Handforth Parish Council — an alternative view
Have you seen the Handforth Parish Council video yet?
If you haven’t, you probably shouldn’t. It’s a record of a bus crash of a meeting, a collision between egos and attitudes that are pre world war one, not post pandemic. (the pre world war one date isn’t accidental — the Edwardian case of the Burgesses of Tenby, who banned a local journalist from their meetings until he proved he could use shorthand to produce accurate reports oftheir meetings, is a minor gem of the form.)
Since I’m the kind of person who when asked to identify one of the causes of the Industrial Revolution will suggest the Black Death, then bore you to death with the causal link, it’s hardly surprising that I think David Cameron had his hand in that meeting being as bad as it is.
I’m going to, as we say in the local government world, declare an interest here. I’m a Town Clerk, as some readers will know, and before I was Town Clerk I was Interim Town Clerk at a council so riven with disputes before my arrival that they even had police called to a meeting. Given how many councils have conduct issues, I suspect I wasn’t the only person who watched that video from Handforth who thought ‘been there, done that, got the teeshirt.’
It isn’t always helpful when people who think they understand the proper construction of standing orders try to dissect the powers and standing orders of a parish council when these sorts of disasters happen. ( Yes, David Allen Green, I’m looking at you.) Nor does it help when people who once wrote the minutes of their University departmental meeting try to hold forth as if they’re experts on parish council governance. In an era of amateur epidemiologists who think they know best how to beat a pandemic, should we be surprised if everyone thinks they’re a governance expert? In a nation where the majority of the soccer watching population think they know the offside law better than professional referees, believing a hot take on whether someone had the power to exclude elected politicians from a public meeting is a bad bet.
Since some commentators have this morning decided to double down on their belief that Jackie Weaver had the power to peremptorily exclude elected members from a meeting at which she had no proper role because it was somehow in the public interest, here’s my take. There is no justification for an officer of an outside body taking charge of a meeting and assuming a power to exclude. It’s bad practice, but, worse than that, it won’t actually solve the problems since those problems are structural, not merely a slightly comical consequence of the wrong people being in charge of Handforth Parish Council. Worse than that, Jackie Weaver has made herself the story, rather than the very real issues in the lowest level of local government that require a more considered approach than media commentators insisting it’s ok because the right people lost, as if power is everything.
Remember when I mentioned David Cameron? The coalition government of 2010 -15 declared that it was going to have a bonfire of the quangos, doing away with all manner of needless organizations. Amongst them was the Standards Board for England, the regulatory body that dealt with councillors who had breached their code of conduct. Along the way the broad range of sanctions, such as suspension, against councillors were removed.
Now, if you’re a cynic, you might wonder if Cameron wasn’t pressured into removing sanctions on councillors by those, within his own party, who had noticed how many sanctions involved parish councillors, who are a rural and small c conservative phenomenon. I don’t need to have an opinion on that, because the Standards regime was also widely criticized by Labour figures like Ken Livingstone, who fell foul of it in a way that entirely explains his decline into a peripheral crankiness that makes it hard to understand how anyone ever saw him as a leader for a major political group.
Whatever Cameron’s motives were, the result was to decide an issue, about whether the regulation of councillor behaviour was a desirable public activity, in favour of allowing councillors to behave in any way they see fit because the range of sanctions available had been strictly limited.
In the case of Handforth, I am confident that the conduct of the councillors involved would have resulted in referrals to the Standards Committee of the principal authority, and substantial bans from holding office, under the former regime. They still should. Whatever else we all say about the proper construction of the standing orders, shouting at officers, and abusing them is never acceptable.
I’ve written before about bullying and parish councils; this isn’t the place to repeat myself.
The problem is that, just as the journey from Cameron’s bonfire of the quangoes to Handforth is complex, and sometimes hard to map, so the journey by which a parish council ended up in complete dysfunction can be more complicated than can be discerned from any single video.
Can I let the p word in here? Not politics, but pandemics and polarization.
My experience of the world I live in is that, as the pandemic has run its course, public discourse has become increasingly polarized. My office has always had a bookshelf of ideas, volumes that inspire and shape my thinking. 2020 was going to be the year when my work was inspired by Meg-John Barker’s ‘Beyond The Binary’, in an effort to reflect and recognize the diversity of the world I live and work in. Instead, over the last twelve months, my vision of the world I live in and work in has narrowed and become more restricted, more binary.
Not all the changes made under the Cameron regime were directly targeted at parish and town councils. Restrictions on the power to bring judicial review proceedings raised another obstacle in the path of those who want to be sure that their local council is well run. If you want to understand how Handforth got to where it is, the lack of any power of recourse for thise who object to how the council is run is central to that understanding.
However, whatever else we all say about binary models of society versus something more complex, and more intersectional, shouting at officers, and abusing them is never acceptable. But, and it’s a very nuanced but, expecting councillors to be able to maintain their understanding of their role, and their duties, at a time when even the basic principles of government are being tested by the pandemic, is at best Quixotic, and at worst, simply futile.
Something went badly wrong in Handforth. I’d like to think that I’ve been around parish and town councils, and their Welsh equivalents, for long enough to have a view on this. Back in 2008, when local government reorganization and unitary models were being forced on Northumberland against the will of the electorate, I worked with local government colleagues on how we dealt with the proportion of Northumberland that didn’t have parish or town councils.
A geographical note here. Half of Northumberland’s population lives in about 10% of its land mass, in the south east corner of the county. Before 2009, that area didn’t have parish or town councils. The solution that some of us proposed was that any new parish councils should have their administrative support provided from a pool of professionals, supported and enabled by the County Council. Each council would have a named clerk, but they would work on a team basis, and have specialist financial and spatial support.
That idea lasted about five minutes before it was rejected. In the ensuing 13 years some of those new parishes have lost or paid off their clerks, and others have struggled to meet the demands of their governance regime. I can’t help but feel that whatever the weakness of my idea, it was better than the alternatives we’ve lived with,.
Given what I’ve said it’s inevitable that I would end up as a Town Clerk in a new parish, having been flown in as an interim. There’s no secret to how I succeeded in my role. The council that asked me to be interim had a superb Mayor, Ivor Dixon, who faced up to the challenges of his colleagues behaviour, who supported the Monitoring Officer’s decision to bring in outside experience from Hoey Ainscough Associates to provide an insight to the council’s issues, and who was willing to challenge his colleagues to live up to the expectations of the community.
Every time I put on my robes as Town Clerk, or sit down to advise councillors, I remember Ivor’s leadership, decency and courage. He helped me do a job I love.
Handfoth’s problem is not a problem of the construction of standing orders. If it was it could be easily dealt with, preferably by specialists who know what they’re on about rather than by general legal bloggers and journalists trying to maintain their media profile. Listening to various interviewers trying to unpick who Jackie Weaver is, and why she assumed absolute power to exclude elected councillors from their council has been like watching ducks trying to use roller skates.
Over the last eleven years we’ve seen a sequence of government choices that have made it harder to regulate and manage parish and town councils. The regulation of councillor behaviour has become toothless, to the extent that monitoring officers actively avoid formal investigations, even when the behaviour involved is outrageous. Judicial review is no longer a realistic risk that has to be managed in any meaningful way. As a sidenote to that, the practice of offended councillors and campaigners making ludicrous reports of crimes in local government to exasperated police officers who aren’t interested in the minutiae of local government has expanded in inverse proportion to the decline of alternative forms of resolution like judicial review and the standards board.
In my experience, because of the lack of sanctions, a monitoring officer proposed that the appropriate resolution for an incident where a councillor offered to fight a clerk to resolve a dispute was informal mediation by an unqualified mediator. When the mediation process inevitably failed, the monitoring officer claimed there was nothing more they could do, and refused to release the correspondence from the independent person whose job it was to advise on their work. They have my sympathy. The alternative would have been a formal investigation costing a five figure sum of money, which would conclude with no meaningful sanction. Incidents like Handforth may be faintly risible, but they are unpleasant to live through, and reflect the choices of government to excuse such behaviour and to refuse to regulate and sanction it.
The relationship between these unsatisfactory outcomes and the decision of the Cameron government to strip away the powers of the standards regime is, to me, obvious. Monitoring officers who have that task as just a small portion of their day job, and who are all too pragmatic about the realities of what they can achieve, have to be excused if they prefer not to spend all their time beating their heads against walls reinforced by government indifference.
It’s not all about politics though. According to some, the fulcrum of the Handsforth disputes was the decision of the clerk to the council to announce a casual vacancy because of the failure of a councillor to attend meetings for six months. Government could and should have suspended its operation when they introduced the temporary regulations allowing remote meetings; many councils, like mine, were advised by their proper officer to pass the appropriate resolution to suspend its operation when it became clear government had overlooked this minor detail.
The non-attendance rule isn’t complex. As a clerk, it’s good practice to keep a register of when councillors attend, and when they might fall into the risk of non-attendance. Another good practice, though, is to seek the permission of council to either communicate the vacancy by way of nonattendance, or to give council the chance to exercise their right to waive the rule in the case of councillors who have good reason to be absent. It’s not difficult, but the practice of being a clerk to a parish or town council is all too often undervalued, and all too often the chair assumes that they are the expert on standing orders, and ignores or overrules the advice of the clerk.
If non-attendance is the case in Handforth, why wasn’t it fixed? If it’s true that the clerk chose to report a vacancy to the principal authority without consulting council, the obvious questions are why, and why didn’t they realise what would follow on from that decision?
If political or administrative organizations become dysfunctional, the issue may be the standing orders, or the rules, or the way someone writes the minutes. It’s not likely though. My experience is that these crises are crises of leadership, which reflect a failure to understand how leadership should work, and must work.
Parish and town councils have to work in a way where those who practice leadership are lonely, and sometimes ill advised. The mistake, when seeing evidence of what happens when that approach goes wrong is to imagine that only robust intervention, of the kind Jackie Weaver attempted, can work.
David Allen Green has published a lengthy twitter thread this morning citing his view that what Weaver did was, while procedurally incorrect, somehow in the public interest. This is, in my view, what happens when someone who doesn’t specialize in this kind of work tries to provide a sequence of hot takes. The public interest lies in reforming the sector in such a way that these incidents are prevented from happening. To do that we have to, as I said at the start, begin by asking if the bonfire of the quangoes led directly to where we are now, and if so, by asking what we do about it. Hot takes are rarely the best way of doing that.
