A ROAD safety committee which has been disbanded without notice and without consultation has called a special meeting and contacted its MP.

Guisborough Area Road Safety Committee is taking action after Redcar and Cleveland Council cabinet decided to abandon the group.

Mary Kirkpatrick, chairman of the committee and a town councillor, said the group had operated for more than 30 years, as had similar groups across the borough.

But a letter had arrived from John Harbor of the council's democratic services department, informing the committee that the cabinet had decided on June 3 that the borough's area road safety committees would be discontinued.

Instead a central committee, to be a sub-committee of the council made up of members from the development scrutiny committee with co-opted volunteers, would be formed to discuss road safety issues.

Coun Glyn Nightingale, cabinet member for corporate resources, said that the change would benefit local people, because they would have direct access to those co-opted on to the committee.

He described it as "a major innovation in the way the council operates."

He said the decision was made after re-examining councillors' participation in outside bodies: "We decided we would not be sending members to the road safety committees.

"We were saying it was unnecessary to send people, and expensive. We wanted to cut back on the cost, we felt there were alternative ways of doing things."

Coun Nightingale said the new arrangements would not lead to the council neglecting road safety.

However, Coun Kirkpatrick said no elected member of Redcar and Cleveland Council had attended the Guisborough road safety meetings for years.

The police and one of the council's road safety officers did attend, which meant local people had direct access to the people who could tackle any problems or issues raised.

She said: "I think the way this has been handled by the council is absolutely disgusting. It's disgraceful. These are local issues, and the idea was we could raise these issues with the police and council officers and get something done, which has worked brilliantly.

"But this is how they treat us now; we are very angry and we want to take this further."

Coun Kirkpatrick fears that the new sub-committee will be less accessible for local people and will not have the same passion for local issues.

"These are important things and these people on the area committee know the local issues. This new council sub-committee won't be any use, people won't go to talk about local issues there.

"We were not consulted, democracy seems to have gone out of the window, they are taking the power away from the local people. It's disgusting."

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