Exmouth’s Jarvis Close car park and frustrations with EDDC’s cabinet system | Opinion

Firstly, seasons greetings to all readers of this Nub article.

If you have been a regular reader, you will already be aware that I have expressed concerns about the future of the Jarvis Close toilet block and associated car park in Littleham. See previous article.

When cabinet last met at the end of November it was asked to consider a report which stated in regard to certain car parks that "these car parks are important assets in their respective areas, but other options for their maintenance and long-term use should be assessed to ensure they continue to be the best use of land in consideration of other council priorities".

In this report, the Jarvis Close car park came up for consideration. The report acknowledged that it is "a small car park containing a toilet block that has been deemed surplus to requirements. The car park is mainly used by residents and those visiting the local parade of shops and small supermarket nearby. There is plenty of free kerbside parking in this area, and the car park and toilet block have been identified by the housing services lead as an area with potential for development. An attractive scenario for this site is that it can be used to help meet local housing need, whilst also maintaining an element of free parking for visitors of the nearby businesses. Due to its size, it is not commercially viable in its own right, but could help meet future EV charging needs".

In the end, the cabinet selected option A which was "explore housing potential for this site, whilst seeking to maintain some free parking".

I disagreed with this decision and attempted to ask full council last week when it met at Ocean Exmouth by using what is called a 'call-in' to ask the cabinet to look at this again.

Unfortunately, this was not possible, so we now have a situation where one ward member who sits on the cabinet agrees with the cabinet and the other (myself, who is outside the cabinet) disagrees.

I find this a bizarre way of making good and sensible decisions in the public interest.

Just to be clear, I am not against having housing on this site, I simply want to wait until the future of the toilet block is decided.

This is because if it's required for other uses such a café, as the mayor suggested could be the case, then the car park may also be required.

This process is a very useful guide to show readers that a ward member not in cabinet has very little ability to amend cabinet decisions if they feel strongly about them.

I remind readers that at the start of this council term in 2019, we were led to believe that some of the current cabinet members were looking at the cabinet system within the council under what is termed changes to governance arrangements, whereby the council moves away from a cabinet system to a committee-led system.

Just for the record, we can note that the well-known community blog East Devon Watch itself noted in response to a reader's comments:

"Both the cabinet system and the committee system have committees, which ultimately report to and are approved by the full council, but in the cabinet system a small subset of the full council makes the policies and decisions without the remainder of the full council having a vote or any real say.

"The key difference is that in the committee system, committees are represented by different parties in proportion to the membership of the full council, but a cabinet is appointed by the leader/ mayor and is typically formed only or mostly by members of the majority party and minority parties have far less influence."

Therefore, in terms of the process of running a council and ward members having their say or involvement, I would argue that today we are no further forward than we were a few years ago.

Yes, some would say in response that Covid was a reason which led to a delay in changing the governance system, but last week's full council meeting shows how difficult it is in reality to make changes to cabinet decisions.

In conclusion I feel that cabinet did not handle my suggestion about the Jarvis Close car park as best it could have done, especially as the Mayor of Exmouth expressed his doubts about option A at cabinet and yet he is not a ward member as readers will be aware.