What is the Town Meeting?

This meeting takes place every year at 10:30am, usually on the second Saturday in May, in the New Hall (in parish council election years, it takes place at the end of April).  The purpose of the Town Meeting is to provide the opportunity for the community to get together to discuss important issues and make their collective views known to councillors, and for councillors to report back to the community and, if necessary, be held to account. It also provides the chance for community groups such as Neighbourhood Watch to report and for important external bodies such as the police to meet with residents.

Anybody who is eligible to attend the Town Meeting can raise whatever issues they wish (contact a ward councillor). The meeting has an agenda but this provides a guide to proceedings, not an inflexible directive. The event is therefore an exercise in real local democracy, in origin something like the old Anglo-Saxon moot which is the basis of our democratic process.

While the Town Meeting cannot take decisions on behalf of any other body, the views that are aired are an expression of the will of the community and can therefore carry weight with parish councillors and those outside Winchelsea who take decisions that affect the Town. The Town Meeting is particularly useful for gauging public support for new proposals. It was at the Town Meeting that the idea of a Town Plan was introduced.

You can review the issues covered in the 2008 Town Meeting and read the draft minutes of that meeting.

Town Meetings are advertised in the Town Diary, which can be found on the parish noticeboard and this website. The next Town meeting will be Saturday, 2nd May 2009. An agenda will be posted closer to the date of the meeting.

Since 2007, the Town Meeting has been preceeded and followed by a Community Exhibition, at which clubs and societies advertise their activities and try to recruit new members.

The Town Meeting is open to anybody who lives in Winchelsea, which means, persons actually resident (part or full-time) within the boundaries of the ward of Winchelsea as defined for electoral purposes. Post code and telephone area code do not define Winchelsea (eg the series of post codes for Winchelsea includes streets in Winchelsea Beach, and the 01797 area code includes Rye, Camber, Lydd, etc). It is possible for non-residents whose daily place of work is in Winchelsea, and non-residents who believe they have a material interest in the town, to attend, but only by invitation (non-residents should contact the ward councillors).

The Town Meeting is convened by Winchelsea's parish councillors, but is a community meeting, not a council meeting.

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