Last night Worcester City Council moved from having a Leader and Deputy to one where we have two Joint Leaders drawn from the two political groups. The Conservatives put forward Marc Bayliss the Labour Party declined to put a candidate forward.
It’s a travesty that a great deal of time is spent discussing who gets to go to some external meetings at which the Leader is not even allowed to make decisions. The real issues are the cost of living crisis and climate biodiversity emergencies – we should be talking about how we can create a more sustainable city, how we can support local residents to escape fuel poverty next winter.
Politics has become toxic, cynical and binary, we want to put the concerns of residents and local issues front and central. Watching parliamentary debates and sometimes debates in the council it is clear that the way we do politics needs healing and re-doing. We refused to take sides because we have a mandate from residents to deliver on promises made to them.
The council should be focussing on the priorities of residents and prosperity of our city, we believe that lasting and real change is delivered in a collaborative and not an adversarial way of doing politics. Our residents deserve it.
The council is in no overall control. The two biggest parties are some way off reaching the magic 18 required to control the council with Conservatives on 15 and Labour on 12. We are fortunate to have the committee system – this involves all councillors in deciding council policy. By law committees must be politically balanced. When we held the position of balance of power before we were keen to share that power and involve all political parties.
Despite having the politically balanced committee system and sharing out the committee chairs fairly we have until now always had the thorny issue of who should be Leader and Deputy Leader. In previous years we have solved this by having a Labour Leader and Conservative Deputy Leader and we’ve also had a Conservative Leader and Labour Deputy Leader. In the meeting I thanked both Adrian Gregson and Marc Bayliss for showing the such maturity in previous years to take it in turns doing the leadership / deputy leaderships roles.
What are the Joint Leaders’ responsibilities? If Labour had put someone forward they would have taken it in turns to represent the council in external meetings like the LEP, the Town’s Board and the county Leader’s Board. The council Joint Leaders have no formal decision making powers – decisions are made by full council and in the various committees. Who gets to be a Leader means a great deal to some but for the Green Party it matters rather less. The bigger prize for us is to have a collaborative council where we use the strengths and talents of all councillors. We need to get the balance right. Opposition, challenge and criticism is important to make good decisions but when opposition is overdone and things get tribal it’s possible that we descend into a time consuming toxic opposition for its own sake. If we allow that sort of toxic, us and them, Punch and Judy style council to emerge I’d say that the only people that will lose will be Worcester’s residents.
Unfortunately, despite changing the constitution to allow for Joint Leaders, it was not possible to persuade the Labour group to nominate anyone to represent their group as a Labour Joint Leader.
Final outcome of the meeting was therefore as follows:
In more detail:
Mayor: Adrian Gregson (Lab)
Deputy Mayor: Louis Stephen (Green)
Joint Leader: Marc Bayliss (Con)
Joint Leader: {Vacant} (Lab)
Policy & Resources Chair: Marjory Bisset (Green)
Policy & Resources Vice Chair: Lynn Denham (Lab)
Policy & Resources Vice Chair: James Stanley (Con)
Environment Chair: Andy Stafford (Con)
Environment Vice Chair: Karen Lewing (Green)
Communities Chair: Jabba Riaz (Lab)
Communities Vice Chair: Owen Cleary (Con)
Health & Wellbeing Chair: Lynn Denham (Lab)
Health & Wellbeing Vice Chair: Stephen Hodgson (Con)
Place & Economic Development Chair: Lucy Hodgson (Con)
Place & Economic Development Vice Chair: Robyn Norfolk (Lab)
Planning Chair: Chris Mitchell (Con)
Planning Vice Chair: Jill DeSayrah (Lab)
Licensing Chair: Richard Udall (Lab)
Licensing Vice Chair: Louis Stephen (Green)
The Green Party refused to back just one party instead we have pushed for a power sharing council where all parties are involved.