Solihull Labour Party is pushing the Conservative-run Council to hold important meetings on the Covid-19 pandemic in public and to share information and reports on Covid-19 in the public domain.
Solihull Council set up a Covid-19 Outbreak Control sub-Group in the summer to bring leading Councillors and Officers in the Health sector together, and it is understood that this Group is meeting regularly. Labour welcomed this move to help to combat the virus so that Councillors and Officers can be better informed – after all we were not happy that the Council’s Health and Adult Social Care Scrutiny Board did not meet for nearly 4 months earlier this year when it should have been scrutinising what the effects of Coronavirus were in the Borough when the numbers of people testing positive for the virus were at its peak.
However, this new Covid-19 Outbreak Control sub-Group is meeting behind closed doors and neither the minutes of their meetings or the reports and information discussed by the Group are in the public domain.
Chair of Solihull and Meriden Labour Party Nick Stephens said “I wrote to Councillor Ian Courts, the Leader of Solihull Council, on 25th September asking for this Group to meet in public, and also for him to look at improving the nationally run Test and Trace programme that was letting local people down, but have not received any response to my request. Then on 15th October I formally tabled and asked a question at a Decision Making Meeting to the Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care and Health Councillor Karen Grinsell asking why this Group meets in private and asking her to arrange for it to meet in public, but again received a very unsatisfactory response. She said that some of the information the Group receives and discusses is made public at a later date, but this is not the same as local residents being able to watch the meetings and view the information online before the meetings take place, which is the case for all other Solihull Council meetings.”
All parties want us to succeed in tackling this virus and ensuring the number of Solihull residents that are infected by it are an absolute minimum, but that does not mean residents should be denied their right to know what is going on. Solihull residents are entitled to know what the situation is regarding Covid in their Borough, and we publicly call on the Council to act in an open and transparent way by holding future meetings of the Covid-19 Outbreak Control sub-Group in public and to make the reports that go to the meetings of that group open to public scrutiny with immediate effect.
