Questions on Notice
A period of up to 15 minutes is allocated for the asking and answering of questions. This may be extended at the discretion of the Chairman with the agreement of the majority of those present.
To deal with any questions on notice from Members of the Council, in the order in which they have been received.
Minutes:
Question Submitted by Councillor P. M. McDonald
“Now that it would seem the Government is seeking a softer Brexit does the Leader feel that would be in the interest of Bromsgrove residents?”
The Leader responded that there was still a great deal of work to be done on the Brexit negotiations before anyone would be clear as to the impact. However, as Leader he assured Members that he would be watching the negotiations with interest to ensure that any impact on Bromsgrove could be managed and mitigated wherever possible.
Question submitted by Councillor M. Thompson
“During the General Election campaign I spoke to many postal voters who did not receive their voting slip in time to vote. In addition, it was well publicised that many Bromsgrove based voters were given polling cards with addresses ending in Redditch putting many people off voting.
Does the Leader agree with me that shared services have gone too far when mistakes are made that rob the people of Bromsgrove of their democratic right to vote? Wil he confirm how many people could not note because of errors caused by his party’s cost-cutting and what he intends to do to ensure this never happens again?”
The Leader responded that in terms of the error in the supplementary poll cards, it was important that Members appreciated that all of the addresses of electors and their polling stations were correct; the error was that the constituency was printed incorrectly. As soon as this error was discovered the Elections manager issued a press release and contacted all election agents to advise them and the Elections Manager had apologised. Officers were in discussion with the software provider into how this error had happened and would be implementing further checks to ensure it did not happen again. However, it should have been picked up by officers in the proof read; it was not and the Election Manager apologised for this.
In respect of postal voting the Leader advised that in Bromsgrove Constituency nearly 13,000 postal votes were sent out to electors, this was via Royal mail Business Advance in conjunction with Royal Mail Postal Voting Team. This was done in two tranches with our officers travelling to Slough (which was where the postal votes were printed) to quality check the issues and wait to see the votes being loaded on the Royal Mail vans. Out of the Postal Votes issued 87% were returned by close of poll on Election Day. Over 300 were also received which had been delivered to the Polling Stations.
The Leader provided details of the process when a Postal Vote was either lost or had not been received, explaining that under legislation, a replacement could only be issued from four working days before Polling Day up until 5.00 pm on Polling day. It was confirmed that 46 packs were re-issued with not more than 3 re-issues in any one polling district; this is monitored by officers to ensure that there ae no area based issues that ... view the full minutes text for item 21