Tag: accountability

CIVIC came about when a group of councillors and ex councillors met on line. They shared concerns about the activities of their councils. Groups of intelligent, articulate and knowledgeable councillors and ex- councillors discussed each others’ concerns, provided answers and support. But the issues didn’t go away, and in fact, when armed with information or advice, those individuals began to experience another recurring issue – they became labelled ‘trouble makers’ or worse. 

After reading yet another example of what looked like the bullying of a councillor for questioning what the council was doing, one of them suggested meeting up, to share experiences and see if they could get to the bottom of why this was happening and change it.

‘We met several times and decided to form a group. The more we met, the more examples emerged. Across the country, large and small councils with different responsibilities and budgets, appeared to be having difficulties following their own standing orders, policies and procedures, national legislation and the code of conduct. Some seemed oblivious or resistant to any responsibility to adhere to the findings of monitoring officers or external auditors…and everywhere, councillors and ex councillors trying to scrutinise and hold them to account were suffering a great deal for trying to do so.’

After a period of gathering lots of examples of ‘issues’, the group has summarised what’s going wrong as follows:

Town and parish councils have insufficient external accountability. No body has a remit within current legislation to go further than issue recommendations and council personnel act with impunity knowing this.

Some council personnel (staff and councillors) are repeatedly failing to adhere to legislation, policies and standing orders, and ignoring the recommendations they receive from monitoring officers and external auditors regarding these wrong doings.

While a town and parish council is a public facing organisation with a responsibility to provide certain services to the electorate, there are no minimum standards for service delivery, or personnel management, nor any minimum qualification or monitoring of capability.

The council itself investigates any complaints about its performance and activities with ultimate say on whether complaints are legitimate or upheld, or even ‘valid’. 

Groups of personnel on councils can in some cases bully and isolate colleagues who attempt to hold them to account. These people often have no understanding of the nature of bullying in the workplace and are held to a different standard as council personnel, both in terms of tolerating bullying behaviour and the assessment of whether someone is a bully. 

Councils are generally supported by a regional advisory body which is paid a subscription to provide legal and training support. Individual councillors and members of the public are badly served in this system for advice and support when trying to hold councils to account.

We consider these issues to be symptoms of the fact that there is no external governance of these councils. There is no external accountabilty for individual personnel or councils as a body. Legislation is insufficient to provide monitoring officers and external auditors with anything more than the ability to make recommendations to councils and individuals within them. 

CIVIC believes that these problems must be addressed as soon as possible to prevent more damage to the credibility of town and parish councils, and more waste and/or misuse of public money. Standards for council services and their internal activities will only be improved by external governance and accountability and changes to and tightening up of existing legislation.

CIVIC has a website which has begun recording its members’ experiences and which is where you can read its submission to the Committee on Standards in Public Life for its consultation on accountability of public bodies.