Commenting on my previous article, Friern Owl wrote ‘political opponents in the wider public … often go to council meetings intending to confront councillors, including preparing supplementary questions which are carefully designed to trip up the councillors’. That’s an opinion. So here are some facts to help put it in perspective.

Anyone can submit questions to a council committee meeting (not to full council). To be accepted, the questions must be related to an item on the agenda for the particular meeting and must be submitted by 10 a.m. two working days before the meeting, to allow time for them to be answered. The agenda and associated reports appear on the Barnet website no more than a week before the meeting. That gives you several days to read the documents – sometimes more than a couple hundred pages – and to try to absorb the information and formulate your questions.

The reports are the basis for the council’s plans for our public services and the expenditure of our council taxes. As such, they should be brim full with facts … but they’re not. My reason (and I assume that of others) for asking questions is to get that information. I want to know what a statement in the report actually means and the evidence on which it is based. Sometimes I want to know whether alternative proposals have been considered or why they haven’t been.

Those of us who ask questions are not trying to ‘trip up the councillors’, as Friern Owl maintains: the councillors do not write the reports or the replies to the questions. I don’t know whether the councillors have the information we’re asking for, but I don’t see how they can reach decisions without it, and asking questions is the clearest way we have of bringing these issues to their notice too.

Written replies to the questions might be e-mailed to you on the day of the meeting; otherwise your first sight of them will be at the meeting. Sometimes they answer the questions asked. When they don’t – when they give tangential or even irrelevant information, as is too often the case – people want to ask supplemental questions to try again to get a real answer. If you get the written replies on the night of the meeting, you will have 10–25 minutes to read them and prepare supplemental questions – not enough time for the ‘careful design’ Friern Owl claims.

You might be allowed one supplemental for every question you’ve asked but there’s a strict time limit for this procedure, so you might not get to ask many, or even any. If you do get your opportunity, you might get a satisfactory answer or, as has happened to me and others many times, you might get statements that are not answers, that might be irrelevant. If you dare to protest, the Chair will tell you ‘Too bad, that’s the answer you’re getting.’ In these cases we fail to get the information, and we worry about the basis on which decisions about our services are being made, and who’s making them – officers or councillors. We don’t want to, nor should we have to, ‘confront councillors’: in a democracy information should be forthcoming, the workings of the council should be open and transparent. We are impelled to ask: Why don’t they answer the questions? What is it they don’t want us to know?