A plain, candid answer at a committee meeting registers as remarkable, which says something bleak about the baseline
A plain, candid answer at a committee meeting registers as remarkable, which says something bleak about the baseline
The Councillor Who Finally Answered a Direct Question and How Strange That Felt
Something genuinely unusual happened at Tuesday’s committee session, unusual enough that I want to record it properly before the memory of quite how startled I was fades into the general blur of committee sessions this job has accumulated over the years. A councillor, asked a direct, pointed question about a contract award that has been the subject of considerable local unease, simply answered it. Plainly. In full sentences. Without once retreating into the fog of “ongoing processes” and “due diligence considerations” that has become the default register of nearly every public answer I have sat through in this chamber for a very long time.
What Was Actually Asked
A resident, present at the public session and clearly having done her homework, asked why a particular contract had gone to a firm whose tender was, on the published scoring criteria, not the highest rated of those submitted, and whether the eventual award represented value for money against the criteria the council itself had set. This is precisely the kind of question that, in my experience, generally receives a carefully worded non-answer, an acknowledgment that “all procurement follows the appropriate governance framework,” which tells the asker nothing whatsoever about the actual thing they wanted to know.
What Actually Happened Instead
The councillor in question, to general and audible surprise in the public gallery, simply said that the scoring had weighted delivery timeline more heavily than raw cost given the urgency of the underlying need, explained the specific weighting formula in terms an ordinary resident could follow, acknowledged that reasonable people could disagree with that weighting choice, and offered to share the full scoring matrix with anyone who wanted to review it directly rather than taking her summary on trust. I have covered this council for the better part of a decade. I do not believe I have heard an answer of that specificity and candour from this particular bench in all that time.
Why This Felt Genuinely Remarkable Rather Than Merely Pleasant
I want to be honest about why a single competent, direct answer at a routine committee meeting struck me forcefully enough to write an entire column about it, because on reflection it says something slightly bleak about the baseline expectation I, and I suspect most residents who bother attending these sessions, have quietly come to hold. We have, collectively, adjusted our expectations downward to the point where simple honesty registers as a notable event rather than the basic minimum standard it ought to be. That adjustment did not happen overnight, and I do not think it is confined to this council. It is, I increasingly believe, a genuinely national pattern, decades in the making, in which institutional caution around liability, media management, and the fear of any answer becoming a headline has slowly trained an entire class of public officials to prefer vagueness over clarity as a default reflex, even when clarity would cost them nothing.
What Happened After the Meeting
I approached the councillor afterward, partly out of genuine professional curiosity about why she had chosen to answer so directly when the institutional incentives clearly point the other way, and her answer was refreshingly straightforward on that front too: she said she had simply decided, fairly recently, that residents deserved the actual reasoning behind decisions rather than a defensive summary, and that she had found, somewhat to her own surprise, that direct answers generated considerably less follow-up scrutiny than evasive ones, because residents who feel genuinely informed tend to ask fewer, sharper follow-up questions than residents who sense they are being managed.
The Column I Actually Want to Write Because of This
I intend to follow this specific contract through to delivery and report back plainly on whether the timeline the weighting was designed to prioritise actually materialises, because a genuinely candid answer deserves to be tested against the same scrutiny I would apply to a evasive one, not treated as automatically trustworthy simply because it was refreshingly direct. Candour is not the same as correctness, and I do not want this column to slide into simply rewarding officials for being pleasant to interview rather than for the actual outcomes their decisions produce.
A Small Hope, Stated Plainly For Once
If this single, unusual answer achieves nothing else, I hope it demonstrates to the rest of that chamber, and to the wider political class this paper covers, that directness is not actually the reputational risk the institutional instinct assumes it to be. The resident who asked the question left, by every visible sign, satisfied, informed, and considerably less suspicious of the council than she arrived. That is not nothing. In twenty-six years, I have watched a great deal of institutional energy spent trying to manufacture exactly that outcome through careful messaging. She achieved it, apparently, by simply telling the truth.
I have also, since Tuesday, found myself rereading old committee transcripts from years back, curious whether this councillor has always answered this way and I have simply been too jaded by the general pattern to notice the exceptions when they occurred, or whether this represents a genuine, recent shift in her own approach. The earlier record is decidedly more mixed, which suggests something has changed, whether through experience, through a specific piece of feedback I am not privy to, or simply through the accumulated confidence of enough years in the role to stop fearing the follow-up question. Whatever the cause, I intend to keep watching for whether it holds.
Further coverage and commentary from this desk runs at my author page, alongside the wider paper at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/