South & West Fife C
ouncillors have been denied the opportunity to publicly quiz officials on the need for a booking system at Dalgety Bay Recycling Centre.
Local Conservative Councillor Dave Dempsey said “Council Committees exist to allow councillors to make decisions and to scrutinise the work of the Council. The imposition of this booking system affects the public in South & West Fife, so the obvious place to scrutinise that is our Area Committee. Accordingly, I asked that this motion be tabled for its next meeting.
“Committee requests that the relevant Spokesperson and senior officers attend the next meeting of the Committee to facilitate scrutiny of the decision to reintroduce a booking system at Dalgety Bay Recycling Centre”.
The response read
“… your proposed motion is not competent nor appropriate for the above committee to process. The running of the recycling centres have been contracted out to FRS together with the supplying of the associated services. In terms of the contracted position regulating this arrangement, operational decisions rest with FRS, and these provisions require to respected as do the individual positions of the contractual parties. In terms of governance, there is no remit for the above committee to cover otherwise”.
FRS is Fife Resource Solutions, which operates as Cireco. It was spun out from Fife Council a decade ago. It is wholly owned by Fife Council and the reason it exists is that it can do things that a council can’t. That’s good but it also provides services that the Council would otherwise provide and those services ought to be as open to scrutiny as any other.
This isn’t the end of this matter. It’s scarcely even the beginning. If the rules really bar us from asking these questions in public then the rules need changing and the 75 Fife Councillors need to push through those changes. If the contract between Fife Council and FRS needs rewritten then it should be rewritten.
It may be that a booking system is the answer to the problems at Dalgety Bay Recycling Centre, though I’m unconvinced, but such changes should be discussed in advance, not imposed by diktat. This is a service to the public, ultimately paid for by the public, and the public’s elected representatives should be part of any decision to reduce it.