Council TV To Cover Some Scrutiny Meetings

Wrexham Councillors will discuss proposals to expand webcasting of meetings to include some Scrutiny Committee meetings.

At the moment Wrexham Council only broadcast the monthly Executive Board, Full Council and Planning Meetings via a webstream – however on Thursday members of the Democratic Services Committee will debate plans to expand that to include 10 hours of Scrutiny Meetings or around five meetings.

The broadcasting of the meetings would depend on the availability of the Council Chamber, as that is where the webcasting equipment is set up.

If approved by councillors a pilot of a Scrutiny Meeting would begin in April 2016, and as most meetings are straightforward in nature it would be expected to become standard procedure later in the year.

Previously Council Leader Mark Pritchard has said he would like to extend ‘openness and transparency’ to include Scrutiny Meetings and that he would be looking for political support for the idea, which is not a legislative requirement.

Details of viewing figures of the webcast meetings have also been provided within the report, showing that the viewings of the meetings after they have been broadcast are viewed more than those who tune in live.

Nearly 56 hours of Council meetings were webcast in 2015, with viewing figures provided from August 1st 2015 through until January 31st 2016.

1,299 live viewers have been noted, with a much larger 13,330 people watching the archives or ‘on demand’ style replay functions of meetings.

The Executive Board meeting in mid January was the highest ‘live’ watched even with 331 viewers, with a planning meeting on the 7th September having the highest replays of 1,544 people.

The January Executive Board meeting was a middle of the day 10am through lunchtime meeting, but contained items such as the then proposed Arts Hub and the knocking down of the Groves School.

If it is decided Scrutiny Meetings will be webcast a criteria could be used to decide which will be allocated the 10 hours of use:

• Has the topic already generated public interest
• Would the topic have a significant public impact
• Raising the profile of an issue with the public.

This is all a wonderful progression in a relatively short space of time, when the live tweeting of a meeting by a fledgling Wrexham.com was thwarted as it was ‘transmission’. Thankfully that was successfully challenged, with us able to formally send the first tweets from a meeting thanks to Futurologist Rodney Skelland (with the world continuing to rotate), with a further first of us videoing of a meeting prior to webcasting thanks to Steve ‘Bill Gates’ Wilson!

Been told I cant ‘transmit anything from the meeting’ so will queue up and send after….catch you in abit…

— Wrexham.com (@wrexham) April 5, 2011

We asked the Chair if we could transmit & recieve data via mobile devices during tonights meeting.The Chair said yes.Thus transmitting this!

— Wrexham.com (@wrexham) January 9, 2013

The full PDF report that is being considered can be viewed here.