Camden Town Hall

• I AM still a relative newcomer to Camden Council. There’s much that’s impressive.

We get great support from hard-working officials; the committees I sit on are chaired by the public spirited Cllr Richard Cotton and Cllr Awale Olad; and the council has used technology to enable meetings to continue despite social distancing.

But full council meetings too often are more performance art than substantive debate.

Monday’s themed “debate” on the crucial topic of Covid-19 and the lockdown was a case in point, (Labour blocks review of Camden’s waste contract despite filthy streets warning, November 24).

I don’t envy the role of the mayor, Cllr Maryam Eslamdoust. She has a difficult time dealing with warring backbenchers (and that’s just on the Labour benches). But it does seem rather absurd to hear salaried cabinet members making repeated interventions.

It’s as if Jack Straw, Gordon Brown, and Margaret Beckett hogged the questions at Tony Blair’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

It’s especially grating when interventions are either panegyric puff pieces of the “can the council be even more fantastic?” variety, or used for party-political polemics about national government policy rather than discussing things that we, elected Camden councillors, actually control.

At the end of Monday’s meeting we had little time to debate a crucial motion on Camden’s rubbish collections (the topic on which I receive by far the most correspondence).

The motion, proposed by my Conservative colleague Cllr Steve Adams in Belsize ward, called for an independent panel to conduct a “full external review”, including considering a return to weekly bin collections.

Labour forced through a wrecking amendment which replaced all but five words of the original motion, convincing Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green members to unite against them, despite the Lib Dems’ doughty opposition to restoring weekly bin collections.

As councillors of all parties we simply want to represent our constituents effectively by scrutinising the council’s work.

The Labour leader, Cllr Georgia Gould, should look again at how our debates are organised and consider whether they further the goals of democratic transparency and accountability in which I know she believes so passionately.

CLLR HENRY NEWMAN
Conservative,
Frognal & Fitzjohns ward