One thing leads to another!

Your report (Friday June 14) as to how your correspondent, Geoff Cooper, using a Freedom of Information request, discovered that Bournemouth Council had spent £35,000 of Council Tax Payers money to engage the services of a recruitment agency to find a temporary executive director, prompted me to wonder what had happened to the Liberal Democrat party in Bournemouth to back up the questions implied in the answers to Mr Cooper’s FOI request.

With that in mind I visited the official website of the Bournemouth Liberal Democrat Party and my attention was immediately drawn to a posting today of a visit to a full Bournemouth Council meeting held in April ‘Council Meeting – an Exercise in Self Gratification’.

That account should be read by all councillors; whether is an accurate account is not for me to say; except that in one respect it echoes the view I formulated in January 2011 when I attended my first and only full council meeting where I found it extremely difficult to hear what was been said – that view was repeated in the website posting already referred to.

This was underlined in a report in the Echo on January 22, 2012 when the widow of the late Alderman and former Mayor Keith Rawlings complained that she was unable to hear the tributes being paid to her late husband a full Council meeting Perhaps Councillor John Beesley, Leader of the Council, can tell us what was the outcome of his stated reference of this matter to the council’s outsourcing partner Mouchel; was the hearing system repaired or has it broken down again?

It is surely a fundamental right, as Councillor West asserted in your earlier report, for residents who take the trouble to attend council meetings to hear what is going on!

Finally in the light of the High Court ruling last year that prayers should not form part of the official business of a Council meeting perhaps Tony Williams, the chief executive of the council, can indicate whether that ruling has been communicated to the council.

Few would quarrel with councillors or any one else holding private prayer meetings at a time and place of their own choosing but as the High Court ruled . They should not from part of any offficial Council agenda.

Gordon Cann Craigmoor Avenue, Bournemouth