to the press of meetings bill’ as technically the companies they propose to set up are not committees of Council and will operate under Companies House rules.

Its been said to us that the Leader of Council has become an ardent fan of time travel who loves reading history books and he’s now trying to take us all ‘Forward to the Past’.

http://committeedocs.northumberland.gov.uk/MeetingDocs/45991_M9494.pdf