How can you tell if a councillor actually does any work?

This question has been raised a number times within council over the last few years. We know, of course, who is contributing and who is not, but how is the public supposed to know? If you believe everything you read, then you should take the meeting statistics at face value - someone attends only xyz percentage of meetings, that means they are only working xyz of the time they are expected to. Or are they?

The statistics, which are published every six months, record the number of formal meetings and workshops a member attends for a period of one hour or 50% of the meeting time, whichever is the lower time. So, a councillor *can* attend half a meeting and sleep through that time, and still have the nice tick against their name as having been physically present. A councillor may also attend a meeting for an hour or less, without having read the order paper or having a clue what the meeting is discussing, not say a word, not take part in voting, and still have his/her stats show attendance. Is that councillor actually working? If the stats are the way you measure this, then, yes!

Not one councillor managed to attend all the LTCCP workshops late last year. Does this mean they were not working? Absolutely not! Some of the 14 workshops were for a full-day gatherings, some half a day, and councillors had no control over the dates on which they were set. Some councillors, not many, work full-time and for some of these attendances at workshops mean they must get annual leave approved in advance from their employers. It is not suprising that nobody managed to attend all the workshops we were expected to attend.

Workshops have been uncharitably called “talkfests” by some people. Decisions cannot be made at workshops and it is not uncommon for issues that have been presented and discussed at workshop to be debated again and again. Should workshops be included in meeting stats? There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on this, but there is a school of thought that the fear of bad stats may force some councillors to attend that would otherwise not. Where a group of councillors is unable to attend a particular workshop staff often hold another gathering at a different time. The councillors who attend the alternative meeting do not get a tick in the stats.

Last night at the Finance and Economic Well-Being Committee (FEWC) meeting I raised the issue of councillors being penalised when they need to miss a recorded meeting due to being elsewhere on council business. Councillors may, for example, be attending a two-day conference at the behest of council and miss a two-hour meeting. The stats will show that the councillors have missed the meeting, but do not show that they missed the meeting because they had been sent elsewhere on council business. The members of the FEWC unanimously agreed and a resolution was passed that in future, the meeting statistics will not be affected when a councillor is away on council-approved business.

This is a step in the right direction but I can see many problems arising in the future. The Mayor and councillors receive a lot of invitations to events, many of which fall into the realm of public relations. Some councillors attend more social events than others - will they now have an added incentive because their meeting statistics may not be affected?

As you can see, I have posed more questions than answers. Most employers today recognise that a time-sheet alone does not give any indication of whether their staff actually do the job they are employed to do. The meeting statistics record was introduced in an attempt to provide some measure of accountability to the public. However, like any statistics, these figures can easily be manipulated.

My own stats from the last six months are poor. I don’t however, play the stats game. I did not attend most of the 14 workshops. For each workshop, I contacted the staff and asked two simple questions - “is there anything new being presented that I do not know about or understand? Do I need to attend?” If the answer was “yes”, I attended. If “no”, or if an alternative date was set, I joined some of my colleagues on the alternative date. I don’t play the game but I was aware that I could have attended each workshop for an hour, perhaps over lunch, and seen my stats looking good.

The Manawatu Standard has this week been encouraging people to use the statistics when making a decision on who to vote for next year. Newspapers are good at quoting statistics without examining what the stats don’t say. I recall hearing a speaker saying that a newspaper reported on the death of a man who was trying to cross a stream. The man drowned in a stream that had an average depth of six inches. Shame he walked into the 12 foot deep hole.

In conclusion, I give you my two favourite quotes on statistics.

“There are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies and statistics”. ~Benjamin Disraeli.

“Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say”. ~William W. Watt