Lydford Parish Council website
Parish Council website
Lydford Parish Council (LPC) contributes towards a web site, www.lydfordparishcouncil.co.uk. Potentially this is a very useful means of communication, particularly for those parishioners who are unable or unwilling to attend meetings in the village hall.
Unfortunately the web site leaves much to be desired. One only has to look at other parish council web sites (e.g. Kingsnorth Parish Council) to see just how much more information could be provided and how much better the layout could be.
Improvements have been suggested on several occasions but changes have been very minor. Perhaps the most significant step has been a backwards one. They have actually reduced the amount of information available on the parish council website. This action is just so hard to understand and can only be detrimental. See section Missing minutes.
There is a legal requirement to publish certain information under the Freedom of Information Act. There is a "Publication Scheme" on the website but it is more about meeting the bare minimum requirements of the law rather than providing genuinely useful information for parishioners. Of the information listed most of it is in hard copy or by inspection only rather than openly available on the website.
It is as if LPC has never read the documentation from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). In a document entitled "Completing the guide to information for parish councils, parish meetings and community councils" the ICO says:-
"Councils must make sure that they have systems in place to make the listed information available to the public as easily as possible. If they maintain a website, a large part of the information should be provided there".
Well that seems to be clear enough so why don't LPC do this? Is it perhaps that they simply do not want to share information?
There are plenty of other things that could be published. The Councillors’ Code of Conduct would be a good thing to put on the website as it would help inform members of the public of the standards of behaviour they can expect of the parish councillors. Perhaps more to the point it might help remind some of the councillors just what is expected of them (see Standards and LPC).
The website could be so useful for explaining significant proposals but this simply does not happen. No attempt was made to use the website for the either of the Parish Plan questionnaires or the results of them, although this could have been useful at the time. Similarly with the proposal for a new sewage works, which of course was abandoned after the council voted in favour of it (see Lydford Sewage Works).
New housing in the village is undoubtedly of interest to many parishioners and again this is something where the parish council website could be useful for explaining proposals. One could even have a 'blog' or a 'forum' so that ordinary parishioners could express views on a range of issues, but that would almost certainly be too adventurous for LPC.
Instead we are left with a website that is of far less value than it might be. The ‘events’ and ‘activities’ sections are useful enough and the ‘history’ and ‘village today’ sections are interesting the first time one reads them. The problem here is the format. Most of the information is confined to a narrow column in the centre of the screen. This format soon becomes tiresome as much scrolling is involved and a lot of screen area is wasted.
The official council website costs approximately £170 of tax payers' money each year (it rose in 2010). This is poor value when one considers just how little benefit parishioners and the general public actually get.
Parish Office website
In February 2009 a new website was developed by one of the more enterprising LPC councillors (sadly they left the council in the autumn of 2009). This was http://lydfordparishoffice.co.uk. The idea was to gather together information that the parish council is required to publish under the Freedom of Information Act but it had potential much wider than that
This website was a great improvement over the older one in terms of the quantity of information provided as well as usability and appearance. As it utilised web space provided by Microsoft under their Office Live Small Business scheme (see www.officelive.com/free-website?xid=c2logo) there was no charge for the 500MB of webspace provided.
Unfortunately after 2009 the website was not updated. Even so it remained of some interest until January 2011 when it went offline. Not that anyone from Lydford Parish Council cares enough to even notice. The LPC slot in the March 2011 edition of the Parish Magazine was still mentioning this website.
It is really sad to see the work that has gone into this wasted in favour of a much inferior paid for web site. Despite clear evidence of how easy and cheap it is to publish to the web Lydford Parish Council remain happy to spend public money rather than build upon the good work done in setting up the Lydfordparishoffice website. Why?
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