When electors living in Exeter’s Alphington ward voted in this year’s local elections they did not know that their councillor, Yvonne Atkinson, who was standing for re-election, had been investigated by the police and found in breach of the county council members’ code of conduct for failing to disclose a pecuniary interest.
Had Devon County Council published the minutes of its March standards committee meeting in the week that followed the meeting, as is usual, many votes might have been cast differently. As it is, the county council did not publish them until four days after the election results were announced.
And what it did publish is only a cursory summary of a fourteen month process involving Devon & Cornwall Police and the Crown Prosecution Service.
The county council redacted all seventeen supporting documents containing 161 pages of correspondence that provide a complete account of what happened, including the decision not to prosecute, and which should be a matter of public record.
It is standard practice for complaints against local councillors to be first examined in private to see whether there is a case to answer. This approach protects individual councillors where the evidence is weak or non-existent.
It is only when council officers conclude that a councillor has almost certainly breached the code of conduct, usually in consultation with “independent persons” appointed to assist in such cases, that the issue is referred to a formal local authority standards committee to make a final decision.
At this point practice between councils diverges. We conducted a survey to assess how approaches to standards committee openness vary between local authorities.
We ensured a mix of council type by looking at county councils, district councils, metropolitan councils, unitary authorities and London boroughs, a total of 27 councils including all the district councils in Devon.
We reviewed each council’s constitution, its complaints protocols and the minutes of recent standards committee hearings where available, then categorised them in three groups according to their degree of openness around standards committee hearings.
Closed doors at County Hall
The top group includes councils which default to holding standards committee hearings in public unless there are exceptional reasons for them taking place in private.
Four of Devon’s second tier councils follow variations of this policy: Exeter City Council, East Devon and South Hams district councils and West Devon Borough Council.
Another nine councils in our sample also do so: Maidstone Borough Council, Essex, Hampshire and Lancashire county councils, the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, South Tyneside Council, which is a metropolitan district, and the unitary authorities in Dorset and the East Riding of Yorkshire.
Two further councils have also adopted this policy but nevertheless tend to closed sessions: the London Borough of Haringey and Northumberland County Council.
In the middle group are five councils which simply apply the normal rules about meetings privacy and make no presumption about standards committees either way.
These are Mid Devon, North Devon and Teignbridge district councils, Chesterfield Borough Council and Cornwall Council, which is a unitary authority.
Six further councils in our sample have also adopted this policy but nevertheless tend to closed sessions. These are Torridge District Council, Norwich City Council, Leicestershire County Council, Salford City Council, Wakefield Metropolitan District Council and Shropshire Council, a unitary authority.
There was only one council in the bottom group in our survey, that has an absolute rule requiring private assessment and determination of councillor conduct complaints: Devon County Council.
