Agenda item

The committee considered the report of the Monitoring Officer on the revised Members’ Code of Conduct, following work by the Standards Working Group.

Questions and discussion on the revised code included:

·         Request for public consultation on the revised code, prior to recommendation to Council, in order to obtain public feedback on some elements of the code.  This was requested in light of recent parliamentary events in the media; and as other authorities had undertaken public consultation; and to capture the views of the “reasonable member of the public”;

·         The entire code was not suggested for public consultation, but elements such as the threshold for gifts and hospitality could be;

·         Undertaking any public consultation would require careful phrasing to obtain the feedback required, and not attract responses that could not reasonably be taken into account; as well as delay the adoption of the revised code;

·         Public engagement through means of consultation or for informing needed to be considered;

·         Best practice listed by the LGA with their model code was detailed as both an annual review of the Code, and regularly seek the views of both the public, communities and neighbouring authorities;

·         Care in deciding on how regularly seeking views of the public was undertaken, balancing consultation fatigue and administration resource; the threshold for the number of responses was also key, as a low response may have to be weighted before taking into account in any review;

·         Refer back to the Standards Working Group the question of what the public should be consulted on, also including the independent persons, representatives and parish representatives in the discussion;

·         Amend wording in reference to the register of interests and identifying land as set out in Appendix B (General) paragraph 2 of the revised Code “…councillors should provide sufficient information to properly describe the land and also provide HMLR title numbers or field numbers to enable land to be identified” – replacing “should” with “shall”;

·         Suggestion of using “WhatThreeWords” app to identify land was acknowledged, but was only able to identify one single point; whereas HMLR title or field number would provide the boundary of parcels of land;

·         The LGA model code does not include membership of masonic lodge in the list of other registerable interests – Members have the option to retain that in the revised code;

·         It was in the purview of the Council to decide what should be included in the list of “other” registerable interests

·         Should criminal convictions unspent or recently received be included in the reviewed Code – in response, the Group were reminded that under the Local Government Act 1972, certain levels of conviction meant an automatic disqualification as councillor.  Standing for election also contained this level of protection;

·         Sanctions for a councillor under criminal investigation was not relevant to the review of the code;

·         The limits set on gifts and hospitality had been extensively debated and were felt reasonable.

In light of the further work requested, the Committee were advised that the draft Code was now likely to be presented for Annual Council consideration.

The Chair thanked the Working Group for their extensive work to date.

Before reaching a conclusion on the next steps for the review of the Code, the Independent Representatives, Independent Person, and Parish Representative were asked for their view on the proposed step of referring the detail on public consultation to the Working Group to develop and action with the Monitoring Officer, in conjunction with the Chair of the Standards Committee and the Portfolio Holder for Council and Corporate Co-ordination.  They concurred with the steps proposed.

The Monitoring Officer was asked to progress to the Working Group the task of developing the public consultation, including in the Working Group the Independent Representatives, Independent Persons and Parish Representatives; as well as the Chair of Standards and the Portfolio Holder Council and Corporate Co-ordination; with a view to then actioning that public consultation and providing the results back to the Committee in due course.  The Monitoring Officer agreed to do so.

The Monitoring Officer agreed to update the revised draft Code to amend the word “shall” to “should” in the wording for declaring an interest in land; and to include in the “other” registerable interests memberships that might cause conflict with the role of being a councillor, such as membership of a masonic lodge