STC councillors’ attendance update

5 minutes ago

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I decided to compile a councillors’ attendance chart, so I have less work at the end of the year. While I was at it, I noticed a few strange, weird things. Today I want to show you what I found. In short: STC councillors’ attendance is a mixed picture.

As always, I’ll show you the data first, and if you’re interested in my analysis you’ll find it below, along with several other images illustrating the situation. Let’s start with the chart showing councillors’ attendance at meetings as a percentage. As I said above — it’s mixed. See for yourself:

In my view, high attendance at council meetings is the bare minimum councillors have to manage. You can’t fulfil your duties if you don’t know what’s going on at meetings. Minutes never convey the vibe of the Chamber, very often skip important points in the discussion — the arguments, the subtext — and record only the key moments and decisions. To be a good councillor, you have to be at meetings. Full stop.

COUNCILLOR LUKE SHORTHOSE — SHAME ON YOU
My teaser of this article on social media provoked him into answering on Facebook. He listed excuses for his lack of involvement, but my answer is simple: improve or resign. If you don’t have time, you don’t have time: clearly you stretched yourself too thin and it looks bad for you and your main ally: M.Barber.

Focus on what you do best, because councillorship is clearly not your thing. Saddest part is that you knew damn well that you wouldn’t have time and you went for it anyway, blocking someone else. Just look at this sea of red beside your name. Shame. Seriously — improve or resign.

At this point I have to congratulate the Labour Party: great co-option choice. This ‘councillor’ is exactly what you needed, right?

I had to ‘name and shame’ few other councillors: M.Barber (Ind) with 64%, D.Downes (Ind) with 43% and R.Holland (Lab) with 57%. There is still time to improve, but current level of involvement is below expectations.

SHADOW OPERATIVE VS REAL COUNCILLOR
If you have low attendance, in my view you are not really a councillor. You are a placeholder, a shadow operative for a group seeking or holding power. Someone to call in, to summon when a key vote is planned or the ‘leader’ needs to block something or someone. People like that don’t serve residents — they serve political interest groups. In my opinion, people like that are a main ingredient of the current STC problems: too many of them took seats in the past, and now we’re paying for it.

It was clearly visible last year, when the Labour ‘elite’ showed up only to avoid being removed from office and to elect the ‘chosen ones’ to positions of power. If you want to see how it worked in a 100% Labour council, check out the 2025 attendance here:
https://shirebrook247.com/2026/04/17/stc-councillors-attendance-in-2025/

SHINING EXAMPLES ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE SCALE
Kerry Kirk (Ind) and Andrew Stevens (Reform) are shining examples of councillors who show up. They have 100% attendance, and at this point I’d bet they feel the vibe of the room — they recognize the political affiliations, the cliques, the dynamics of the Chamber. Will they turn that knowledge into real results, the way I did when I was a councillor? That remains to be seen.

WHAT ELSE?
Cllr Luke Shorthose’s abysmally low attendance wasn’t the only thing that caught my eye. For example, I noticed that none of the Personnel Committee meetings leave any minutes. The taxpayer pays the wages of STC’s bureaucrats and staff (79.9% of all our tax goes on wages at STC), but the taxpayer has no right to know anything about what’s happening with the STC workforce. Weird.

National legislation clearly allows ‘personnel’ matters to be discussed publicly. It doesn’t allow ‘personal’ matters to be discussed publicly. A small change in spelling — a huge difference on the Chamber floor. A transparent Council would publicly acknowledge problems with personnel and then discuss personal details behind closed doors. STC takes everything behind closed doors. That’s the Labour style of politics.

From my point of view, as an ex-councillor, something odd is happening and there’s a group trying to hide it at all costs. They have the majority, so they force the ‘transparency group’ to stay silent.

NEXT WEIRD THING
The second thing I noticed is that the minutes stop in May. Since then we’ve had meetings in June and July — 8 of them. We also had as many as 4 cancelled meetings in July alone. Some of the delay must be structural (minutes must be approved to be published), but some of them already should be on the website. Still- much improvement from times when ‘Jenny and the brother’ allowed minutes to be published with 6 months delay and only when I asked for it, right?

What else is weird? Cllr Michael Yates (Lab) is listed as just ‘Yates’ — a single name — on multiple sets of minutes. Like Beyoncé or Cher. To be fair, that’s not his fault; it’s just odd that the mistake repeats itself several times over the course of the year and no one seem to care.

4 February: the original minutes list Cllr Bradbury as absent- but he was in the room. 2026/011 amends that to present. I’ve used the amended record.

28 January: in these minutes you can read a series of questions and answers about the town budget. That’s a significant change from what happened when I was a councillor. Back in ‘my day’, none of my questions ever got an answer, never mind any trace of those questions in the minutes. In one case the Chair simply fled the room rather than answer a question about the TOWN’S DEBT. You’ll find an account of that, and even an audio recording, here:

https://shirebrook247.com/2022/01/31/me-what-with-debt-chair-im-closing-the-meeting/

DON’T LEAVE POLITICS BEHIND THE DOOR
‘Leaving politics behind the door’ is the new slogan of a few STC councillors. In my view, this slogan gets repeated to hide Labour’s responsibility for the current problems and years of neglect. Throwing every councillor into one bag blurs the blame. But the truth is that STC is a political body, and you should be able to see the difference in the policies created, based on party affiliation.

Labour want higher taxes, more bureaucracy, more ‘net-zero’, more immigrants in HMOs, less transparency. Reform should stand on the opposite side of that argument — lower taxes, less bureaucracy, less ‘net-zero’ lunacy, less HMOs and less immigrants. Independents? Well, that’s a completely different story.

But that vast difference in potential worldviews between councillors gave me idea to look at data once more. Through lens of the party members engagement.

WHICH PARTY CARES MORE?
So, the chart I showed at the start is based on incomplete data, covers only the first 5 months of the year, and doesn’t show you who is who. STC isn’t 100% Labour now, so for the first time in decades we have an opportunity to observe how people with different views on life behave in the STC Chamber.

Guess who’s in last place? Who couldn’t care less about Shirebrook’s affairs, and who shows up more often than the rest? Here’s the data, without my commentary. Draw your own conclusions:

THE END
These are the first five months. I’ve tracked this since 2019, and I’ll say something you won’t often hear from me: so far, so good. Most of them are showing up. One man is single-handedly dragging the average down while majority pulling hard up.

There are still months to go before the end of the year, and everything can change. People get sick, people lose interest, people resign. Some people get better with time. In history of STC only a few have managed to keep 100% through a whole year and there are two new contenders to that list: K.Kirk and A.Stevens. To be exact, there have been only 3 councillors with a 100% attendance record since I started compiling this data. I was one of them.