Report from last nights meeting of Bury Council’s Executive Committee.

Last night was the regular meeting of Bury Council’s Executive Committee, this is the meeting that brings together the eight Labour Executive members, together with the two opposition leaders as non-portfolio members. As part of the ‘tour’ of the Borough, we were in Tottington, though no members of the public came to see our tour….

Social Media and IT
We agreed a new policy framework for the Council’s use of Social Media (Facebook, Twitter etc etc). All worthy in itself, but I feel that the policy was lacking a strategy, and said so at the meeting. It would be good if the council did make best use of Social Media to communicate (both ways) with local people, and hopefully this policy is the start.

I also raised a question on why the Council continues to refuse to allow links to Councillors websites, twitter feeds, facebook pages etc etc either in their email footers, or on the council’s little web profiles we each have. Surely in this modern age we can do this? I think the Labour council agreed to think about it.

Medium Term Financial Strategy
We considered a draft of the Medium Term Financial Strategy for the Council over the coming years. As with all public sector organisations the Council needs to reduce its expenditure over the next few years. I raised a point about the announcement in the press this week that Bury was going to take up the Governments offer of a 0% council tax rise in April (yet another occasion when the first Councillors hear about things is an press announcement, not a democratic meeting). The impact of this (very welcome) news has not yet been worked into the strategy.

We closed the meeting with a minutes silence to mark the very sad death of Cllr John Byrne over Christmas. John had been a member of the Executive or its predecessors for probably most of the last 30 years.

The papers for the meeting are here. Any questions please ask!

Tim