One question you may be asking yourselves before voting in the local elections is, “How well did my councillor do?”
There’s no single way to measure that, but I’m going to look at some of the key numbers today.
I haven’t included Phil White (formerly Lab, Caerau) for obvious reasons and also David Owen (formerly Ind, Nanymoel) following his disqualification.
Similarly, Mary Hughes (Ind, Nantymoel) and Christopher Davies (Ind, Caerau) haven’t been included as they’ve only been councillors for a year or less.
Cabinet members will be counted separately from backbenchers and the opposition as Cabinet positions are full-time and can’t be compared like-for-like with the rest of the council.
The attendance figures cover the date range of 9th May 2017 to 20th April 2022 and are available on the Bridgend Council website. It only counts attendance for county borough council meetings, not town/community councils.
Here’s an explanation of what was counted:
- Present – The number of meetings where the councillor was expected to attend (virtually or in-person) and did so.
- Absent – The number of meetings where the councillor was expected to attend but didn’t. High numbers here are bad.
- Apologies – The number of times a councillor has apologised for being absent. This doesn’t tell you much other than how courteous they are. I’ve included apologies for absences due to council business which usually aren’t included in the total figure.
- In Attendance – Meetings where the councillor wasn’t expected to attend but did so anyway, either because they were interested (professionally or personally) in what was being discussed or for another reason. High numbers here are probably “good” but they haven’t been used to calculate the attendance rate.
Attendance is just one measure of how “hard” a councillor has worked during the term, but it shouldn’t be considered the best measure by itself.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons why a councillor may not attend meetings. These may include:
- Illness, medical treatment and appointments.
- Maternity and paternity leave.
- Bereavement and family leave.
- Care commitments.
- Education (such as taking exams).
- Poor internet connection during virtual/distant meetings.
- Being called away at short notice for another reason.
“Clashes with work” would be borderline. It’s more acceptable if they were, for example, a doctor or nurse and need to prioritise that to continue practising. It would be a struggle to justify that in any other scenario but will occasionally be unavoidable (i.e. if council meetings are rescheduled at short notice).
There’s no “ideal” percentage of meetings a councillor should attend. A councillor can have 100% attendance but if they don’t contribute in any meaningful way then it’s just as bad as not turning up at all.
In order to put the numbers in perspective, school pupils with attendance rates below 90% are marked out as potential truants by local education authorities (the council). The median average attendance amongst backbench and opposition councillors over the last term has been just 80.2%.
If councillors aren’t turning up to – for argument’s sake – at least 75-80% of the meetings they’re expected to (I’m being generous because of the Covid pandemic), then it ought to raise questions about how committed they’ve been to the role and ought to play a factor in whether they deserve re-election (if standing again).
Starting with the Cabinet.
Unsurprisingly, there’s high attendance across the board. Given these are full-time salaried roles it’s to be expected, though five Cabinet members would foul of the 90% attendance benchmark set for schools.
Apologies were given for absences most of the time, though if they want to set an example it should be close to 100%.
This is where things start to get disappointing.
I’ll get the good news out of the way first. Labour’s Jon-Paul Blundell – standing for re-election in Cefn Glas – has the highest attendance rate of any councillor, with Coity’s Independent councillor, Amanda Williams, following not far behind.
Generally speaking, there are more Independents and Conservatives in the top half of the attendance figures than the bottom half and the better-performing Labour councillors are usually there because they’ve been committee chairs or have held another civic office like Mayor or Deputy Mayor at some point during the term.
Now the not so good. There are 11 councillors with attendance rates of under 70%, which is completely unacceptable. I’ve decided not to mark any individuals out for criticism because there could be issues we’re not aware of. As said earlier, there may be perfectly good reasons for low attendance and we’ve been going through a pandemic after all. But if you’re going to miss a third of your scheduled meetings you should probably consider whether holding elected office is for you.
Maybe it points towards the need for a culture change or a change to how meetings work and are scheduled. Maybe it means some councillors just don’t pull their weight. You can make your own minds up.
What makes things worse is that some at the bottom of the attendance “league table” also had very poor rates when it came to giving apologies for absence too.
