“What do Councillors do?”

One of the most frustrating things is that this question is frequently asked but when it comes down to it, many people don’t know what the Council is supposed to do or how it is structured these days.

For those of you who do know, perhaps you should skip this page. For those who don’t, I thought a brief outline might be useful.

Dudley Borough has over 300,000 residents and is split into 24 wards, each with approximately 10,000 residents eligible to vote. Each ward has three Councillors each of whom are elected for a term of four years. This is why, in any four year cycle, we have a year without local elections.

The primary duty of a Councillor is to help his or her constituents with problems over Council service delivery. When members are involved in political groups, the largest or controlling group also has responsibility for Council policy direction and, depending on which committees they sit on, they will also be involved in the Borough wide aspects of service planning of one sort or another.

Most people remember the old system where there were service committees and policy decisions were made by a collection of Councillors under the Chairmanship of the controlling group.

This all changed with the Local Government Act 2000. Councils were given a number of options including an elected Mayor and the ‘Leader and Cabinet’ model. Dudley opted for the latter. Under this system the Leader of the Council has responsibility for overall policy and the Cabinet (of 9 others) has executive responsibility for seeing to it that those policies are carried out.

Service committees were abolished and ‘select committees’ were created.

According to the rules, select committees have a scrutiny and oversight role to hold the Cabinet to account and assist in policy development. In reality they have very little power and have led to many Councillors feeling that they have been left out in the cold.

In Dudley Borough, there are a number of statutory committees, five select committees and five Area committees who meet within the geographical area that they serve.

If you want more detailed information about Dudley Council and its services, you should visit Dudley Councils Web site where there is much more detailed information.