Agenda and minutes

Members will declare any pecuniary or significant other interests they have in relation to the items on this agenda.

None.

Confirmation of the Minutes of the meeting of the Committee held on 16 June, 2016.

RESOLVED that the Minutes of the meeting of the Committee held on 16 June 2016 be confirmed as a correct record.

Schedule prepared by the Monitoring Officer.

The Monitoring Officer will report verbally on the latest position with regard to the complaints listed and any issues arising from them.

The Monitoring Officer submitted a report on complaints of alleged breaches of the Council’s Code of Conduct which were currently being processed or had been completed since the last report to the Standards Committee.  Ms Hadgraft said that brief details of each of the complaints were included in the schedule attached as an Appendix to the report.  She provided further information to the Committee at the meeting, as follows:

Complaint Ref: 2015/07(ii)

As previously reported to the Standards Committee, mediation had taken place on a related complaint involving the complainant. However, following that mediation process, an earlier case involving the same complainant and another member of the same Parish/Town Council now needed to be resolved.  The Monitoring Officer had requested a meeting with the complainant to allow any further issues to be understood and dealt with accordingly. That meeting had yet to take place.

Complaint Refs 2016/08 to 2016/17 inclusive

The Monitoring Officer said all these complaints related to one Parish/Town Council and were all connected in some way. Two of them were new complaints (2016/16 and 2016/17) which had been received since the last meeting of the Committee.  However, in the main, these were also connected to the other complaints.

The Monitoring Officer said that at the last Standards meeting she had reported that a number of complaints had been received in succession from a number of members belonging to a particular town council and, for a number of reasons, it had been agreed that they would all be independently investigated by an outside person.

The investigation had resulted in two reports being produced. One of the reports dealt specifically with two complaints, refs: 2016/11 & 2016/12. The recommendation of the report in respect of both those complaints was that a breach of the code of conduct had occurred.

The second report grouped the remaining complaints listed in the schedule. In all these cases, no breach of the code of conduct had been found. However, the report had identified a number of issues within the town council, including poor behavioural issues and “tit for tat” complaints which had resulted in a dysfunctional organisation. The report was not at all complimentary and showed the Town Council in a bad light. She had met with one of the Independent Persons (Barry Parsonage) to review the findings of both reports and had agreed on a proposed course of action.

Firstly, with regard to the report on the complaints where no breaches had been found, she and the Independent Person had decided to meet with all members of the Town council. That meeting had been held on the 17 October in private. Those members that had either been the subject of a complaint or a complainant had been requested to attend, whilst the remaining members of the council had been given the option to attend, so as to not exclude them. In the end, all members of the Council had been present. It had been a very frank meeting. She had made clear at  ...  view the full minutes text for item 9.

The next meeting of the Committee is scheduled for 6.00pm on Thursday 16 March, 2017.

The Committee noted that its next scheduled meeting was due to be held at 6pm on Thursday 16 March 2017, but that it was likely that one or two special meetings were likely to be arranged before then.