Toby Perkins, Labour’s parliamentary candidate has told the Lib Dems running Chesterfield Borough Council that years of failure at consulting with so called ‘hard to reach groups’ must stop if the Council is going to move forward.

Speaking at a meeting of the full Council, Toby focused particularly on the fact that the gay, lesbian and bisexual community had been completely neglected within the Council’s Community engagement strategy promoting how the Council would look to improve it’s record of consulting with minority groups.

Under the Lib Dems Chesterfield Borough Council has been slated on more than one occasion for it’s failure to consult with people from hard to reach groups such as young people, unemployed people, GLBT community, ethnic minorities and those with chaotic lifestyles.

Toby Perkins said: “They just don’t seem to get it. If you really want to make progress in reducing poverty and crime and then you need to be talking to people right across the spectrum from minority groups to those with chaotic lifestyles and drug and alcohol dependency.

Yet here we have the Community engagement strategy and it says little more than we’ll take it to the Community Forum.

Now whilst I support the work that Community Forums do, they are attended by a small percentage of the community and by definition those who turn up to Community Forums are almost certainly not ‘hard to reach’.

It’s not good enough and I really hope that we see some real progress on this. It’s no wonder the Council has had so many PR own goals when it is only consulting with a tiny fraction of the community.”