I may have mentioned in the past how bloody useless the Crawley Borough Council website is.  This week’s example of uselessness is the obscurity of the list of nominations for the local elections.

On the front page is a link to the May elections.  Go to that page and there is a link to the list of nominations. Try that link and it doesn’t work.  It looks like an internal intranet link which won’t work for anyone outside the Town Hall.  Fortunately the document itself is on the public webserver and I was able to get to it by taking the intranet URL and replacing the start of if with the normal internet address – but I shouldn’t have to. (The link above works – it is what the one on the CBC website should be)

Even without such cock-ups the site is one of the least easy to navigate and least useful local government sites I have come across.  Having to work out the proper addresses of individual pages is just the icing on the cake.

Anyway…  I finally found out what I wanted:

Of the 13 seats up for election, Labour and the Tories are standing in all 13.  The Liberal Democrats are standing in 10 of them – and are not standing in the Broadfield South seat which they currently hold following a defection.  The BNP are standing in six wards, and the Justice Party are standing in Bewbush again.

There are no Greens, no independents ((and therefore no Richard Symonds for the first time in ages)) and no Respect-type candidates.  No ward has more than four candidates and no wards have two seats up, requiring multiple candidates, so it should be a very straightforward  election – especially in Broadfield South where it is a straight two-way fight between Labour and the Tories.

The wards where the BNP are standing are:

• Tilgate
• West Green
• Pound Hill South
• Ifield
• Gossops Green
• Bewbush