🏛️ PREVIEW: What Tuesday’s Full Council Meeting WON’T Tell You — but You Definitely Should Know

🏛️ PREVIEW: What Tuesday’s Full Council Meeting WON’T Tell You — but You Definitely Should Know

A resident’s honest, sarcastic and eyebrow-raised guide to what’s really on the agenda.

Full Council is back on Tuesday, and once again the agenda reads like a perfectly-behaved school report card: neat headings, long documents, reassuring titles, and absolutely no sign of real-world context.

So, as a public service (because the Council certainly won’t provide one), here is the real, resident-friendly, and not-drinking-the-Kool-Aid version of what’s coming up — and why you should care.

1. Apologies for Absence

Councillors announce who won’t be attending.

No reasons required.

No context offered.

No pattern analysed.

If a councillor hasn’t shown up since the last ice age, you won’t know. The minutes won’t tell you. Your bin might know more.

2. Declarations of Interest

Technically this is the section where councillors are supposed to declare whether they might be connected to anything being discussed.

In practice?

Tumbleweed.

Apparently Sandwell councillors have no external roles, friendships, loyalties, influences, or past lives. Astonishing.

3. Minutes of the Last Meeting

Council will approve 55+ pages of minutes in under a minute.

Imagine skimming War and Peace and saying, “Yes, all seems fine.”

Unchallenged. Unquestioned. Unverified.

The “actions” (if they existed) could be stuck to the underside of a desk for all we know.

4. Announcements

Here comes the glossy promotional bit.

Expect:

Success stories

Ribbon cutting events

Inspirational slogans

Do not expect:

SEND chaos

Highways issues

Service complaints

Homelessness pressure

Anything involving reality

This is the greatest hits album. The B-sides? Never released.

5. Public Speaking Time

“No public questions received.”

This isn’t a sign of contentment — it’s a sign that the rules are designed like the Krypton Factor:

100-word limit

Must relate directly to the agenda

Must be submitted early

No follow-up

No speaking back

Sandwell says it wants resident engagement.

Just… preferably not from residents who actually want to speak.

6. Members’ Questions

Q1 – Violence Against Women & Girls (VAWG)

Expect a carefully crafted answer about “partnerships”, “listening”, and “commitments”.

Do not expect:

Clear data

Performance outcomes

Mention of grooming gangs

Mention of historic child sexual exploitation

Anything remotely resembling uncomfortable truth

In other words: a safety strategy where the biggest safety issue is quietly left in a filing cabinet marked “Not Today”.

Q2 – Hate Crime Graffiti

Likely answer: “We take this seriously.”

Reality:

Residents often wait far too long, and no one ever provides:

statistics

response time targets

enforcement outcomes

A bit like cleaning graffiti with invisible ink: technically something happened, but no one can show you.

7. Petitions

Welcome to the Petition Bermuda Triangle, population: every petition ever submitted.

They get “received”.

They do not get “tracked”.

They definitely do not get “updated”.

If residents want to know what happened to their petition, they’d have more luck asking a psychic medium.

8. Council Tax Reduction Scheme (CTRS)

A 135-page legal document.

No plain-English explanation.

No poverty modelling.

No real-world examples.

The Council will say it protects vulnerable residents.

Protected… how? With what? According to which analysis?

Nobody in the room will know, because the room was never told.

9. Housing Rents & Charges

Rent rises will be approved.

Not a single person in the chamber will be presented with:

projected arrears impact

hardship modelling

eviction risk

benefit alignment

Imagine flying a plane without instruments.

This is that, except the plane is thousands of homes.

10. Polling District Review

Polling stations move like pieces on a board game.

You won’t be shown who is now further away, who loses walkability, or who needs public transport.

We all support accessible democracy, as long as you can find where it’s moved to this year.

11. Committee Appointments

Quiet reshuffles.

No explanation.

No performance criteria.

No accountability.

Like moving deckchairs on the Titanic — but at least on the Titanic they told you why.

12. MOTIONS FOR DEBATE

12(a) – Women & Girls’ Safety

A warm, sincere motion — that avoids the actual elephant in the room:

historic and ongoing child sexual exploitation.

It’s a bit like offering a fire safety policy that proudly excludes “fires”.

12(b) – Blood Tests (Phlebotomy)

The motion talks about Wednesbury.

The problem is Sandwell-wide.

Residents everywhere are waiting up to three weeks for blood tests, with GP phlebotomy long gone and digital booking systems that exclude whole sections of the community.

This isn’t a localised issue; it’s a borough-wide service failure wearing a Wednesbury badge.

12(d) – Small Businesses

Who doesn’t want to support small businesses?

But to do that you need:

data

targets

analysis

actual tools that work

Instead we get a motivational postcard.

No mention of:

high street vacancy

business closures

failures of the “Business Ambassadors” programme

what the Chamber of Commerce even does for Sandwell

A supportive message with no engine underneath.

FINAL WORD

Residents deserve:

real answers

real data

honest conversations

decisions grounded in evidence

Tuesday’s meeting will be polished.

It will be organised.

It will be official.

What it won’t be — unless residents keep asking — is truly transparent.

Always ask questions. Always expect detail. Sandwell works better when residents aren’t treated as bystanders.

ADDENDUM 

🔥 **THE PART THEY NEVER SAY OUT LOUD:

CSE, Grooming Gangs, and the Hypocrisy of “Women & Girls’ Safety” Motions**

There is one subject that Sandwell Council manages to walk around with Olympic-level agility: Child Sexual Exploitation.

Every year, we get another warm, reassuring motion about “Violence Against Women and Girls”, full of uplifting slogans, partnership pledges and “we will continue to strive…” paragraphs.

But somehow — every single time — the biggest, most traumatic, most well-documented issue involving actual girls is quietly missing.

Not mentioned.

Not acknowledged.

Not even whispered.

❗ The omission isn’t accidental — it’s political.

Earlier this year, Labour MPs voted down a Conservative proposal for a national inquiry into grooming gangs — a statutory, full-powers investigation into systemic CSE failures across the country.

Only after intense backlash, media pressure and survivor outcry did national Labour start rowing back and cautiously supporting some form of inquiry.

But the damage was done.

It confirmed what many survivors already suspected:

CSE is the issue too many people want quietly contained, not openly confronted.

❗ Yet here in Sandwell, local Labour councillors now present themselves as champions of “Women and Girls’ Safety”.

All well and good — but it’s a bit like celebrating fire safety without mentioning arson.

Or producing a road safety strategy that avoids the topic of cars.

How can anyone claim to take “violence against women and girls” seriously while carefully editing out the rape, grooming and exploitation of girls that has haunted communities across the West Midlands for decades?

❗ This omission rewrites reality. It erases victims. And it undermines trust.

Residents are not stupid. They know CSE has happened here.

They know learning reviews exist.

They know not all of them have seen daylight.

They know multi-agency safeguarding once failed catastrophically.

A motion that refuses to mention CSE is not “sensitive”.

It is not “responsible”.

It is not “protective of survivors”.

It is politically convenient — that’s all.

🧨 THE HYPOCRISY IN A SINGLE SENTENCE

They voted against a national grooming inquiry — then wrote a local motion pretending to defend girls.

If that doesn’t deserve scrutiny, nothing does.

📢 WHAT RESIDENTS DESERVE TO HEAR (BUT NEVER DO)

How many CSE cases have been recorded in Sandwell in the last five years?

How many multi-agency failures were identified?

How many learning reviews remain unpublished?

What support is being offered to survivors?

What cultural changes have actually occurred in schools, police and services?

Why does the Council refuse to treat CSE as a core part of VAWG policy?

Until those questions are answered, VAWG motions will remain glossy brochures — emotionally comforting, politically marketable, and strategically incomplete.

🔍 FINAL WORD

If a council cannot say the words Child Sexual Exploitation,

it cannot claim to be protecting women and girls.

If national politicians vote down a grooming inquiry,

they cannot pretend to hold moral authority on safeguarding.

And if local motions avoid the hardest truths,

residents have every right — and every reason —

to demand better.

ADDENDUM II

🏛️ THE QUIET COUP: HOW SANDWELL COUNCIL REWROTE ITS CONSTITUTION TO SILENCE THE PUBLIC

And where exactly is the “Independent Person” while this happens?

Sandwell Council has always had an interesting relationship with transparency.

The kind of relationship where one partner says, “We’re absolutely committed,” while quietly turning the lights off, locking the door, and posting the key into the nearest drain.

But the latest round of constitutional changes takes this to an entirely new level — a level where public engagement isn’t merely discouraged… it’s practically criminalised.

Welcome to the new Sandwell Constitution:

An elegant, carefully engineered device for minimising inconvenience from the public.

Let’s break down what’s really happened.

🔪 1. PUBLIC QUESTIONS HAVE BEEN STRANGLED BY DESIGN

It used to be possible for residents to ask questions at Full Council.

Not easy, not pleasant — but at least possible.

Now?

It is a bureaucratic assault course with electrified fences.

The new rules:

100-word limit (shorter than some parking signs)

Must relate directly to an agenda item chosen by councillors

Must be submitted well in advance

Must be vetted

May be rejected for reasons not published or explained

Cannot include supplementary questions

Cannot challenge or correct an answer

Combine all that and you get what the council wanted:

Public questions without any actual public participation.

It’s engagement theatre — all the props, none of the meaning.

🧩 2. THE COUNCIL NOW CONTROLS WHAT THE PUBLIC IS ALLOWED TO CARE ABOUT

By forcing residents to only ask questions about agenda items chosen by Cabinet, the council has quietly seized control over:

what the public can talk about

which issues are allowed into the chamber

which problems can be ignored indefinitely

If the public wants to ask about:

pollution,

SEND failures,

environmental mismanagement,

housing delays,

CSE safeguarding transparency,

service cuts,

broken complaints processes…

Too bad.

Unless Cabinet chooses to put it on the agenda (spoiler: they won’t), the public is gagged.

This is not democracy.

This is curation.

🚨 3. THE “NO FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS” RULE IS PURE DEFENSIVENESS

This is perhaps the most telling change.

A resident asks a question.

The council gives an answer (true, false, vague or irrelevant — doesn’t matter).

The resident cannot reply.

Cannot challenge.

Cannot correct.

Cannot clarify.

If the council wants to give a script instead of an answer, the constitution protects them.

🏴 4. THE COUNCIL MADE THESE CHANGES TO PROTECT ITSELF FROM SCRUTINY

This isn’t a side-effect.

This is the purpose.

After years of:

scandals,

external interventions,

weak governance findings,

poor public trust,

complaints mishandling,

and… well, you know the list,

The logical response should have been more transparency, more resident voice, and more accountability.

Instead, Sandwell chose:

Less openness.

Less challenge.

Less scrutiny.

More control.

It’s the political equivalent of saying:

“We hear your concerns, and in response, we have soundproofed the building.”

🧑‍⚖️ 5. WHERE IS THE “INDEPENDENT PERSON” IN ALL OF THIS?

Good question. A very good question

Under local government standards law, the “Independent Person” exists to:

uphold ethical conduct

ensure fairness

protect the public from abuses of process

advise on complaints

intervene when governance looks questionable

So where is this Independent Person while:

democratic access is restricted,

public rights are curtailed,

scrutiny is weakened,

participation rules are rewritten to suppress residents?

Answer:

Nowhere visible.

No public statement.

No challenge.

No commentary.

No assurance.

Not even a gentle cough in the background.

This silence is either:

an oversight,

a misunderstanding of the role,

or a worrying sign of compliance with decisions that undermine public confidence.

Either way — residents deserve an explanation.

📉 6. THE EFFECT IS SIMPLE: FEWER QUESTIONS, LESS PRESSURE, LESS ACCOUNTABILITY

These constitutional changes will reduce the number of public questions.

That is the whole point.

Then, conveniently, councillors will claim: “Residents are happy — nobody is complaining.”

It’s brilliant, in a dark sort of way.

Remove the microphone

→ then declare the room silent

→ then congratulate yourself on how content everyone is.

This logic is used in:

failing councils,

authoritarian regimes,

and occasionally, by toddlers who hide behind curtains made entirely of their own fingers.

🧭 7. WHY THIS MATTERS TO RESIDENTS

Because if residents cannot ask questions publicly, then:

councils can avoid tough topics

poor decisions go unchallenged

mistakes are buried

safeguarding concerns get ignored

officers are not held accountable

Cabinet can operate without real scrutiny

the public becomes a passive audience rather than an active citizenry

This is how democratic deficits start.

Not with headlines — with procedures.

Quiet, subtle, technical changes that close doors one at a time.

🔥 8. WHAT RESIDENTS SHOULD DEMAND NOW

1. The immediate restoration of meaningful public questions

No artificial word limits

No agenda restrictions

No hidden veto power

2. The publication of an annual report on public participation

Number of questions submitted

How many were rejected and why

How many received complete answers

3. A public statement from the Independent Person

Do they believe these changes support good governance?

If not, why have they remained silent?

What safeguards can they offer the public?

4. A wider review of democratic access and inclusion in Sandwell

Because reading the Constitution shouldn’t feel like reading a manual on how to safely dispose of criticism.

🧨 FINAL WORD

Sandwell didn’t improve public engagement.

It reduced it.

Codified it.

Neutered it.

And wrapped the whole thing in procedural niceties.

The only people who benefit from fewer questions are the people who don’t want to answer any.

Residents deserve more, expect more, and — constitution or no constitution — will continue asking questions.

And that is precisely why the Council had to rewrite the rules in the first place.