It would appear that a momentous day in the search for greater transparency at Boston Borough Council has come and gone without anything apparently being done.
More than three months ago, Boston Labour Party proclaimed on its website: “Transparency arrives in Boston at last!”
It expressed delight that we were moving closer to a time when the people of Boston would be able to see their councillors’ register of interest on the Boston Borough Council website – rather than only  being accessible for inspection between  Monday and Friday by personal visit to the Municipal Buildings and asking to see them.
Repeated questions led to a definitive answer at a council meeting on March 1^st, when leader Peter Bedford declared: “The current legislation requires the Register of Interests to be available for public inspection, which is the procedure followed by this council and many others. 
“However, with the impending changes to the Standards regime, all interests will have to be published on the Council’s website, including parish councillors, from 1st July 2012.”
The response was to say: “Boston Labour Councillors are delighted that you will have the opportunity to see this information online, but it is sad that they knew the Localism Act included this legislation but they couldn’t admit it. So we have now got attendance at meetings; recorded declaration of interest at meetings; and soon member’s registers of interest all available on the Boston Borough Council website – not bad progress from the Labour Group in ten months, but there are still many authorities that have got more information about their members on their websites than we currently have at West Street.”
We spent some time yesterday scanning the pages of Boston Borough Council’s website to try to find this new information – but it has eluded our efforts.
We can only conclude that the information – which we understand is a legal requirement – has either not been put on the website, or is so well hidden as to be  unfindable.
We were prompted to do this since Labour has now moved on to another line of attack in its fight for transparency.
In its Wednesday blog  - which appears simultaneously as a letter in the Boston Standard more often than not – there is a hard to follow extension of the argument for greater transparency.
We would have hoped that July 1^st would have been a date marked in Labour’s diary and action been taken when the promised information did not appear or was not made easily accessible.
We are sorry to say that Boston’s Labour group is beginning to disappoint.
Three councillors - all named Paul - who always refer to themselves “Boston Labour Councillors,”  seem  increasingly to resemble Cerberus,  the three-headed  hound of  Greek mythology.
Certainly, a lot of barking occurs - remember the outrage over the way the borough Chief Executive was paid which has now petered out and disappeared - but when it comes to biting, the teeth are kept in a jar by the door.

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