DORSET Council is still failing to properly listen to town and parish councils – according to Dorchester independent councillor Alistair Chisholm.

He has called on the unitary authority to ‘get its act together’ before it loses all credibility.

Cllr Chisholm told Dorchester town councillors that he had found town and parish councillors across the county increasingly disillusioned with the attitudes of the larger authority on a range of issues.

Dorset Council has previously pledged to improve relationships which many saw as hitting an all-time low around the time the new council was created in 2019.

“We are simply not being served well by the highest local council authority in the county,” he said, saying that something needed to be done to ensure the views of town and parish councils “counted for more.”

Recent issues for Dorchester have included planning decisions where both the town council and ward members from the county town had opposed applications – only to be voted through by planning committee members from outside the area.

Other issues centre around the hand-over of assets to town and parish councils.

Fellow independent Cllr Les Fry said he believed there were some signs that Dorset Council might change its ways and was considering a shift from the existing Cabinet system to the more inclusive committee system.

He said the current view from Dorset Council leader Cllr Spencer Flower was that further discussions would be held in September with a decision before the elections in 2023.

Cllr Chisholm said that idea was laughable and a definition of kicking something into the long grass. He called for a public referendum to speed up the process – which had happened when the former West Dorset District Council refused to change away from the Cabinet system, being finally forced to do so by an overwhelming public majority when put to the vote.

Cllr Chisholm said the Liberal Democrats opposition group on the Dorset Council should keep to their pledge to go for a petition for a referendum and force Dorset Council to change.

“If we had a referendum we could get it done and dusted much earlier,” he said, “there’s little evidence the current Cabinet are inclined to change…

“There is a great deal of dissatisfaction with Dorset Council, it would get the necessary signatures in no time at all.