Swindon Borough Councillor attendance rates 2008

In a similar way that I did for last year, I’ve trawled through the record of meeting attendance for Swindon Borough Councillors during 2008. Taking an entry in the attendance page of ‘Present’ or ‘In attendance’ as meaning they were there, and any other entry as meaning that they should have been there but weren’t, I get some interesting results. Note that I have considered all meetings for which councillor attendance is listed on the council’s website, except for one committee. That exception is the Wiltshire & Swindon Joint Police Committee for which there is no attendance record for most meetings and, for the couple where there are, the record does not appear to be reliable.

At the moment, the information for five meetings is not available. This will be added when the information becomes available and if appropriate the figures and lists below will be updated.

In terms of attendance rates, the top five councillors of 2008 were:

• Ms Tomlinson: 31 meetings out of 31 – 100%
• Mr Tomlinson: 19 meetings out of 19 – 100%
• Mr Parry: 16 meetings out of 16 – 100%
• Mr Montaut: 9 meetings out of 9 – 100%
• Mr Cherry: 9 meetings out of 9 – 100%

Two councillors that stood down in May, Mr Lister and Mr Barnes, also attained a 100% record in 2008, tho’ for only three meetings. Another 10 councillors attended over 90% of the meetings they are recorded against.

The councillors with the worst attendance rates in 2008 (60% or less) were:

• Mr Edwards: 18 meetings out of 30 – 60%
• Mr Baker: 12 meetings out of 20 – 60%
• Ms Duff: 13 meetings out of 22 – 59%
• Ms Martin: 7 meetings out of 13 – 54%
• Mr Sharp: 2 meetings out of 4 – 50%
• Mr Wiltshire: 10 meetings out of 27 – 37%
• Mr James: 2 meetings out of 8 – 25%
• Mr Thompson: 0 meetings out of 3 – 0%

Of these, Messrs James, Sharp and Thompson are no longer councillors. Of those that are still councillors, Mr Wiltshire’s record stands out as being particularly poor.

The overall attendance rate in 2008 (80%) was slightly better than in 2007 (77%). Full details of all the Swindon Borough Councillors’ 2008 meeting attendances are available in the archive.

Update, 17 January 2009: The figures above have now been updated. Attendance records for two meetings remain unavailable.

Update, 15 February 2009: The records are now complete. The full data is available in comma delimited text (csv), OpenOffice and Excel format files.