With a Town Council election coming up on 7th March and nomination papers to be in by 8th February – just over 1 week away – one might have thought that this very important information would be posted on Maltby Town Council’s website.  

But no. True to form, MTC’s Homepage is still wishing us a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, with pictures of people in Santa hats, even though it’s the 1st February tomorrow.

http://www.rotherhamparishcouncils.gov.uk/Home/Maltby/maltbyHome.aspx

So I re- looked at the “Councillors” page. Now we know there’s a vacancy for one councillor and the names and pictures of the 17 current ones seem correct. But it’s the “extra” piece of information at the head of this page that leaves me puzzled. There is a link for the wards – east, north and west which takes you to the RMBC Election details for the 2011 election, showing who stood, how many votes they had and who was duly elected. But there is a glaring omission  in that the south ward of Maltby doesn’t appear. 

An error maybe ? The website does state “this page is currently being updated” , but there hasn’t been a time when that was not the case. Pages are ‘updated’ very selectively in mb’s experience and this seems more probable in this instance too. 

For the benefit of those who don’t know – and how would anyone know if it’s not posted – in the May 2011 election the south ward of Maltby was not contested. The three councillors at that time were Amy Rushforth, Keith Duckmanton and Andrew Searson. During the course of the next year, Andrew Searson left the council and Michael Richardson was elected, making up the full quota of 18 again.

Maltby Town Council are pretty adept at keeping the community uninformed by simply not making the information readily available. Rather like Rotherham Borough Council, in fact !

Let’s hope that the next councillor to be elected to MTC can help to bring about a change in this for the benefit of all of Maltby.

https://maltbyblogger.com/2013/01/14/wards-of-the-parish-of-maltby-and-numbers-of-parish-councillors/