Green Party

Green City Councillors are celebrating Tuesday night’s City Council meeting where their motion proposed by Green leader Claire Stephenson[1] calling for a more open and accountable City Council [2] received unanimous approval.

Councillor Stephenson proposed the motion because she thought the current process to scrutinise executive decisions was bloated and inefficient. Passing the motion is a first step towards a Green vision of a Council fully open to community participation. In the short term it means that Councillors from all parties will now be working together to improve the system for scrutinising the executive, without creating additional expenditure.

The motion was one element of a very successful night for Norwich Greens, who also achieved unanimous support for another motion calling on the Council to adopt open source software [3] [4] where appropriate; which they said often costs less, is more innovative and is easier to fix and adapt than standard licensed software.

Councillor Stephenson commented “Taken together, these motions demonstrate the kind of direction a Green run Council would take. Open source software is democratic computer programming and opening the Council to greater scrutiny would end the undemocratic practice of working groups making decisions behind closed doors. Having several smaller scrutiny panels would enable councillors to specialise in different areas of the council’s work and effectively hold Council officials and the ruling party to account.”

Samir Jeraj, deputy leader of the Green Party City Councillors [5], seconded the Open Council motion. He said “In these tough economic times we need innovative new ideas like these to show how the Council can continue to improve its service whilst spending less money. You can't make good decisions without good scrutiny, and now more than ever it is important that the Council’s decisions are good and fair.”

The second motion, regarding open source software, will mean that the Council may start using open source alternatives to licensed computer programmes, such as Firefox and Open Office. Councillor Ruth Makoff [6], who proposed the motion, said “There could be significant savings for the Council, and the idea that we could use local IT workers to maintain computer programmes the way we want them rather than writing a big cheque to a distant corporation every year will resonate with a lot of people.”

The Open Council motion specifically called for the scrutiny committee to be broken up into several specialist panels to increase the involvement of Councillors and others in scrutinising decisions that affect Norwich residents. This will enable more people to get involved, but also ensure Councillors can become more specialised and trained in one particular area, making them more effective. This is already how many other Councils including Norfolk County Council operate.

Notes:

[1] Claire Stephenson is a representative for Nelson ward and is leader of the Green Group on Norwich City Council. She has been a Councillor since 2006.

[2] The motion reads:

‘Council,

RESOLVES,

(1) to increase the involvement of councillors in scrutiny by establishing an appropriate number of committees or panels to fully cover the work of the Council;

(2) to ask the Head of Legal, Regulatory and Democratic Services to convene a meeting of the Chair and Vice Chair of the Scrutiny Committee, scrutiny officer, representatives of the Corporate Management Team, and leaders of other political groups to explore ways of embedding scrutiny throughout the City Council.

(3) any changes to be made without additional expenditure.’

[3] The motion reads:

‘The recently published "Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use: Government Action Plan" builds on existing policy for government departments to use open source software wherever it offers the best value for money and states that "where there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non open source products, open source will be selected on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility.

Council,

RESOLVES to ask the Executive:-

(1) as part of the Strategic ICT Review agreed in this year's budget, to consider whether any of the software currently used within the Council could be replaced with better value for money open source alternatives;

(2) to review policy and options on ICT procurement including:-

• how to ensure that systems procured are able to adapt to unforeseen changes and advances in technology;
• making it a requirement to assess the opportunities to use open source software, including the potential benefits, in a Total Cost of Ownership assessment;
• the opportunities to the local economy that arise from using software that can be modified by local IT workers rather than being restricted to modification by large companies elsewhere;
• whether the upgrade and exit/replacement cost of current proprietary systems could or should be included as a liability on the relevant Council balance sheets.’

[4] Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is available in source code form for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software. Some open source software is available within the public domain. Open source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. (Taken from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software)

[5] Samir Jeraj has been a Green Party representative for Town Close ward since 2008 and is the deputy leader of the Green City Councillors.

[6] Ruth Makoff has been a Green Party representative for Wensum ward since 2008

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