Making Crawley council meetings more accessible

Democracy is about more than just voting for your representatives. For democracy to be effective you need a whole infrastructure around it, including clear rules around how the system operates, mechanisms for accountability, and for voters to have access to the information they need to decide how to use their vote.

The information voters need is potentially endless, which is why in principle all public bodies in a democracy should default to maximum transparency.

Since regaining control in 2014, this is something we have tried to enhance at the council, starting by making changes to the rules to enable greater opportunities for members of the public to attend meetings and to ask questions.

However, to really make council meetings accessible we knew that we needed to get them online, not only making it easier for people to follow the meeting but providing a verbatim account of proceedings.

Unfortunately, the cost of retrofitting the old chamber proved prohibitive, but with the new Town Hall we had the chance to build the right equipment in as part of the fit-out and councillors lept at the opportunity.

As chair of the council’s Governance Committee, yesterday I was pleased to be able to propose to Full Council procedures which will implement the streaming of meetings online as soon as possible after the local elections.

It’s the culmination of nine years’ of work to improve the accessibility and transparency of democracy in Crawley and finally delivered to you by your local Labour council.