Ambridge Parish Council in crisis

It’s been a fascinating week for students of local government. One of England’s most well known councils has been dogged by issues around procurement, disputes over standards of governance and even the possibility of external intervention.

I’m not talking about Liverpool; their troubles are part of a weary catalogue of failed councils since 2010. The bonfire of the quangos in 2010 caused clear collateral damage to local government; it’s no accident that I’m writing on the day when Northamptonshire County Council slipped silently from the stage, to be replaced by two new unitaries, with the usual dumping of services onto parish and town councils. Liverpool’s downfall was, sadly wholly predictable and part of a sequence of council collapses or near failures that has accelerated as standards of governance have declined.

No, the well known council that appears to be having a crisis of its own is Ambridge Parish Council. The procurement issue is trivial yet goes to the heart of the problem; the parish clerk is alleged to have purchased a stapler without permission from council. Allegedly this is in breach of standing orders, which some councillors seem to hold in high regard. As you’ll see below, I’m not persuaded the issue of the purchase of a stapler is covered by standing orders, but in my experience ignorance of what the standing orders actually say has never stopped a certain type of councillor from asserting that they’ve been breached.

For the record, standing order number 18 of the model for standing orders for parish and town councils says only that issues like procurement or authorizing payments should be dealt with by way of a set of financial regulations; a set of financial regulations is not provided in the same document. If you’ve ever wondered about the state of parish and town councils, the fact that how to make a point of order in a meeting is prescribed, but how to set up a standing order for the allotment water bill is not, might be an indicator that the national body has not always focussed on the same issues that the public does.

The second issue suggesting Ambridge Parish Council is in crisis is the resignation of the chairman of the council, seemingly in anticipation of some serious questions about his role in the procurement of a contractor who used slave labour on work commissioned by the parish council. The difficulty this storyline poses for those who are not well informed about the work and role of parish councils is exemplified by Keith Flett’s description of Neil as the Secretary of the Parish Council. WIth Keith Flett, of course, you can never be sure when he’s simply wrong, and when he’s tweaking his reader’s tail by deliberately using the lens of a long time observer of the weirder components of the left to re-frame the narrative. Would any self respecting Leninist want to be Chair of a council when a secretary might control the bureaucracy? The fact that a parish council doesn’t have such a role has never stopped the extra parliamentary and slightly detached from reality left from believing things should be that way.

Neil’s problem is that he can’t prove, so far,that he is not implicated in the wickedness that was Philip Moss’s use of slaves in upgrading the village play park. Those financial regulations, in a well run council, would prescribe how a council might procure work, using a structured system of quotes, tenders and estimates. A chair under pressure would, in such a system, be able to produce a paper trail that makes clear how and when key decisions were made. In AMbridge this doesn;t appear to be the case. As a result the PC doesn’t appear to have a chair, or any kind of guiding hand in its struggles. To make things worse, in the world beyond Ambridge, there are any number of parish clerks, who actually know the difference between standing orders and financial regulations, and who understand what should have been done if Neil’s resignation had actually happened during a parish council meeting.

For the record, if the chair of a parish council resigns during a parish council meeting, then they’ve resigned, and they leave office immediately. If they haven’t resigned, the issue of who should succeed them is moot. Never mind what the councillors think should be done; the job of advising on the process is the clerk’s job. The problem, of course, is that if you’re clerk, and you’re not allowed to even buy a stapler, you’re unlikely to plunge headfirst into a debate about why there’s no such thing as an interim chair of a parish council with the same peopl who don’t think you’re capable of buying a stapler without their guidance.

And then, as if it couldn’t get worse, Jackie Weaver has offered herself as an advisor to The Archers on parish council issues. Yes, that Jackie Weaver, whose intervention in Handforth Parish Council made them synonymous with bad governance and bad behaviour, in equal parts. One of the pieces of advice I give the council I clerk is that I would never remove an elected member from meetings, even if it were lawful to do so, for fear it would only make the problem worse, not better. In future I will cite Jackie Weaver’s intervention at Handforth as the exemplar of this rule.

Let’s be quite clear. Jackie Weaver throwing difficult and challenging councillors out of the room by using control of Zoom may be hugely popular. It may make for delicious video where the audience think that the offending councillors got what they deserved, but as a piece of governance it’s a horror show. Why, after such a debacle, would Jackie Weaver want to promote herself as an expert on parish councils? I’ve covered this topic at length elsewhere, if you’re interested in why I think this.

The answer, of course, is that promoting parish and town councils is what Jackie Weaver does for a living. She’s the Chief Executive of the local parish and town council association in Cheshire (although the idea that such a small organisation has a chief executive begs the question of how many other executives it has), and she’s suddenly hugely recognizable, if a touch controversial, not least with those of us who believe that mere officials shouldn’t be in the business of excluding elected councillors without due process. Membership of NALC is voluntary, and Jackie Weaver is responsible for recruiting as many councils to be members as possible.

There’s another issue at work here though. I’m employed by a local council. NALC, the national body for which Jackie Weaver holds the local franchise, is the employers body that sets wages and terms and conditions for most parish and town council employees, including me. They’re the people who have set the lowest pay range for parish clerks at £10.16 per hour. That’s for a job that involves being the legal and financial officer for a corporate body, responsible for everything from getting procedure and law right, to the nagging, aching business of getting VAT returns right and making sure tax and national insurance is paid. They’re also the body responsible for what looks, from where I sit, like an horrific gender imbalance, where female employees are disproportionately common at the bottom of the pay scales, and disporoportionately uncommon at the top end of the pay scales.

That’s right, there’s a sliding scale of pay rates for parish and town clerks. The top end of the pay scale is four times the bottom, reflecting, according to NALC, the complexity and range of tasks involved. That’s actually contrary to the evidence — this piece of research by a practitioner goes in great detail into the perils of being a lone working parish clerk, like Jim in Ambridge. Being clerk of a small parish council is challenging, difficult and stressful. I’ve written at length about the realities of parish clerks and bullying. As a representative of the employers who are responsible for the parlous state of employment relations in parish and town councils, Jackie Weaver would be hopelessly conflicted as an advisor to the editors of The Archers.

I suspect, too, that by offering, Jackie has opened the window to a debate about why parish and town councils are such a troubled sector, and why NALC is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Back before the Standards Board for England was abolished it reported that half of all councillors reported to it for breach of the standards code were from the sector. As a membership organization, dependent on its members for the income that sustains its activities, NALC always has to other the most troubled councils, like Handforth, to make clear its view that dysfunctional parishes are utterly distinct from the run of the mill parishes whose clerks routinely experience, stress, low pay and a lack of regard for their professionalism and skills.

There’s a second issue though, that Jackie Weaver’s public and naive offer of her services overlooks. The editors of The Archers pick and choose which aspects of Ambridge life they show us. The era when the Archers was required to show listeners what the Ministry of Agriculture wanted them to hear ended in the early 70s; since then The Archers editorial team have chosen to share with their listeners the aspects of Ambridge life that correspond with the listeners preconceptions about village life. The editorial process is reflective, not didactic, and if the Archers shows a dysfunctional, badly governed parish council that’s at least in part because that’s what listeners expect to hear, and it’s the narrative that has a dramatic edge to move the show forward.

I’m a parish clerk; I think councils arte judged not on how well they promote themselves, but on the basis of what they do. Telling an audience what councils elsewhere do is not the same as showing them what councils can do where they live. There’s a huge range of issues that are central to parish and town councils in the here and now. Want an example? In just over four weeks the government provisions about holding meetings remotely, which have worked remarkably well, despite Handforth, end. NALC did nothing, initially, and has finally attached itself to the court case brought by the Association of Democratic Services Officers and Lawyers in Local Government which could finally bring local government meetings into the 21st century. (Declaration of interest — I’ve previously spoken at an ADSO conference about modernizing meetings, and I used to attend their board meetings as a regional rep.) Instead though, Jackie and her supporters in the NALC press office want you to look at all the good things Jackie has to tell you.

Ultimately, The Archers has come a long way from its didactic origins. It shouldn’t be seen as a potential proxy for self serving organizations seeking to promote their agendas. In the real world, parish clerks routinely experience stress and bullying, and parish councils are routinely seen as organizations that are both challenging and unattractive. That’s fixed, in my view, by changing what you do, not by changing the narrative of a radio drama, no matter how good or how highly regarded it is. If the editors of the Archers show you a world where parish councils are misunderstood, and councillors are mistaken about standing orders, good governance or the role of their clerk, it’s probably better to change the real world than to try and fix the narrative.