Swindon Borough Councillor attendance records

Prompted by Mr Thompson’s antics, I’ve been trawling through the record of meeting attendance for Swindon Borough Councillors during 2007. Taking an entry in the attendance page of ‘Present’ or ‘In attendance’ as meaning they were there, and any other entry as meaning that they should have been there but weren’t, I get some interesting results. Note that I have considered all meetings for which councillor attendance is listed on the council’s website: some of these committees are described as ‘independent’, but presumably are closely related to the council’s business otherwise why would they be listed?

In terms of attendance rates, the top five councillors of 2007 were:

• Mr Montaut: 7 meetings out of 7 – 100%
• Mr Holland: 29 meetings out of 30 – 97%
• Mr Moffatt: 44 meetings out of 46 – 96%
• Mr Tomlinson: 22 meetings out of 23 – 96%
• Mr Shaw: 38 meetings out of 40 – 95%

Another 15 councillors attended over 90% of the meetings they are recorded against. The five councillors with the worst attendance rates were:

• Mr Short: 12 meetings out of 27 – 44%
• Mr Baker: 7 meetings out of 20 – 35%
• Mr Thompson: 8 meetings out of 24 – 33%
• Mr Dobie: 5 meetings out of 15 – 33%
• Mr Wiltshire: 9 meetings out of 38 – 24%

Two other councillors had attendance levels of less than 50%, one of whom stood down at the last elections.

The full set of data on which this analysis was based, including links to the meeting attendance records, is available as a comma delimited text file. Please mention komadori’s green corner when referring to this data.
Update, Sunday 24 Februrary 2008: OpenOffice and Excel files of the full data now uploaded.
Update, Wednesday 5 March 2008: Data now published as pages on my website. There’s also a lively discussion going on the TalkSwindon forum.