TONIGHT I will be reporting from Huddersfield Town Hall on the monthly meeting of the 69 members of Kirklees Council.

As usual, deputations of concerned residents are free to come and speak for five minutes on anything from potholes to parking permits. Members of the public also have the chance to question councillors.

But next month’s meeting will be different. For a start, it will be a one-topic show, with the entire event devoted to the Local Development Framework.

For those of you who don’t know, the LDF is the council’s controversial blueprint to allow nearly 28,000 new homes to be built in Kirklees by 2028.

If the plan gets the green light, villages like Linthwaite and Skelmanthorpe will grow by more than a fifth in the next 20 years and the diggers will move on to green belt land in Honley, Almondbury and Ainley Top.

So it’s no surprise that the LDF has generated a lot of opposition, with anti-development groups springing up from Brockholes to Lindley.

Kirklees officers have come up with a novel way to cope with the high public interest in this issue: by banning people from speaking.

If council officers have their way, there will be no deputations and no chance for residents to question the people they elect at the LDF meeting on November 23.

Members of the public will still be allowed to attend the gathering, but only if they agree, like Victorian children, to be seen but not heard.

A report to councillors explains that the rules which govern their monthly get-togethers must be changed to “maintain the proposed timetable for the meeting”. In other words, democracy is all fine and well, but some of us have homes to go to (whether they’re in the green belt or not).

To be fair to the officers who came up with the gagging plan, there is no doubt that dozens of residents would speak against the LDF if given the chance to do so. We could be there all night.

But so what? When it comes to democracy, accountability must trump time-keeping every time.

A few years ago, when Kirklees was considering closing several high schools, the council went out of its way to allow dozens of angry parents to speak against the plans before making a decision.

Those marathon meetings at Dewsbury Town Hall were ill-tempered, unfocussed and agonisingly long. But they were magnificently democratic.

However, it seems that Kirklees officers have grown tired of this kind of accountability.

Since residents can’t speak at the LDF meeting next month, you might imagine this will free up more time for councillors to debate the blueprint.

Er, not quite. Officers propose kicking-off proceedings with an hour-long presentation given by themselves.

It’s worth bearing in mind that all councillors are familiar with the general issues around the LDF. They will receive the relevant paperwork at least a week before the meeting, more than enough time to sit down and read it.

So why do councillors need to spend 60 minutes looking at vacuous buzz-words on a PowerPoint screen before they can get cracking with the debate?

Will the officers’ slide-show include arguments for and against their blueprint, or just the case for sending in the diggers?

But the most cynical part of this ploy is the attempt to spin exclusion as inclusion.

Go to the Kirklees website and you’ll see that, far from being banned from speaking on the LDF plan, Joe Public has actually been invited to a “special” Cabinet meeting about the blueprint on November 8.

This event has been “organised specifically to allow all public views to be heard”.

Reading that, you might assume that Cabinet meetings usually take place in secret, but that Kirklees has decided to open things up for the day to allow the anti-LDF types to let off some steam.

But the fact is that all Cabinet meetings are held in public. Residents can turn up and ask councillors questions or speak about any item on the agenda.

So, while the council is taking special steps to allow planning officers to talk for an hour unchallenged, it is doing nothing special – despite the spin – to permit residents to speak.

All this comes in the same year that Kirklees hired private security guards to physically prevent dozens of left-wing protestors from attending a meeting where care cuts were being pushed through.

The mostly middle-aged and middle-class campaigners in the anti-LDF lobby may not think they have anything in common with placard-waving socialists.

But perhaps both groups should consider how inconvenient voices – whether shouting “save our services” or “save our green belt” – are silenced, either by brute force or sleight-of-hand.