In May we fought the election in Furnace Green ward with two main points. I’ll admit that ‘fought’ might be a bit of a strong word as we didn’t really do much there: knowing that it was unlikely to be a gain for us we only gave it a little time and only produced one piece of literature besides the election addresses.

But as we were only doing the one piece of literature we decided to just say what we thought and it turned out to be the most controversial leaflet in the town, leading to a bit of a row in the pages of the local papers and the Labour leader calling the Tory leader a wimp. Which was fun.

The topic which caused the controversy was our suggestion that a Tory council would lead to cuts in services, with at least one of the town’s major public assets sold off or transferred to a trust, the major public assets being the stadium, the Hawth theatre, Tilgate Park, the rare breeds farm and the golf course.

At the time this was called scaremongering. As it happens we were, and still are worried that this could be a possibility having looked at the booklet which came with the annual council tax bill showing large reductions in the overall budget, mostly coming from the Leisure part of the budget.

An argument I didn’t make at the time, because it never even occurred to me, was one which was pointed out in a letter to the Observer after the elections pointing out that all the things we said were only things which the Tories threatened were likely if the council houses were not sold off – since the housing stock transfer fell through then these things were likely to happen… unless all those claims in the councils bullying letters to tenants were just scaremongering.

In other words our election material was only scaremongering if the council’s housing campaign was. Well since we have now found out that the claims in those council letters, brochures and DVDs were exaggerated maybe it will turn out that everything is safe after all. I wouldn’t bet on it, but its a bit too early to be in a position to say “told you so” just yet.

Ironically the “told you so” moment comes with the second main topic of our election leaflet, which was really just a bit of rhetorical mischief, but turns out to have some substance.

What we said was that Furnace Green had an unfortunate track record with its councillors. First of all they had one who spent the last 6 months of her term working on an oil rig in Africa or something like that. Her replacement was someone who, as far as we can make out, never lived in the town but continued to live in Brighton, and lost most of his interest in Crawley once he failed to get selected as parliamentary candidate here – then lost all interest when he got selected in Brighton.

In the first instance it was just one of those things. It can happen that you get a transfer or an opportunity which means moving away. Unfortunate but unavoidable. Following that up with another absentee councillor is just careless. Our slightly provocative stance was that neither Thakordas Patel nor I were likely to be be going anywhere and would therefore be available to concentrate on representing Furnace Green – but really this was based on the track record in Furnace Green and not this year’s candidate.

As far as we could make out the candidate was a local person, pillar of the community, regular fixture at the local church and everything so we didn’t push that too hard. it seemd unlikely that lightning could strike the same place three times in a row.

But what we didn’t know at the time, and you can be sure we would have mentioned it if we had, is that the Tory candidate, Carol Eade, was already a district councillor in Adur and vice chair on a couple of committees down there. This is a fact which I only found out very recently.

So it turns out that Furnace Green elected another councillor who has responsibilities elsewhere, and not only that but potential conflicts of interest. She did not resign her seat in Adur and continues to serve on both councils, drawing two sets of allowances, but is surely unable to carry out both jobs properly.

But surely we have plenty of examples of councillors who sit on both the borough council and the county council, so why is this any different? Actually I am not in favour of that either, but its quite common practice and quite different. For a start those councillors normally represent the same area but at different levels. The county council meetings are during the day and the borough meetings are in the evenings so it is possible to go to all relevant meetings and when you are in your ward you are there representing all the people who voted for you at different elections.

That is not the case with Cllr Eade. Adur council meets in the evenings so there can be clashes with the Crawley meetings, and whichever place you are in you can only be representing one of your sets of voters.

I can remember when I was a councillor in Crawley. There were weeks when I had meetings four nights of the week. So much of my time was occupied with matters relating to Crawley or specifically to Broadfield that I know I could not have managed the time to also serve on another council 40km away with meetings at the same time.

From looking at the two councils’ web sites, it appears that Cllr Eade serves on the bare minimum of committees so the chances of a clash in meetings she serves on is a lot less likely, but this is far from ideal. Firstly it means she is not doing a full job on either council, and increasing the workload for all her colleagues slightly, but serving on committees is only part of the job. Quite often you will want to attend committees you don’t serve on so you can keep abreast of everything. If there is a Crawley council committee meeting on a topic which affects your ward on the same evening of the Adur full council meeting you can’t do both can you? And remember that official council meetings are only a part of the workload – there are group meetings in both places, training sessions, workshops and then there are residents and tenants meetings and other things which don’t appear on the official diary.

(Talking of which – I would have done some research to see if Cllr Eade has any obvious diary clashes but I fell at the first hurdle when I failed to find the list of council committee meetings on the Crawley web site. Another example of how crap it is. Adur have a lovely full-year calendar on theirs, linked to from all sorts of places and not so much easy to find as hard to miss.)

On top of all those obligations, councils place their members on outside bodies to represent the council’s interests, and those bodies all have meetings to attend. As it happens Eade is on very few of them either – another example of her being given deliberately light workloads at both councils. I can only imagine that the Tory groups on both councils are complicit in fixing it this way to facilitate being on both authorities. Either that or Cllr Eade is not very competent so they try to minimise the chances of her being able to cock anything up. Perhaps they could tell us which it is?

So it looks like Furnace Green did manage to elect another councillor who is unable to dedicate their whole time and attention to Crawley, when they had a choice of two Labour candidates who would have been here full time. Told you so!

It may be that Cllr Eade is actually serving Crawley fully – in which case she is short-changing Adur. I wonder if the constituents of Eastbrook ward know that their councillor moved to Crawley last June, and now serves on Crawley council?

There is another aspect to this: is there a conflict of interests in being on two district councils within the same county? On the register of members’ interests in Crawley Cllr Eade has listed her membership of Adur council under section 2.2 (member or hold a position of general control or management of a public authority or body exercising functions of a public nature) so at least that interest is registered. However there is no such corresponding entry in the Adur register of interests.

That is interesting, but more to the point is probably illegal. I have been out of the loop for a while, but my understanding is that any changes in circumstance have to be recorded on the register within 28 days. It is more than 28 days since the elections in Crawley, but the last change to the register in Adur was a change of address notification in June 2006. As far as I can see that puts Cllr Eade in a position of failing to comply with the code of conduct for council members.

Of course, as I live in Crawley I am not too bothered about what goes on in Adur, but I shall be mentioning this to my party colleagues down there, and they may want to make something of it.

There other small inconsistencies in the two registers of members’ interests but I think they are trivial. For example, the Adur register lists membership of something called the Conservative Councillors Association as a “body whose principal purposes include the influence of public opinion or policy” but the Crawley register contains no reference to that body. In the equivalent section it just lists membership of the Conservative Party – although I thought the normal practice would be to list membership of the “Horsham and Crawley Conservative Association”. But that is the sort of thing which is a bit of a grey area – you never know whether you need to declare it or not. The safest course is to list anything which might matter just in case.

I suspect that missing off the Conservative Councillors Association is an honest mistake of omission, but I can’t say the same of this May’s election material. If you are asking people to vote for you to be a councillor and you have several years experience of being a councillor, that is the sort of thing you would put in an election address on the basis that even more people will consider you the right choice if they know you have relevant experience. As far as I can remember, there was no mention of being or having been an Adur councillor.

The only reason I can think of for that is that the Tories did not want us to know, so the information was withheld. If we had known we would have pointed out the conflicts of interest and potential conflicts of time, and the Tories knew we would have done that so they counted on us not being aware of the identities of every councillor in small authorities down on the coast. And it worked.

So we not only have a part-time councillor, but one who is probably in breach of some or other code of conduct in Adur and who stood under false pretenses. Nice.