I had a very strange experience at Full Council last week where—along with all my Green colleagues—I found myself voting for a Conservative Notice of Motion without the need to amend it.

The Conservative Group’s motion was questioning the fact that the administration had included a £70k cut to toilets in the budget papers but weeks after agreeing this at Budget Council (Greens voted against, by the way), Labour decided against it and reversed the decision.

Clearly, we’re not against keeping funding for public toilets, but this U-turn is a clear example of poor planning.

Now, we all know that Labour have a propensity for folding like a cheap suit on most decisions and none of us want even more attacks from them on our already crumbling public services after 16 years of austerity from Labour and Conservatives, we just want transparency!

One of the points in the motion was asking that the administration apologised to residents and community groups for the anxiety caused, but of course Labour voted the whole motion down.

Budget cuts are normally announced with time enough for community groups to mobilise and bring forward their views and the potential ramifications from their experienced point of view.

The administration seems to be creating policy by panic button and appear to have lost the manual, and half the buttons aren’t working.

Motions to Full Council give opposition parties the opportunity for all groups to work together on important issues but Labour have spent the last three years voting against or wrecking opposition parties’ motions, with the exception of the Green motion to adopt “Zane’s Law” two years ago.

Zane’s law was named after seven-year-old Zane Gbangbola who died 12 years ago after his home was flooded by water from the River Thames which had passed through a contaminated landfill site.

All three parties—Labour, Green and Conservative—voted in favour of the council compiling a register of land that may be contaminated—and for that register to be easily available to residents and this motion was brought to the chamber by Green councillor Kerry Pickett.

This is what full council should be, a forum for the betterment of our communities where we work together, not the administration baulking at any ask of them to write to their government ministers to demand action.

At full council we have a measly 30 minutes where councillors get to ask policy-related questions of the Labour administration and follow up with a supplementary question, want to guess what backbench Labour councillors do at this point?

Fielding questions to their own cabinet lead members means opposition councillors miss out on the chance to question and the 30 minutes runs out, like you couldn’t drop each other an email or make a call to ask this?

At the end of 30 minutes Opposition Councillors always ask for a suspension of standing orders so that all questions can be asked but Labour always vote this down.

Given that Labour nationally are about to be eviscerated in the upcoming local elections you could imagine that Greens will be in with a shout in our city elections next year – you can be assured that we will be changing the farce that Labour have made of our Full Council.

Unfortunately, the Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) and the introduction of a countywide mayor will mean that we will lose a huge swathe of our localism, transparency and scrutiny.

Our amazing taxi trade are currently up in arms as it appears that taxi licensing will be centralised with the mayor and policy, overview and scrutiny will be taken away from local authorities and councillors as an example.

LGR also means that the Cabinet system is here to stay as opposed to the far more democratic and inclusive committee system, but Greens feel that our Full Council meetings should be a place where residents, communities and their elected representatives can be heard more.

We are committed to opening up Full Council, shining a light on it and turning it into a forum where residents and opposition councillors can genuinely scrutinise and question the policy decisions of the administration to hopefully regain some of the trust that has been eroded in politics.

Steve Davis is Leader of the Opposition and Green Group Convenor.