Not all residents oppose Powys County Council’s decisions, despite criticism on social media, its political leader believes.

At a joint meeting of all three council scrutiny committees on Friday, March 14, councillors and lay committee members discussed the authority’s performance during the third quarter of 2024/2025 from October to the end of December.

They looked at the council’s Corporate and Strategic Equality Plan Scorecard, which evaluates performance against its own expectations for three council objectives.

Measures around public engagement were included in the report.

In quarter two, 26 per cent of respondents said they were satisfied with their opportunities to have a say and felt they could engage in decision-making.

But data for quarter three (September to December) was unavailable.

Conservative Cllr Amanda Jenner, who chaired the joint committee meeting, asked if there were any past council decisions that now need to be revisited and discussed again with residents.

Cllr Jenner said: “Things which at the time may not have been a big deal but the public becomes aware of something and increasingly raises their concerns through their councillor, community council or social media.”

An example is the new booking system set to begin on March 25, along with waste charges at Powys’ recycling centres from April 1.

While the decision to bring this in was agreed at the budget setting meeting in February 2024 – concerns about the implications for residents have only been raised during the last couple of months.

A petition against the scheme has 4,455 signatures and opposition attempts to debate the issue at council meetings have been shut down.

Council leader, Liberal Democrat Cllr Gibson-Watt, said: “A decision is taken and perhaps it’s not implemented for some time.

“Then when the time comes to implement it, suddenly everybody becomes aware of it and says they don’t like it.

“But we must always remember the silent majority. It’s important not to overreact to things that come back at us.

“It’s inevitable that some people won’t like what we are doing, and they tend to make a lot of noise.

“The ones that are content or don’t care tend to say nothing.”

He added that the council needed to feel “confident” in its decision making especially if it is based on thorough research that provides the evidence to back it up.

Cllr Gibson-Watt said: “Our public elected us to take these decisions, and we should not shirk taking them because we might get noise about it.”

Earlier, Liberal Democrat Cllr Glyn Preston had brought up the public engagement measures and asked how the council collected data.

Head of business intelligence and governance, Catherine James, explained that the data comes from additional questions in online surveys and the council’s ‘have your say’ website section. Since no consultations were live during the three-month period, the sample size was so small - just 0.006 per cent of the Powys population - that it was deemed not worth reporting.

Ms James said: “We’re reviewing this to give us something more meaningful and useable.”