Turning quiet council corridors into a chance to get under the skin of big issues
By Fiona Callingham, Local Democracy Reporter, The News, Portsmouth
For any local democracy reporter the council’s summer calendar fills them with both relief and dread.
The gradual winding down of meetings coupled with the fact that about 99 per cent of councillors and council press officers seize the opportunity to go on holiday, can leave an ominous gap in your diary.
However, it is also an opportunity for some breathing space and allows time to look into some of the issues that might have been put on the back-burner during busy weeks.
For example I was able to delve more closely into the situation of two families in Portsmouth who had contacted me about not having a home of their own, and being forced to sleep on floors and sofas of friends and relatives.
In short they were part of the growing number of the hidden homeless within the city. Some requests to the council revealed alarming social housing waiting list figures. This then worked as a longer read — something I could not have done during a typical week.
Working with residents in Portsmouth in this way was also more viable during this time. I was able to go out into the city and vox-pop people on issues that were a staple of council life — namely parking, HMOs, the sea defences and, of course, bins.
This was both useful and refreshing because you can sit in hundred of council meetings and never really know how the decisions being made within those four walls would actually affect people on the outside. And it wasn’t always in ways you would expect.
All of this isn’t to say that contact with councillors was completely cut off over the summer. With Portsmouth’s current political make-up, a Lib Dem administration ruling over a weak Tory majority, there is always something to write about. For instance the controversial move to shut down council-owned company Victory Energy by the Lib Dems led to plenty of sniping from the Tories.
And now that council meetings are starting to appear again on the calendar it’s about working out how to maintain some of the story-finding techniques I applied over the summer and making sure that as a local democracy reporter all the relevant bases are covered, which, I think, doesn’t always mean purely sitting in on council meetings.
