Gone are the days when anyone submitting a specific question to the Council's General Scrutiny Committee could expect a specific answer. Instead, if you choose to submit a question, as I did last week, you are fobbed off with a generalised 'Briefing Note'. This Briefing Note provided an opportunity for the Council to parade more sound bites, rather than respond in detail to comments from members of the public submitting questions on the agenda in the usual way. The topic on the agenda was the all-important 2019/20 Budget and Medium Term Financial Strategy. The Council asks its citizens to 'Get Involved' in decision-making, but by the actions of the Scrutiny Committee recently, it has treated this process with disdain. All citizens of the County have a right to honest and transparent governance. Such citizens have a duty to hold the Council to account, especially if the Council avoids hard questions and proposes instead a repetition of its own propaganda. Regardless of how future questions from members of the public are going to be handled, I, for one, shall continue to send them in, even if some Councillors might think the whole process is a waste of time.

Victoria Wegg-Prosser

Breinton