Bullying and breakdowns — home truths about parish clerks and their councils

One in four parish clerks has been bullied. That’s the stark result of a survey conducted by the Society of Local Council Clerks in County Durham.

I spent a day last week with colleagues from the SLCC in Co. Durham and Northumberland, talking about bullying, about resilience, and how to deal with the problems.

Coming away from the day I turned my mind to the causes of bullying, and whether there’s something structural about the parish and community council sector that makes it prone to bullying.

A quick explanation about the sector probably makes sense. Parish and community councils are the most local level of government in England and Wales. They can vary in size from small bodies that serve communities of just a couple of hundred to parishes the size of Chippenham, which serves a population of around 45000 and has a budget that is well into seven figures. I’m the clerk to Berwick Town Council, a medium sized parish with six staff besides me. Some clerks adopt the title of Chief Executive; I’m not persuaded it’s appropriate, but every council is different.

That throws up the question; if each parish is different, is it still possible there’s something they have in common that makes bullying so prevalent?

I’ve known a few parish councillors who have been identified as bullies. If they have something in common it’s that they believed, sincerely, that they were right on an issue that they considered to be a matter of principle. Let’s park for a moment the degree of insight they may or may not possess about their own behaviour; something drove and drives that belief that they are right, and right to assert themselves in a way that others experience as intolerable bullying.

One of the joys and perils of parish council work is that it’s the most intimate kind of governance work. By intimate I mean that the clerk has to work closely with councillors and the community, without the filters and networks that surround the executives of larger local authorities.

That can mean that, on significant issues, it’s the clerk’s voice against the voice of the councillors, who are their employers. The potential for this to go badly wrong is obvious, especially as there is no alternative source of immediate support for either side. That the breakdown in the relationship manifests as bullying is, again, not a huge surprise. I’ve experienced bullying as an employee at larger councils, but the difference there is that there’s a support network, and checks and balances. The spectacularly unpleasant senior manager at a large council who used to hand back first drafts of projects with ‘Not Good Enough’ written across the top in red ink moved on after yet another complaint to their line manager. One of the reasons why I felt empowered to talk to that manager’s line manager was because colleagues told me they’d had the same experiences, of unsupportive unevidenced criticism that amounted to a kind of bullying by gaslighting. That network of colleagues who convinced me than I was not alone in doubting that manager’s style is a luxury many parish clerks don’t have.

How could we create support networks for parish clerks and parish councillors that reduce the risk of the kind of conflict that is experienced as bullying? First of all, let’s add a caveat; there is no guarantee that all conflicts can be prevented. We cannot prevent people who regard all council officers as probably corrupt from being elected to councils.

There are the beginnings of support structures already. The SLCC works hard to support its members, and the excellent Lis Moore, their employment law adviser, is an invaluable resource. Peer support is never going to be enough on its own though. If we can’t persuade a parish council to respect the views of one clerk, why should they accept the professional opinion of another? The problem, bluntly, is that too many parish councils, and councillors, don’t respect the expertise of their clerks, or of clerks as a group. All too often the clerk is treated as being little better than a minute taker, more at home with shorthand than statutes and regulations. All too often, too, being a clerk feels and is experienced as an isolated role, with no formal recognition of the responsibility that comes with the position.

I’m going to write a companion piece to this one about how to work resiliently, but first I want to focus on where I think the worst bullying cases arise. Sometimes, simply, clerks end up in a situation where they bring in their legal representatives because, in the jargon, there is a breach of the implied duty to behave with trust and confidence in the employment relationship. The conflicts that surround such a breakdown in the relationship of trust are unpleasant, angry, and amount to bullying.

The problem is that there is no mechanism to resolve that issue. How does a council cure the loss of trust and confidence in its clerk, or reassure the clerk that it will behave appropriately in future? Sometimes, the issue is not even a collective loss of trust and confidence, but the actions of a few councillors who take issue with the clerk. All too often, when the problem is the behaviour of a minority of councillors, or even one individual, the council is in an impossible situation; parliament has deprived it of most of the sanctions available under the old standards regime to deal with councillors who go too far. All too often councillors found guilty of standards breaches under the new regime, including findings of bullying, are re-elected by an electorate either blissfully unaware of, or not persuaded of the wickedness of, the findings. It is as if, de facto, there is an acceptance in the minds of some councillors, and some of the electorate, that the usual rules of employment law do not apply to local councils, and that behaviour that would get a manager sacked from a private sector company is acceptable in a local councillor.

If you know the parish and community council sector, you’ll know how these issues play out. The clerk lawyers up, either via their union or privately. The council consults its own lawyers, and, far away from the public eye, a compromise agreement is signed that bans the council from making derogatory comments about the clerk, and which prevents the clerk from speaking out about why they’re leaving. In the process a sum, usually a five figure sum, changes hands, and no-one is supposed to say anything to anyone.

Let’s take a step back. Where else do you have situations where there’s a fundamental loss of trust or confidence? Football managers is one example. Most football managers have the terms of their contract drafted to include how much they should be paid if the board want rid of them. The loss of trust or confidence is anticipated, almost expected.

An analogy closer to home for parish clerks is, of course, local authority chief executives. Increasingly, we see chief execs changing as administrations change; in my eight years at Northumberland County Council I worked under three chief execs and, briefly, during a period when NCC tried to work without a chief exec. It’s telling no tales to say that every Chief Exec I’ve worked closely with is acutely aware of the likelihood of their own future changing after an election. In my experience every time a chief exec leaves, other than voluntarily, there’s a slow motion scandal about the terms of their departure. Usually the detail of how much has been paid, and why, is buried under a non-disclosure clause, a practice so commonplace (via what are called compromise agreements) that even I’m not allowed to talk about why I, a relatively junior manager, left NCC or what the details of my departure were.

I think it damages the local council sector to have the details of clerk’s departures hushed up just as it damages local government to have employees who can only mutter about compromise agreements when talking to former colleagues about why they left. I think the secrecy of compromise agreements provides parish councillors with an incentive to offer more generous deals to clerks pre-tribunal, so that the dirty linen isn’t washed in public, and I think it creates an environment where the reputation of the sector as a whole is damaged by the gossip and rumour that expands to fill the vacuum left by the absence of truth.

I think there’s an alternative that would at least go some way towards resolving the problem both for local authority chief executives, and for parish clerks. If we all know that there’s a risk of an implied breach of contract through loss of trust and confidence, let’s define, in an open and public way, what the process is for dealing with that. I would suggest importing a concept from American family law; the existence of significant differences between employer and employee that are so great and beyond resolution as to make the employment relationship unworkable, and which have led to a loss of trust and confidence. Toss in some compulsory arbitration, a cap on costs that can be claimed or paid by either side and a sliding scale of payments to the clerk or chief executive for loss of office, and you have a system to bring into the light what is currently shrouded in the darkness of compromise agreements. In the process a ban on opaque compromise agreements could be introduced, improving the reputation of local government in the process.

I’d add one other point though. This will not stop bullies, especially those who are convinced they are right. It might actually embolden some of them, to know that a mechanism exists by which they can get rid of a clerk they don’t like for a fixed cost. I understand the argument against sanctions of banning or exclusion of councillors who bully — council committees operating behind closed doors should not have the power to set aside the decisions of the electorate. So, I’ll make a final modest proposal. Instead of sanctions, standards committees should have the power to order councillors found to have bullied colleagues, or employees, to pay compensation. In order to remove the issue of how payment would be collected, the compensation should be paid by the member’s council, and the member suspended until their debt to their authority is discharged.

There’s a lot to chew on here, but one of my concerns about the sector I work in is that all too often, legislation is visited upon it by government with inadequate consultation and too little attention to the needs of the sector. So why not have a debate about how we make things better before the next changes happen?