Well that wasn’t quite how I was expecting helping out a Clerk by attending an in-person Parish Council meeting would end!
Last Tuesday, I left the comfort of my own parishes and went to the first ‘in-person’ Parish Council meeting I’d attended since 5 March 2020. I was masked and hand sanitised and I took my own papers.
I happily sat at the back of the room to avoid contact with the Councillors, had a quick chat with the Clerk at the end and left.
That’s where the fun began. On Thursday, I was contacted by NHS Track and Trace and ordered to self-isolate because someone I had been in contact with had tested positive for COVID. This ‘someone’ turned out to be the Clerk of the meeting on Tuesday evening, who despite being ‘double jabbed’ was really quite poorly (but fortunately not hospitalised). In no way was it the Clerk’s fault. In fact I lay the fault solely at the Government’s door.
The repercussions of the Government’s refusal to allow an extension to the virtual meeting provision (which ran out on 6 May) which the sector was granted last year have been wide-ranging. Some Councils have had to meet in car parks because their hall was too small – or already booked by vaccine clinics – or outside their halls or in Weymouth’s case – on the beach – often taking pot luck at the vagaries of the British weather!
The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government appears to think that their approach of throwing money at the County Councils is fine and that all Town and Parish Councils will get some of it – this isn’t the case! Much of that funding was ring-fenced for projects specified by MHCLG and certainly none of it was given to Town and Parish Councils to pay for bigger halls or specialist IT systems for broadcasting meetings. The Minister – Luke Hall – also suggested that Councils could stream their meetings so that members of the public could attend from home while Councillors met in person. This urban-centric suggestion is so laughable it is sad. So many meetings take place in draughty halls which are lucky to have electricity – let alone a stable broadband connection! And how on earth these hybrid meetings would be run without expensive specialist IT equipment would be great to understand.
The loss of the virtual meeting provision was all the more galling because the Welsh Assembly managed to allow an extension – so much for Mr Johnson’s ‘levelling up’!
What are the repercussions in my tale?
Well firstly, a competent Clerk is now laid low with COVID, can’t do his primary job, and the members of the family he lives with have to self-isolate.
Then there are all the Councillors who attended the Parish Council meeting on Tuesday evening. They now all have to self-isolate which has an impact on their work and employers. The Council is a diverse mix of professionals and younger retired individuals. The professions include a senior manager in an Oxford University Medical Team, a member of the Senior Leadership Team of a large secondary school, and a specialist engineer together with a number of younger retired Councillors who are actively involved in supporting the community including helping to run the local food bank.
Then there’s the wider impact on my personal Parish work. For instance, I have had to re-arrange the Parish Council meeting which was scheduled for Wednesday because my Chairman didn’t want to hold it without me and we can’t hold it online. I have also had to change some personal, long-standing, arrangements.
And if I then test positive, my whole household is put into self isolation and the beginning of the school holidays is put on hold.
All because of the Government’s refusal to extend the virtual meeting provision – which I may add, they managed to do for Parliament.