Post-Covid: Calls for Harrogate council meetings to remain virtual to cut travel and improve access

As lockdown started in March last year the government brought in emergency regulations which allowed councillors to take part in debates from their homes and unless an extension is agreed, these rules will expire on 6 May.

During this time Harrogate Borough Council has held more than nine months of remote discussions but just weeks before the pandemic struck councillors voted against an idea to livestream meetings from the authority's headquarters because of the costs involved.

Liberal Democrat councillor Chris Aldred said he believes the coronavirus has now brought about a necessary change of thinking and that meetings - either held remotely or live-streamed from the council's headquarters - should become the new normal.

"The public have a fundamental right to view these decision-making meetings at a time when it is convenient to them and not just to councillors or council executive officers," he said.

"The fact that, occasionally, decisions made by local councillors have a huge public interest is justification in itself for the continuation of the streaming of council meetings.

"This should definitely be debated further by councillors in the light of our shared experiences of doing online meetings over the past year. I am going to suggest to the council leader that an all-party working group of councillors and officers be set up to look further into these issues."

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Councillor Aldred was the one who previously put forward the idea to livestream in-person meetings before it was shut down by other councillors who claimed it would have been too expensive.

The costs were not initially made public but later revealed as ranging between £5,000 to nearly £48,000.

Councillor Richard Cooper, leader of the Conservative-run council, previously said he could not justify spending the money when the council chamber was closed and because of predictions that the numbers of viewers would have been low.

He also argued it was important to differentiate between the costs of installing equipment to livestream from the council's headquarters and the costs of holding remote discussions using software.

Councillor Cooper said he now believes there should be a place for both remote and face-to-face meetings when coronavirus restrictions are relaxed to cut travel and reduce the council's carbon footprint.

“I hope that we can all get back to something that approaches a normal life as soon as possible but not everything should return to how it was before Covid-19," he said.

“There is a place for face-to-face meetings but there is also a place for remote meetings because we need to think about the dead time taken travelling to meetings, the expense of holding those meetings and, most significantly, the harm done to the environment in the travel to and from meetings.

"It is not difficult now to imagine a world where people spend less time commuting and where there are fewer vehicles on the roads spewing pollution from their exhausts."

By Jacob Webster, Local Democracy Reporter