What I Learned by Reading 40+ Council Minutes So You Don’t Have To

A Kafkaesque paper trail, a mysterious missing voting portal, and a civic system that makes democracy look like amateur dramatics with better biscuits.

It started innocently enough. I wanted to know how my local councillors had voted on a couple of issues. You know—small, democracy-type stuff. Nothing fancy. No secret dossiers, no cloak and dagger. Just: who voted, on what, and when?

Published by mistake, the voting portal that never was.

So I went to the Council’s website, clicked on the very helpfully labelled “How Councillors Voted” tool, and typed in a name. Nothing. Tried again. Still nothing. A decade and a half of governance—not a single vote recorded. Either we’ve achieved total political harmony (unlikely), or someone’s been filing minutes with invisible ink.

And yes, they record the meetings too—transparency, they say. But watching them back is like being trapped in a public access fever dream where everyone’s speaking in procedural code and no one’s mic is working properly. Sure, there are timestamp links so you can jump between agenda items, but even then, the angles don’t show who’s voting, the cameras wobble like it’s student media week, and the image quality makes it feel like you’re watching politics through a fish tank. You don't see governance—you see knees under desks, cables everywhere, and occasionally, the back of someone’s head nodding. It’s not transparency. It’s civic CCTV with bad lighting.

When I asked the Council why, I got a refreshingly candid reply from the Director of Law and Corporate Services. Turns out the tool was never meant to be live. It had been switched on “following some historical testing of the software” and quickly removed once they realised it was still visible. A polite whoops. No bad faith—just a digital phantom limb of a transparency function that never quite grew.

But that little glitch set something off. Because if that’s the state of the online tools—ghosts in the machine—then what’s actually documented about decision-making in Wirral?

So I did what no sane person should do without caffeine, context, and questionable life choices. I read the minutes. All of them.

Bedtime reading, guaranteed to send you to sleep.

By “all,” I mean over 40 committee records—mostly from Wirral’s Economy, Regeneration & Housing Committee and the Environment, Climate Emergency and Transport Committee, spanning five years. Hundreds of pages of procedural language, arcane phrases, and the political equivalent of a shrug typed in Calibri.

What I found was… instructive.

There are patterns. Oh yes, there are patterns. They’re just not the kind you want from a functioning council. They’re more like the patterns you get from staring into the static on an old television set. Familiar. Repetitive. Opaque.

Everything is “subject to officer review,” “deferred to a future meeting,” or “pending funding confirmation.” Votes are passed “in principle,” commitments are made “pending further consultation,” and public input is—how shall we put it—very kindly acknowledged before being unceremoniously buried in the garden behind the Town Hall.

If local democracy were a play, Wirral’s would be a Beckett production where nothing happens, twice. Everyone claps, and then someone suggests reviewing it again in Q4.

The deeper I went, the more absurd it became. Take Birkenhead Market: a saga stretching over years, with traders consulted, plans revised, locations changed like socks. And yet? No clear voting record. No transparent decision trail. Just a slow morphing of reality via committee updates that read like plot summaries from a show you’ve never seen.

Or active travel schemes—discussed, amended, revised, deferred, and occasionally disguised under euphemisms like “connectivity upgrades.” It’s as if they’re afraid to say “bike lane” in case someone faints.

And when the public does engage? When people speak up, make deputations, send petitions?

“Noted.”“To be responded to by officers.”“Referred to a future report.”

It’s death by procedure. A velvet rope of politeness keeping scrutiny at bay. Now, let me be crystal clear: I’m not accusing anyone of malice. This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s something worse. It’s habit.

A system so entrenched, so dependent on paper trails and procedural fog, that no one really questions it anymore. The minutes are the record. But the record is a novel where the key chapters were never written down. And the epilogue is always “subject to budget.”

This is governance that meets the legal minimum with all the enthusiasm of a teenager filling out a tax form. It satisfies the Local Government Act of 1972—drafted, you’ll note, before email was a thing—but it fails the modern expectation of transparency entirely.

So what am I actually asking for?

Not revolution. Just evolution. Other councils—Bristol, Hackney, Manchester—already do it. They publish named votes. Link decisions to outcomes. Let residents actually see what the hell is going on.

Imagine that! A dashboard where you can check who voted for what, how much it cost, whether it’s been delivered, and what the return on investment was. I know—it’s outrageous. You might call it “accountability.” Or, in Wirral, “witchcraft.” Of course, some might prefer we never reach that point. After all, once you can track outcomes, you can start noticing that some of them… don’t.

Wirral haemorrhages money from leisure centres, office space, retail developments, creative assets—and yet you’ll struggle to find a single, unified system that shows you where things went wrong. Or right. Or anywhere at all.

So yes, I read the minutes. Every dry, bureaucratically padded page of them. I read them because that’s the only way to figure out what’s going on. And that, in itself, is the problem.

Democracy shouldn't require detective work.

We shouldn’t have to choose between blind trust and blind reading. We shouldn’t need AI to piece together what our councillors were doing. And we definitely shouldn’t be quietly removing broken tools from the website and calling it closure.

The Director of Law and Corporate Services was honest and professional. But honesty doesn’t fix opacity. It just makes it more politely worded.

If Wirral wants to rebuild trust, it doesn’t need another masterplan. It needs a ledger. A log. A visible, usable, digital record of how power flows through the system—and who’s steering it.

Because if all we have is minutes, then all we’ll ever have are mysteries.

And frankly, I think Wirral deserves better than that.

🧾 Disclaimer

This article is based entirely on publicly available information, including Wirral Council committee minutes, published reports, and formal responses from council officers. No councillor, officer, or political group is accused of wrongdoing, misconduct, or breach of duty. The observations, interpretations, and conclusions presented here are solely the author's own, offered in the spirit of civic engagement, constructive scrutiny, and public interest journalism. Any errors or omissions are unintentional, and I welcome corrections or clarifications from any individual or official body. Because if we can’t talk openly—and correct our course—how can we ever move forward?