We have posted on the parish website a notice of the 2024 Annual Parish Meeting, to be held on 23^rd April. This is not a Parish Council meeting. It is a meeting for parishioners – for you – that the Parish Council is legally required to organise.

The requirement for Parish Councils to hold an Annual Parish Meeting stems from legislation dating to 1972. The purpose of the meeting, as stated at that time, is to enable the registered electors to discuss parish affairs and to have a say on anything they consider valuable to the people of the parish.

We have, properly, organised these meetings over the years, but like melting snow attendance has reduced over those years to, for at least the last 2 years and literally, nothing. It’s now a meeting without a purpose or any participants – the bureaucrat’s dream.

The reason is obvious. The legislation was framed and passed decades before widespread mobile communications, the internet and social media revolutionised the way government and councils communicate with their residents and keep them informed about local, regional and national issues.  

Despite the world having gone somewhere else since 1972, the continuing legal obligation on Parish Councils to organise an Annual Parish Meeting reflects sepia-tinted social expectations, organisational cultures and ways of working redolent of “The Vicar of Dibley.”

I believe the whole idea of an Annual Parish Meeting is now an outdated anachronism, a cause of wholly unnecessary, no-value-added work for small councils like us.

I feel strongly that it is time that it should be optional for small councils to hold an APM, at their discretion. I have argued my case with Jacob Rees-Mogg, but it’s clear that there is no political appetite or parliamentary time to revisit the 1972 Local Government Act.

So, stuck in our Groundhog Day timewarp, here we are again offering you the chance to attend a meeting no-one is interested in.

David Orme

Chairman, Dunkerton & Tunley parish Council