COUNCILLORS’ FIVE WEEK BREAK

CRUMBRIA: 28/07/2025: EXCLUSIVE

WHAT will the 46 councillors on Crumberland Council have to do next month apart from claim their allowances, wonders my spy?

That’s because the meetings calendar for August is entirely blank.

Did someone declare it National Doing Nothing Month?

**Nothing to see here: Cumberland Council’s meetings calendar.**

My spy calls it a “generously long recess” and a “five-week hiatus,” although that’s not to say they won’t have work to do in their wards.

But matey boy insists it’s a tad inappropriate given what he calls the Labour council’s “ballooning debt and an unresolved budget shortfall of £17 million.”

He has a point. A look at calendars from previous years shows that in August 2024, there were SIX meetings of Crumberland Council, and in August 2023, there were NINE.

Under the shadow authority in 2022, the month of August was packed with 22 meetings as Carlisle, Copeland and Allerdale all had business to conduct throughout August.

Neighbours Wokemoreland & Farcical Council aren’t having an August break. By comparison, they’re positively blue-arsed flies with four meetings planned.

The council will return to very busy business in September with 21 meetings, but in the year 2025, we can’t think of any other organisation that wipes the calendar clean in August.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that Councillors get a basic allowance of £14,500 a year.

Totted up, it all amounts to circa £1 million a year once you add expenses and special responsibilities, etc.

And in any other decade of local newspapers, any Council leadership having five weeks off from council meetings would be headline, front page news.

Questions would be asked, and answers demanded.

Perhaps Crumbria’s media is having a summer sojourn too?

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