Move taken to stop full council meetings running over

Members from both parties spoke out about the matter at Thursday's governance and ethics committee.

In March councillors spent a gruelling six and-a-half hour session setting the annual budget, with a further fatiguing forum following in April which also went deep into the small hours – meaning not one of the city’s 60 councillors saw their beds until well after 3am.

The council’s chief operating officer David Pattison told the meeting: “This report is essentially on some tweaks to the rules of debate to ensure that we keep to time at full council meetings. A couple of things that we think would be helpful is to ensure that – as with all the other reports for questions and motions – there is a right to reply for the leader in relation to his report. But again, keeping that time very tight.

“Another aspect is in relation to questions asked at meetings. One was about extension time. Ultimately, meetings are guillotined at three and-a-half hours. However, sometimes there might be a need to finish an item off rather than defer it to the next meeting.

“The question that was asked was should we simply have one extension to go beyond the three and-a-half hours? Regarding the leader’s report and winding up, the issue was raised that there is no right of reply. The previous rules had no time limit and provided merely for the report followed by questions and answers by councillors. The new approach is to have the leader’s report – ten minutes – and opposition response of five minutes.

“It is recommended that in line with the practice for other reports, questions and motions, there is an amendment to introduce a two-minute right of reply to the opposition’s responses from the leader.  This will last no more than two minutes, meaning that the leader’s report item is now 17 minutes,” he added.

Conservative group leader Councillor Wendy Thompson said: “I’m very conscious of the fact that apart from health, finance and family, time is one of our most precious commodities and it is so wrong to actually impose on people’s time when it is not useful and not productive.”

Chairing the meeting, Councillor John Reynolds said: “As a compromise, can I propose that we do eight minutes, five minutes and two minutes,” which members agreed to after taking a vote.

Mr Pattison went on: “We can clarify in the rules by stating that a meeting be allowed to continue beyond three and-a-half hours. For the avoidance of doubt, this can include a motion to extend by a certain amount of time, in which case further motions could be brought forwards to extend the time if the earlier extension proves insufficient and the meeting wishes – by vote – to continue beyond that extended time.

“Alternatively, it can just be that we adopt the practice of simply extending the meeting and not extending by a fixed amount of time, but rather give an indicative time,” he added.

Councillor Reynolds said: “I’d like to propose that we have a time limit that is a specific amount of time, and also an item limit. And that that is the only thing we do and don’t extend it beyond that.”

The proposal was seconded by Councillor Thompson who added: “It should be one item and one set amount of time, as people have jobs to go to. I’m really pleased that as councillors we are all coming together on this item.”

Mr Pattison said it would be written into the constitution to only extend by a fixed time.