Council told to ignore ‘keyboard warriors’

Criticism on social media does not mean all residents are against decisions that have been taken by a Welsh council, believes its political leader.

At a joint meeting of all three of Powys County Council’s scrutiny committee’s on Friday, March 14, councillors and lay committee members discussed the authority’s performance during the third quarter of 2024/2025 from October to the end of December.

They looked at the council’s Corporate and Strategic Equality Plan Scorecard which evaluates performance against its own expectations against three council objectives.

Measures around public engagement was included in the report.

They showed that during quarter two 26 per cent of respondents were satisfied with their opportunities to have their say and agreed they could engage in decision making.

But data for quarter three from September to December was unavailable.

Concerns

Conservative Cllr Amanda Jenner who chaired the joint committee meeting asked if there were any past council decisions that now need to be revisited and discussed again with residents?

Cllr Jenner said: “Things which at the time may not have been a big deal but the public becomes aware of something and increasingly raise their concerns through their councillor, community council or social media.”

An example of this is the imminent introduction of a booking system from March 25 and the introduction of waste charges at Powys’ recycling centres from April 1.

While the decision to bring this in was agreed at the budget setting meeting in February 2024 – concerns about its implications on residents have only been raised during the last couple of months.

A petition against the scheme has received 4,455 signatures and attempts by opposition councillors to bring the issue up for discussion at council meetings have been shut down.

Council leader Liberal Democrat Cllr Gibson-Watt said: “A decision is taken and perhaps it’s not implemented for some time.

“Then when the time comes to implement it suddenly everybody becomes aware of it and say they don’t like it.

“But we must always remember the silent majority, it’s important not to overreact to things that come back at us.

“It’s inevitable that some people won’t like what we are doing, and they tend to make a lot of noise.

“The ones that are content or don’t care tend to say nothing.”

Review

He added that the council needed to feel “confident” in its decision making especially if it is based on thorough research that provides the evidence to back it up.

Cllr Gibson-Watt said: “Our public elected us to take these decisions, and we should not shirk taking them because we might get noise about it.”

Earlier Liberal Democrat Cllr Glyn Preston had brought up the public engagement measures and asked how the council collected the data?

Head of business intelligence and governance Catherine James explained that the data is collected from “additional questions” when people give their views in an online survey or visit the council website’s have your say section.

As there were no live consultations during the three-month period Ms James explained that the sample was so small that it was “deemed” not to be worth reporting on.

Ms James said that those that had given their views were “0.006 per cent” of the Powys population.

Ms James said: “We’re reviewing this to give us something more meaningful and useable.”