Mr. Guss O'Connell:

Many sensible things are being said here. I am going for the more radical approach. I believe we need to take a root-and-branch approach. This is why I would say the day of the county council really needs to be examined. We need to look at a different model. We have inherited this one from the British and it has served its time. What Councillor Colgan said there was very apt. She said that when we are elected on 7 June and go back, all of a sudden there will be a them-and-us situation. The only them-and-us as far as I am concerned are the officials on one side and the elected members on the other.

The side of things concerns being part-time versus full-time in a role. The full-time people, as far as I am concerned, are the professionals trained to do a certain job. They are meant to be responsible to us. If the origin of politics is on a voluntary basis, then I believe we need to be able to balance this with having an income we can live on. When I am talking about being part-time, I am talking about having a real job that is half-time or maybe three-quarter-time. I would not, though, like us to end up in a situation where the only people in the council chambers making decisions are those who have given up whatever other jobs they had, and they are in there, however they got in there or whatever their qualifications. This is not to cast aspersions on anybody I have ever served with or currently serve with at local government level or those who may get re-elected in June.

Politics is quite a different thing to saying we are going to put you in there and you are going to be working full-time. There is a balance to be struck, and I think this might come about if we were to organise things quite differently than they are now. I refer to the example of the area partnerships, the LEADER programme and so on. Some people call them quangos, but I do not like this term and do not use it. These other bodies have been put in there to do very good work. If they were responsible to the local municipal district, I think we would be going much further towards meeting people and serving them as volunteers where they are while getting remuneration for doing that, because it does take an awful lot of commitment. You learn a lot on a job that you can then apply to the role of councillor.