Frivolous questions waste public money

9.40.27pm BST (GMT +0100) Sun 22nd Jul 2007

In responding to a formal written question by the Council's cabinet member with responsibility for finance, Liberal Democrat Councillor Sam Crooks, Council Leader Isobel McCall has discovered that nearly 500 hours of staff time, costing £16,500, has been spent on searching out and making available five years of correspondence on growth from around the Council. This costly research was undertaken as a result of a demand by the Tory and Labour Parties at the June Council meeting.

Liberal Democrat Councillor Isobel McCall said: "Some staff have been working full-time for weeks on compiling all this correspondence. They have been prevented from doing their normal job. Not a single resident has benefited from the 500 hours spent on this pointless exercise."

Isobel is so concerned about the waste of time spent on implementing this frivolous motion that she has called in the District Auditor to look into what has happened and to ask if the Auditor considers this to be a good use of public money.

She continued: "I fully support councillors' rights to have access to information within the Council. However, councillors have a duty to spend public money wisely. Surely they must consider the financial and service implications of supporting frivolous political motions which require council staff to do lots of work for no good reason?"

The work was started by Tory Councillor Brock's "witch hunt" over the interpretation of one sentence in a seven-page letter signed by the Chief Executive. When the Performance Review Panel met on Wednesday to consider the correspondence that had been compiled, they did not raise a single objection to any of the hundreds of letters that had been written by council officers and cabinet members.

Isobel McCall added: "This is not the first time in recent months that staff and cabinet members have put considerable resources into providing lists at the whim of opposition councillors. In response to several questions from Labour Councillor Brian White, many, many hours were spent in compiling lists of meetings that we have all attended over the last year. I doubt if anyone read the lengthy lists provided and this pointless exercise has also diverted staff away from important work. I hope the District Auditor will provide some guidance on how the Council should deal with such requests in the future."