Ashfield District Council chairman makes move to extended the amount of time petitioners and councillors can speak

Councillor Lee Waters, Chairman of Ashfield District Council's Standards and Personnel Appeals Committee has kept a promise he made in December. 

He has extended the amount of time lead petitioners can speak to Council and ensured more councillors can speak up. 

The rules have been unchanged for over 20 years, leaving residents increasingly frustrated.

At the council's Annual General Meeting last week, Cllr Waters successfully moved significant changes to how the Council deal with petitions. 

Cllr Waters claimed that it showed that the Council were "…transparent and willing to listen to act on what residents tell us."

In December, residents signed two major petitions against the Council's enforced local housing plan. 

At the meeting, councillors and residents complained about the way the council received the petitions. 

This was something that Cllr Waters, who is in charge of council meetings, promised to rectify.

At the meeting last week, the amount of time a lead petitioner had to present their case to Council was increased from five minutes to 10. 

The amount of time to debate the petition was increased from 15 minutes to 30.

The amount of councillors who can speak per petition was increased to 10 per meeting.

Cllr Waters told the meeting: "It's critical that we, as a Council, are completely transparent and show we listen to residents. 

"What we're doing this evening is showing that we are doing exactly that. 

"By extending the time that Councillors can respond to resident's concerns and reducing the time limit to respond to three minutes – we're showing that this Council has listened to residents' concerns. 

"It will allow for at least 10 Councillors to respond to petitions so that residents can be satisfied that members are listening to their concerns.

"The rules that this Council work under have to be rightly changed as we listen to residents. 

"The constitutional rules were set about 30 years ago of course when this Council was a very different place. 

"Now, the Ashfield Independents run the Council – we want to ensure that every single concern can be addressed. 

"Following concerns expressed in December – we have acted swiftly to change the way we run meetings."

 Only one Labour Councillor – Hucknall's Kier Morrison - failed to support the move to improve debate and transparency.