LETTER: Tory support for cabinet system?

This paper for over a year now has rattled the cage of the cabinet at Horsham District Council under the leadership of Cllr Dawe and his deputy Helena Croft. The paper has consistently called for more accountability and transparency yet these calls have fallen on deaf ears amongst the cabal that run our local council. Why has West Sussex County Council leader Louise Goldsmith signed the Free Speech Charter but Cllrs Dawe, Croft and Vickers continue to refuse to?

Perhaps Cllr Dawe and the rump of his Tory colleagues, who one would expect would all take the Daily Telegraph - always regarded as the in-house journal of the Tory party - should note its leader column (5.2.15, p21) when the Telegraph wrote that the cabinet system in local government is: ‘inherently anti-democratic. Decisions are often taken behind closed doors by a small group of favoured burghers, whose conclusions are then rubber-stamped by the full council. The local press… struggles to find out what is going on, as its reporters once could under the old open committee system.’

If the vanguard of the Tory press is calling for the abolition of the cabinet system and the return to a committee system then with only weeks to go to May 7th, Tory councillors seeking re-election should be asked by the voters if they would seek to abolish the existing cabinet system and replace it with one where each back bench councillor has a much greater role in decision-making in the council.

Perhaps the WSCT could conduct a poll of all aspiring candidates and publish the results.

ANDREW LOBLEY

Wordsworth Place, Horsham