Virtual Hertfordshire council meetings could continue in the future hillingdontimes.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from hillingdontimes.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The communities secretary has been issued a two-week deadline to solve the problem of how councils’ remote meetings can continue to take place legally,
High Court to be asked to rule on continuation of remote meetings
Two groups representing senior officers are preparing to go to court in a bid to ensure remote council meetings can continue to be held beyond May.
Lawyers in Local Government and the Association of Democratic Services Officers have obtained legal advice which claims there are “forceful arguments” that the Local Government 1972 Act as it currently exists allows meetings to be held remotely or in hybrid form when current provisions under the Coronavirus Act 2020 expire on 6 May.
LGC has been told this rests on the premise that in the modern day, remote attendance could satisfy the act’s requirement for somebody to be present at a meeting while the place of a meeting could be a digital place.
There is a compelling Covid-related case for extending provision for councils to hold remote or hybrid meetings beyond 6 May.
Though we would all like to believe that by then widespread vaccination will allow us much more face to face interaction with humans from outside our own households, by the government’s own timetable vaccination of the under 50s will not begin until spring and, as the experts keep reminding us, we do not know yet how far it will go in preventing transmission. I’d rather not even countenance the spectre of new vaccine-resistant strains of the virus having emerged by then, but it is an acknowledged possibility.