Notes from Nairn ward business meetings set to be made public
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NOTES from council meetings which were criticised by Nairn residents groups for lack of transparency will now be made available to the public.
Councillors in Nairn will be sharing action notes from ward business meetings (WBM) online after requests by Nairn Residents Concern Group (NRCG) and two community councils (Nairn River and Nairn West and Suburban) to make these available.
In the past, information shared at these meetings have been obtained by resident’s sending Freedom of Information requests to Highland Council.
Ward business meetings – as opposed to area committees which are meant to be the council’s formal forums for decision-making – are informal meetings chaired by the ward business manager where all the councillors representing one ward regularly meet.
Whereas minutes and recordings of area committee meetings are publicly available, discussions at ward business meetings are not currently published.
Now, these action notes will be made available online at nairn.scot/wbm after a group of Nairn councillors looked into options to share the information.
Nairn and Cawdor councillor Paul Oldham said: “We were asked by community councils to be more transparent and make these notes available so we hope this will be a step in the right direction.
“The information ended up being in the public domain in any case as for every ward business meetings somebody would issue a Freedom of Information request. However, this is consuming in terms of time and resources for the council. If we are in a situation that this document is being put in the public domain, it should be in the public domain anyway.”
Fellow councillor Barbara Jarvie said she was surprised that what was being said at the meetings was not shared with the public.
“I would rather go with transparency,” she said. “It’s more open and at the end of the day the public of Nairn should be informed that we are working for them.”
However, Nairn Provost Laurie Fraser was not supportive of the move, suggesting it would impact what council officials might say at such meeting. “You need to have some sort of confidentiality in the council for the way that we work,” he said.
A spokesperson for NRCG hoped for more in future, with agendas also being published to give residents the opportunity to have their say in the decision-making process.
“As a matter of record, community councils must publish their agenda and papers one week before their meeting and if they do not all hell breaks loose,” they said.
“At ward business meetings, councillors are agreeing major decisions on local development planning, local place planning, common good assets, evictions and consultation, placed-based investment and ward discretionary funding without any agenda/papers being made available to the public or the ward members seeking views from the community councils who are recognised as the statutory local voice of communities.”
Cllr Oldham added there was no plan to publish agendas, stating they sometimes change on the day of the meeting.
