41 tweets

We win! Woo hoo.

Having spent several years telling bloggers and journalists to get lost, councillors have been told by Eric Pickles to welcome bloggers, journalists and anyone else who wants to film, record and tweet council meetings.

Bring your cameras, phones & recorders to council meetings this week as more cuts budgets are set:

I’m one of the many blogging journos who’ve been told by councillors to stop recording and tweeting council meetings over the past few months.

West Lancashire borough councillors were among them. This is an amusing little update on the “West Lancashire tries to stop me from recording a council meeting” story:

As reported last week, (Tory) West Lancashire borough council planned to hear (and very likely agree) a new constitution item to ban members of the public from recording council meetings. The item was due to be heard at the council’s 23 February meeting.

This all came about because in December last year, I recorded the selfsame rotters at a council meeting when they were trying to justify an expensive council-buildings refurbishment project. They took a very dim view of my committing that item to MP3.

“The constitution does not permit the recording of meetings and the ability to do this is in the gift of the council,” the council intoned in reports released before the 23 February meeting.

By the time the meeting rolled around, though, the council had been forced into a squealing u-turn by its very own government – and us, I like to think.

Last Wednesday, Eric Pickles’ man Bob Neill sent out a strongly-worded letter to all councils in which he observed that it was:

“essential to a healthy democracy that citizens everywhere are able to feel that their council welcomes them to observe local decision making and through modern media tools keep others informed as to what their council is doing…”

and that he’d been concerned to hear:

“recent stories about people being ejected from council meetings for blogging, tweeting or filming… I want to encourage all councils to take a welcoming approach to those who want to bring local news stories to a wider audience. The public should rightly expect that elected representatives who have put themselves up for public office be prepared for their decisions to be as transparent as possible and welcome a direct line of communication to their electorate…” The full text of the letter is here (PDF 52KB).

Caught badly short by this, West Lancashire Tories had to move fast to remove their “we’re going to ban public recordings of our meetings” from their agenda by the evening of Wednesday 23 February.

As I understand it, they went for the “we’re out of time to hear this” defence – they skipped over the offending item and deferred it until the next meeting.

The Labour group challenged this – they wanted the Tories to debate their now horribly off-message “we’re going to ban recordings” item in full. As you would. I certainly would have. You can read more from the Labour group here.

I expect to see the item about the public recording and tweeting of meetings returned to the council agenda for the next council meeting – although the spirit of it will have changed, of course. It will no longer be a report in favour of banning the public from recording council meetings. It’ll be a “come one, come all and bring your cameras, phones, mates, picnics, etc,” type item. Suppose this is Pickles’ way of devolving anticuts criticism. Interesting.

Anyway. Barnet Unison and the Barnet Alliance are asking everyone who plans to attend Barnet council’s final cuts meeting on Tuesday 1 March to turn up with cameras, phones and recorders.

The union reports that council has banned people from filming council meetings in the past. Unions and locals want to take the opportunity to test Bob Neill’s new rules. Sounds fair. Let’s do it.

Update 28 February 2011:

Liberal conspiracy (via David Hencke) is reporting that the leader of Barnet council will only consider filming requests from “respectable media.” We all know what “respectable media” means – that’s media politicians can lean on.