Agenda item

A report of the Monitoring Officer presenting a proposal to update reporting and publicity arrangements for Member Conduct complaints at the fact finding stage.

Considered a report of the Monitoring Officer presenting a proposal to update the reporting and publicity arrangements for Member Conduct complaints at the fact finding stage (item 6 on the agenda filed with these minutes).

The Monitoring Officer explained the background to this proposal, that currently only the ‘complaints received’ report regarding fact-finding information was in the public domain and noted that if the proposal was approved, it would not require a change to the Council’s constitution.

Summary of discussion:

·         the proposal would not prevent recipients of the fact-finding report circulating the information more widely if they wished but an anonymised report as proposed would not incur any privacy issues from the Council’s perspective.

·         the fact-finding reports could be included in FOI requests under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act 2020.  The Committee had agreed in June 2013 that as the potential breach of the Members’ Code of Conduct was not proven at the fact finding stage the name of the councillor of whom a complaint had been made would not be released unless it was in the public’s interest.

·         the proposed approach to fact-finding reports would not result in additional work for officers.

·         if the current process was continued but with the reports marked as confidential the Council could not enforce recipients to observe this.

·         transparency of the process was important and the proposal would support this.  The proposed fact-finding reports and / or a link to the documents could be uploaded to the Council’s website on the ‘Make a Complaint about Councillors’ webpage after the 10 working days appeal period had passed.

·         it could be important to protect a councillors’ privacy particularly if the complaint was not upheld.  However, the proposed report template would not include identifying names.  If appropriate, malicious complaints would be referred by the Monitoring Officer to the Police and numerous complaints from one person would be identified by the Monitoring Officer or Deputy Monitoring Officer during the fact-finding process.

·         identifying Parish and Town Councils in the fact-finding report was considered to be required.  Of the three Parish Members attending two members considered this would be appropriate and that it was in the public’s interest to be aware of complaints made about their local council.  It was noted that there were some parish and town councils where the number of councillors was low and this could potentially increase the risk of the councillor being complained about being identified.  However the report would be a very high level summary of the fact finding information and it was considered low risk.

RESOLVED that the proposed approach towards fact finding reports into Member conduct complaints as set out in Part B of the report be approved, and that such fact finding reports, including the name of the Borough and Parish and Town Councils should in future, be published on the Borough Council’s website.

Reason

To respond to a recent recommendation following an independent investigation that the status of fact-finding reports into Member conduct complaints should be clarified, and to adopt a revised approach based on that used by the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales.