BRIDPORT Town Council’s experiment in engaging the public in its business saw one person in the audience.

For the first time councillors set aside 45 minutes at the beginning of their meeting for an open public forum.

The topic on the agenda was how to increase public participation in local government.

But there was only one person in the audience and she did not want to speak.

So councillors agreed to discuss the topic on their own.

Cllr Kelvin Clayton said he thought the topic would be a good one because democracy was so much in the news.

He said: “No one least of all me thinks democracy is perfect but it is the best of all the other options. So the question is how do we improve democracy? How do we get members of the public more involved particularly with the town council?”

He said he’d hoped the public would come in with lots of ideas and start a dialogue but that hadn’t happened.

Mayor Ros Kayes said: “Inviting people to a meeting clearly isn’t enough.”

Cllr Sandra Brown said the way to engage the public was to get them really angry.

She said: “You do need to get the public really angry to make them come.

“My very first full council as mayor we’d been talking about pedestrianising South Street and we’d also been talking about getting the town hall done and moving the butcher’s shop.

“This place was full and they all came dressed in black as if it was for a funeral.”

Cllr Clayton said his fear would be that approach would just perpetuate the ‘us and them’ with people simply protesting about council suggestions.

He said: “My point is we should have more of a collaboration.”

Dave Rickard said: “I like to think this council works by consensus politics. Real politics is about people and doing things.

“Even though it sounded like a good idea to have this discussion clearly it didn’t fire the imagination.”

He said work on the neighbourhood plan had actually increased democracy almost more than anything else in the last eight years and all of the people involved were not councillors.

Cllr Julian Jones said the council needed to have proposals for significant improvements to Bridport to engage people.

He said: “Obviously South Street pedestrianisation would be heavily supported by the people of Bridport. There would be opponents but the vast number of people would be energised and they would be extremely pleased to come along.”

He said the Green Party would be putting forward the idea in the future.

Council leader SarahWilliams said the subject had come up off and on over the past eight years and the council was waiting for a county council’s feasibility study and when that was done the idea would be discussed.