Here is my short(ish) summary of the Full Council meeting on Wednesday.

We heard from community groups first, including the delightful experience of being sung to by a group of school children.

Then, we moved the questions to the Executive Members segment. This should be a time to ask about big city issues. Instead, opposition councillors wasted their time asking about small, local, if important problems, they could have just spoken to officers or the Executive Member about directly to fix - but it's interesting how many don't, and then wait for a public meeting rather than getting the problem resolved sooner for their residents.

I find many of their questions tedious for this reason. They are clearly just trying to get headlines or clips for social media.

They generally don't give any context to the question and then complain when they get a long answer, and they don't really help check how the council is running in most cases, which is the entire point of them.

​The Tories spent most of their time and questions claiming the tram was cancelled. It hasn't been cancelled. In fact, while many of them were speaking, the government was on TV confirming new rail upgrades for Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, and Liverpool, and a reconfirmation that the tram would go ahead, if slightly delayed, as surprisingly to no one, building a whole brand new tram system is more complicated than it looks.

​Next was the Advisory Climate Emergency Committee report. It was a good summary of a year of hard work.

Then we debated the White Papers.

​First up was the Tory paper on parking charges in some parks. Nobody likes charges, but the Tories seem to forget their national government had cut Leeds Council budget for 14 years. This resulted in a 70% reduction in real spending power of the council by the end of their time in government.

​The money raised by these charges will be reinvested back into those parks. The other parties won't admit that money has to come from somewhere.

​The Greens had the strangest view. They voted against charges now but said they want them later to stop people using cars. But they only want them after public transport gets better. That will take years, and I don't think we should pause park improvements that will benefit people in the long-term.

It is typical double-speak, trying to please everyone and one of the advantages of being in opposition rather than actually having to make decisions.

​The second White Paper was from the Lib Dems on proposed planning rule changes. They claimed that changes by the government to speed up building would mean overriding local decision makers completely and result in instant approvals.

​This is just scaremongering. We need to build homes and infrastructure more quickly, and government reforms will prioritise how decisions are made. This is very different to giving a free-for-all to developers, and the removal of local oversight.

The Tories also kept repeating a misleading claim about "grey belt" land, even though their argument has already been debunked, again, because they oversimplify their argument and completely ignore all the other procedures that are currently in place when it comes to deciding land allocations for development.

Headlines before facts.

​The third White Paper was from the administration.

It welcomed the creation of the new Waste Crime Team to reduce waste related crime and highlighted that since the pandemic, fly-tipping in Leeds has gone down, with significant work being done by The Serious Environmental Crime Team to achieve this by dealing with commercial dumpers and the establishment of the accredited waste carriers scheme.

The opposition then tried to claim Manchester prosecuted thousands of people for fly-tipping, and asked why Leeds didn't. This is misleading. If, the Greens had checked the facts, they would know those are mostly litter fines, not fly-tipping cases.

Fly-tipping is hard to prove in court and so the idea that any council takes thousands of people to court a year for fly tipping, when courts are already full, is hard to believe.

​Finally, here is something you won't hear from the opposition parties: they almost always vote as a block. Yes, Tories, Greens, Lib Dems, SDP, Reform, etc. voted together on most things. They probably won't put that in their election leaflets come May