Letters
I see no ‘slackers’ at the county
SIR - In your article on county councillors' expenses (Chronicle, July 3), you quoted the opinion of Mrs Christine Melsom that a register of attendance at full council and committee would quickly identify "the hard workers and the slackers". In fact it would do no such thing.
Attendance at committee meetings is a very small part of a county councillors' workload. For example, the number of official meetings I attend a year is 15 (six council, five children and young people's select committee, and four pension fund panels).
But on top of that there are meetings of the Winchester HAT (12 a year), the road safety council (4), briefing sessions on council issues (12), special meetings on technical matters (4) and political group meetings (8).
Most councillors are appointed to several external bodies as the county council representative.
This means for example in my case, meetings of the South Downs Joint Committee (16 a year), the Fareham and Gosport Foster Panel (12), the West of Waterlooville Forum (4), the Fort Nelson Liaison Panel (2), the Fair Oak Sandpit Consultative Panel (3), the Winchester District Strategic Partnership (6), The Winchester Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership (2), the Winchester Action on Climate Change (6) and the Youth Justice Council (3). That is another 54 meetings.
Next come attendance at parish council meetings which is essential to keep in touch with issues affecting one's county division.
With five parishes meeting either once a month or eight times a year, that means another 48 meetings.
All county councillors are members of a political party and therefore need to keep in touch with their local political branch. That means another 20 meetings.
In between all these meetings there are volumes of e-mails arriving every day that need to be answered.
This is quite a workload, but many county councillors work a lot harder than I do.
I would be very surprised if there are any slackers on the county council.
Frederick Allgood,
county councillor,
Winchester Southern Parishes.
9:26am Thursday 17th July 2008
Print 
Email this 
Comment
What are these links for?
If you liked this article and would like to share it with others on the web who might be searching for good content we've made it easy for you to do it.
At the bottom of all articles, you'll see links to six sites. These sites - commonly called 'social bookmark' or 'social news' sites - have large communities of web users who share and rate interesting, useful and fun things on the web.
Clicking the links will automatically add the address of the story you are reading to one of these sites, letting you share it with others. Each site will ask you to register to share stories. Registration is free and once a member, you can store, recommend and search for stories that interest you.
More on Digg
More on del.icio.us
More on Furl
More on reddit
More on NowPublic/
More on Yahoo!
