Tuesday 29 June 2010

Voting info

My motion at todays Constitutional Issues Committee was rather overtaken by the more media friendly story of the Labour Leader's request for more pay.

However I did manage to get committee members to agree to something that, if pursued properly, will give citizens in Liverpool more information about their Councillors.

At the moment you can find out about how your MP voted as every vote is recorded in Hansard.

You can't however do the same for your councillor in Liverpool as, unless there is a specific "card vote", which is the exception, votes are just recorded as numbers for,against and abstaining.

I believe that citizens should be able to find out how their representatives voted.

So today I had a motion at the Committee establishing this principle and asking for some work to look at how this might be done (there is more than one way of recording votes and then publishing them)

Apart from some discussion about mechanisms, people seemed to accept the principle so hopefully there'll be some progress on this.

I did actually start on this before the election and for me this is a piece of unfinished business.

If you want to see the phrasing of the motion it's on the Liverpool City Council website -www.liverpool.gov.uk - in the section with all the meetings and agendas under Constitutional Issues Committee.

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