Tim's Council Diary: Getting Balls Rolling

What is fun is when you see womething you've been pushing for some time start to really get going.

Having secured the agreement of Council last week to progress the work on bringing in a more inclusive Commitee system, the work to do so has got running. The Working Group membership has bneen agreed, and the first date is in the diary (12th July). The Group will need to agree the shape we are looking for, but I hope that people will share the vision agreed at Council: a dynamic, streamlined, inclusive committee system, with a limited number of committees. From there, we can start looking at forming that into a new way of working, and the detailed constitution changes to make that work...

During the week I had a briefing on the perfomance reports for the ast year that will be going forward soon to Scrutiny and Cabinet (clearly, a review of the work of the last adminsitration, but shows the progress against targets) and a "forward look" leadership meeting with Susan Priest and Connor McConville (Jim would have been there, but was on emergency Grandad duty).

On Wednesday evening I had no meetings at any Council (something of a rarity) so took the opportunity to... watch the Overview and Scrutiny Committee online, discussing Folkestone Town Centre leveliing up plans amongst other things.

Webcasting our meetings is really important as it allows many more people to see them and engage, and although auto-subtitling is not perfect, it's also not terrible. It makes me feel really old when I realise I helped push to get Council meetings webcast back in 2009 (by seconding a motion at Full Council - HOW is that 14 years ago?!

Next week I'm off the the LGA conference in Bournemouth, as are Jim and Connor. It'll be 3 days of talking to Councillors, Cabinet Members, Leaders, Chief Executives and Officers from Councils across the country. The idea is to share news about what we're each doing, seek best proiactice, learn from each other, and get to know people from other councils that may help us deliver more, better, for Folkestone and Hythe. For the record, we're all taking the train...