National Assembly for Wales

I'm very pleased to welcome everyone to this meeting of the Local Government and Housing Committee. Item 1 on our agenda today is introductions, apologies, substitutions and declarations of interest. We've received an apology from Lesley Griffiths MS, and there is no substitute for Lesley on committee today. As usual, the meeting is being held in a hybrid format. The public items of this meeting are being broadcast live on Senedd.tv, and the Record of Proceedings will be published as usual. The meeting is bilingual, and simultaneous translation is available. Standing Order requirements remain in place, apart from the adaptations relating to conducting proceedings in hybrid format. Are there any declarations of interest from committee members, please? No.

Okay, we will move on, then, to item 2, our fourth evidence session regarding our inquiry into the role, governance and accountability of the community and town council sector. I'm very pleased to welcome Michelle Morris, Public Services Ombudsman for Wales. Croeso, Michelle. Diolch yn fawr, thanks very much for joining committee and giving evidence this morning. I will begin with some initial questions, before we turn to other committee members. Firstly, in terms of concerns about the sector of town and community councils, do you have particular concerns regarding the operation of those councils? And, in as much as complaints arise and concerns arise, are they similar or different to those that feature with regard to principal authorities?

Okay. Right. Thank you, Chair. Thanks for that question. Perhaps I could just set a bit of context first, before I directly answer the question. You've asked about concerns about the sector, the town and community council sector. I think it's important to recognise, and I'm sure the committee does, but from the work that we do, town and community councils have got a hugely important role across Wales in terms of what they do, and many, as we know, of the larger ones provide services and local facilities as well. There's a huge number of councils, thousands of councillors, and I think it's fair to say that the majority of those do not cross our desks—we do not have complaints about the majority of those councils or councillors. So, I think it's important to set that context, because I'll go on to talk about a small proportion of councils and councillors that we do see, some repeatedly, where there are concerns. But that proportion is small in the overall context of the sector.

So, over the last five years, my office has seen a 42 per cent increase in the complaints against elected members, under the work we do with local government, and, last year alone, that increased by 16 per cent. So, those are quite significant increases. The majority of the complaints we see are against town and community councillors, as opposed to principal councils. And to give you context for that, in the current year, we've got a caseload of 88 cases we're currently dealing with, and 59 of those cases relate to members of town and community councils. So, it is significant in terms of our work.

With regard to your question about what we see, and whether there's a commonality across local government, the thing that we see most often in terms of breaches of the code are around equality and respect, and I'm sure we'll come on to talk more about that. So, last year, that was 55 per cent of our complaints; the year before, it was even higher, at 61 per cent. So, that's consistently the area where we see most issues, and that is just about behaviours and how people treat each other, as members; sometimes, members of the public those complaints will come from. But, often, and I know you've identified this in your work already, there is discourse between clerks or officers of the council and those elected members. So, there is, I think, quite a strong theme within the town and community council sector of complaints brought by members against other members, and complaints brought by clerks against members as well. I think that's more prevalent in the town and community council sector than we would see usually in principal councils. In principal councils, you're probably more likely to see members of the public as well bringing complaints forward. So, that would be the specific observation on that sector.

I guess there are quite a number more town and community councils compared to principal councils in Wales, but on the other hand, principal authorities have greater responsibilities and perhaps more impact on people's lives. So, in terms of those sorts of factors, do you think that's reflected, then, in the complaints, the cases you get in terms of principal authorities compared to town and community council authorities—is it disproportionate? Are you getting more complaints about town and community councils than you would expect?

Well, you're right, principal councils have very broad ranges of responsibility, a lot of statutory responsibilities and services that tend to impact on everybody within that county borough or county council area, so, in a way, it's expected that those complaints would come forward from those. I think what we're really seeing with the town and community council sector is more that inappropriate behaviour, that lack of equality and respect, within the workings of the organisation, between councillors, disagreements that spill over into complaints, and sometimes that's justified, sometimes it isn't.

I think the other thing, as I've just said, really, is around the officers of those councils. Sometimes that's just a clerk, and I know you've talked about this in previous sessions. The clerk can be, I guess, quite isolated at times; they don't have a support structure around them in terms of an officer support structure. If there's disagreement between councillors and the clerk, or the clerk is trying to deal, perhaps, with what they perceive to be inappropriate behaviours or poor behaviours in terms of the governance of the council, then if they call that out, it can be very difficult for them in that environment. So, I think we see more of that in the town and community council sector, and I suppose that's not surprising, because, in your large principal councils, there's much more in terms of officer resource and support for people, and support for elected members as well, in terms of training and advice, to ensure that they are aware of the code at all times and comply with it. And if they don't, I'm sure those conversations happen informally, to try and correct poor behaviour. So, I think the resources available to principal councils are much greater.

Yes. So, the sort of issues for the town and community councils often tend to be internal, as it were, rather than members of the community complaining about—

Yes, I think the pattern we see is it's more likely to be internal, and for the reasons you say. A small town and community council will have a relatively small population that's affected by its actions, compared to a larger principal council.

Yes. Okay, Michelle. Siân. Siân Gwenllian.

Okay, thank you. Diolch. So, those 88 cases are 88—sorry, I can hear my own voice there—individual cases. So, there'll be a councillor that will be the subject of each of those complaints. And, as I say, 59 of those 88 are within the town and community council sector. But you raise a good point—and I was just looking through my notes to try and find it—where we've got a number of councils where there are multiple complaints against the council. You raise a very good point, because I think we've got about four councils where we've got three or four complaints in that one council. And, of course, what happens is, a complaint's brought forward, particularly if it's a disagreement between two individuals, and you can get retaliatory complaints coming forward, and we get drawn into that. So, we've got one example, which is quite extreme, but it's relevant to your question. We have one relatively small town council at the moment—we have 13 complaints relating to that one town council. And that is of concern, because there's obviously a real question about how functional that body can be with so many complaints and so much disagreement running between, in that case, the clerk of the council and members.

So, you are right, there can be multiple complaints in a council, and that's certainly the case in four or five cases at the moment. And I know you've taken evidence from the auditor general. Some of those councils that we are dealing with in terms of those multiple complaints are also councils that he and his team are dealing with or perhaps have concerns with about governance as well, and, for obvious reasons, there's a read-across.

Sorry, was there another aspect to your—? Sorry, you asked about geography. No, I don’t think we've got a discernible pattern that we've picked up in terms of rural versus town. So, I don't think there's anything there at the moment. But having said that, those examples of multiple cases are actually, I think—they're pretty much they're all town councils. So, they are more urban environments, although some of them are very small towns in the context of Wales.

I wonder if I can ask you to tell committee a little bit more about complaints regarding respect and equality, because, obviously, you find that they are a significant part of the complaints that come to you.

Yes, we do, and it's quite a tricky area, and I know you've touched on this again in the evidence that you've already taken, because there’s case law that we need to take into account as well. I think you're all familiar with article 10 and what I'm referring to, so that sort of case law is case law that we have to take into account as well in reaching our decisions, and forms part of our consideration. Members may want to talk more about that.

So, in terms of respect, I think the majority of cases that we see in this category do fall into the respect category. Now, under the code, members are required to show respect and consideration to each other, and obviously to members of the public and to staff within their council as well. So, respect can involve very-low-level comments that people might make that we might consider rude or critical, perhaps, in normal life. But this is where article 10 makes consideration more complex, because article 10 is actually saying that politicians, members who are elected, do have the right to freedom of expression, and there's quite a high bar for when that freedom of expression, if you like, can be fettered. And that's when those issues of disrespect really become offensive, where the comments are egregious, and so there's a much higher level when that can be taken into consideration. So, that's quite a difficult judgment to make, but it's one we have to try and make when we assess complaints and assess whether we feel those complaints should be the subject of investigation.

The equality cases form a smaller part of this work, and I think it's probably a little clearer there that equality, really—that duty engages where the behaviours have been towards people with protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010. We do see some of those, but they are fewer—. Generally, the bulk of that work we do see is in respect. Some of it would be low level, which we wouldn't consider in the public interest to investigate. In those situations, we would make that decision. I have—I've done this quite recently and in a number of cases—written back to the elected member that's been complained against and made the point that even though I am not investigating at this point, and the reasons for that, we do not necessarily condone their behaviour and the actions they’ve taken. If you like, it’s a letter to say, ‘Please think about how you’re behaving, how that’s landing with other people, and please adjust that going forward.’ So, we do try and do that, to influence and make the point, though, that even though it hasn’t met that bar, it’s still not acceptable behaviour that we would condone. But, obviously, if it is more severe disrespect, then it is one that we would consider, despite article 10, should be investigated, because article 10 does not give people the right to be obnoxious, to be offensive or make egregious statements.

Okay, Michelle. Lee—Lee Waters. 

Yes, this is obviously tricky territory, isn’t it, and it's sometimes a matter of judgment? I’m aware that your officers told a number of clerks  and community councillors to, in effect, have a thicker skin, which some of them find very difficult as a response, because they don’t think it takes seriously enough the behavioural issue underpinning that. How do you—? These are subjective matters, aren’t they? How do you and your team make a judgment, draw the line on what is, in effect, robust political discourse, and what is the wrong side of that line?

The term ‘thicker skin’ is not a nice term, I agree.

It's not great. 

It sort of came out in the case law, it’s not one that we developed ourselves, but it is there in the case law. And—

Just because it’s in the case law, you don’t have to use it, do yo?

Okay, yes, you could argue that, but that’s where it came from, it’s not come from us—that's the point I’m trying to make.

I can see, certainly for town and community councillors, who are largely voluntary, it’s a very different role to being a councillor in a principal council. So, I’m sure that message must land very difficultly with them. We do—. Obviously, we’ve got a lot of cases that we deal with, so we use—. We will look back at cases—. In making a decision—sorry, the question you’re asking—we’ll look back at cases that will be similar, and perhaps cases that we have taken forward, perhaps where the breaches haven’t been upheld by standard committees, or APW, the Adjudication Panel for Wales, and we will use that to try and inform our decision making, because, obviously, we wouldn't want to go through a detailed investigation and take it forward to an independent hearing if we know that the view of that hearing would be, ‘Actually, that doesn’t meet the bar’, or it isn’t one that they would sanction.

So, we look at the case law, and we look at cases we’ve dealt with, and I suppose over the years we’ve developed that—. You know, we’ve honed that judgment to where we think that bar is, in terms of when it is disrespectful behaviour and it’s covered by article 10, and where it isn’t. But it is a difficult area. It is a judgment, you’re right, and one of the things I would say to committee, and remind you—and I know you’ll be aware—is that, for various reasons I won’t go into, I did commission an independent review of our decision making around code of conduct cases this year, and that’s been considered, literally last week, by the Senedd. Now, that was looking at our decision making, and it did give me, and, I hope, Members of the Senedd as well, assurance about the robustness of our decision making.

Now, it didn’t look specifically at article 10, but it did look at our two-stage process, which is, firstly: is there evidence that something happened? And you’ll appreciate we’ll get complaints where someone alleges something, but, actually, there’s no evidence to support it one way or another, and those are very difficult things to investigate and take forward. So, we will look at whether there is evidence. If there is clear evidence of the complaint, or the actions that are complained about, then we will look at whether there’s a public interest in taking it forward. And that’s when we tend to look at article 10 in particular.

I just wonder, because I don’t envy the judgments you have to make—it sounds horrendous—. But, I guess, listening to what you’ve just said, the approach you’re taking is quite a legalistic one. And that, in turn, can be rather bloodless. And these are human beings, they’re volunteers in their community, and they have been upset for various reasons. For some people, sometimes, as you say, this is weaponised, and there are complaints and counter-complaints, and people are just playing power politics. Sometimes, people have been genuinely hurt and treated badly, and the problem with you resorting to the language of case law is that it then becomes rather cold, doesn’t it? So, I’m just wondering whether or not you should reflect on the way the language that you use in responding to some of these, and also, in the spirit of being less bloodless, sometimes say to people, 'You need to have a word with yourself. Your behaviour really is'—

Well, I do do that. 

Okay.

I do do that. Look, I accept what you're saying and, definitely, yes, I will reflect on that. I take your point entirely on that. But you will also understand that I have to have a mind to the case law in making the decisions that we make, because if we suddenly take a lot of things forward that get turned over on the basis of article 10, then I'm sure that Senedd Members would be saying, 'Well, what's going on there? Why are so many cases not being upheld?'

But your point about, 'Have a word with yourself'—I have started doing that. It's something that I've been doing since I've been in post, because I've been on the other side of this, working in local government, and I know how destructive and soul destroying it can be when relationships aren't going well in an organisation. So, I have, on a number of occasions. I can think of examples in my mind—I won't be specific with you—where I have said, 'Okay, this is disrespect. It doesn't meet the bar because of article 10'—or whatever other reason we give—'but you do need to be mindful that you might think this is okay, but actually it's had quite an impact on other people'—and, quite often, that's officers—'please reflect on your behaviour, reflect on the language you use, reflect on how you build relationships et cetera.' So, I am trying to do more of that. 

Can I just say to you, on the town and community councils as well, the other thing that is relevant here, and we do look at this, is where there's repeated behaviour or patterns of behaviour? And there have been a few cases that we have picked up and investigated because, in this case, it was my predecessor who had not investigated, for good reason, but had made that warning and that person totally ignored it and has carried on. We've now investigated and, actually, that's a case that I've referred to the Adjudication Panel for Wales. So, we do pick up the more serious ones, and, definitely, where there's a pattern of behaviour, we definitely pick those up as well. 

Okay. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you for that. James Evans.

Yes. Just one thing you said on public interest—. Take two examples. I know of a county councillor who was censured for getting some horrific abuse from, actually, someone who worked in local government in quite a privileged position. They reported it to local government, that person then complained about the county councillor and reported it to the employer. They were censured for it. And at a community council level, I know of a community council clerk who was subjected to some horrific misogynistic abuse, in writing and orally, and nothing was—. It was investigated, but was told, as Lee said, to grow a thicker skin and that this is just the rough and tumble of how it is in politics. Talking about public interest, is there a judgment call that actually a county councillor should be treated harsher than a community councillor because they hold, perhaps, a higher public office than a community councillor? Is that taken into the decision making sometimes? You said about public interest; there's sometimes more of a public interest in disciplining a county councillor than there would be a community councillor, for example. Does that ever get brought in? Because how do you ensure consistency, then, across the piece?

We do aim to and try to be consistent. So, I don't think it would be right, and indeed the code is there for all elected members, whether they're in town and community councils or principal councils or national parks. So, we don't make that distinction between what level of local government that councillor is in, because the code doesn't make that distinction and all members, when they're appointed and take up office, are required to comply with the code. So, I don't think it would be right for us to make that call, really. But the impact on individuals can be as severe in a community council setting—which I think is the point you're making—as it can be in a principal council setting. And I think we see many examples where clerks are in a very difficult position. Sometimes things are brought to us that are actually employment issues, issues about the fact that that is the employing body and that is their employee—

Well, it's a very difficult situation. They're the employer, and it's a different working environment to anywhere else, isn't it?

It is very difficult and, quite often, I think that town and community councils struggle to have the capacity and capability to deal with tricky staffing issues when they come up, and sometimes they bounce into us as complaints, but we're not there to resolve employment issues. 

All right to carry on, James?

Yes. So, talking about the code of conduct, and you've mentioned the framework that you work to, as far as I'm aware, I think it was last updated in 2021. Am I correct on the framework and the code of conduct?

Yes, after the Act. 

Yes, so it's a little bit—. I wouldn't say it's out of date, but it hasn't been updated for a while. Do you think that that code of conduct is robust enough? Do you think that enough people take note of it, enough people understand it? Do you think that community councillors and town councillors fully understand what they are signing up to in terms of a code of conduct when they take elected office? Do you think it's robust enough to actually do what it says on the tin?

There are a couple of questions in there. In terms of the code itself and the framework, I think we do believe it's still fit for purpose. It covers a very broad range of areas and we certainly find that it covers the complaints that we're seeing, that are brought to us, so I think we wouldn't have a particular observation or position on changing the code or updating it. 

The second point you raise I think is the trickier one: are people aware of it, and when they sign the declaration that says, 'I will comply with the code of conduct', do they really understand what they're doing? I think, in principle, councils, again, have the resource and the support to ensure there's good induction for new elected members; there's training on a raft of things, but including code of conduct. And of course, they've got officers there to support them through complying with that code. So, I think it's much stronger there. I think, again, when you get into the town and community council sector, we do, unfortunately, see a number of complaints. One of the things we will ask is: have members signed the declaration, have they attended training? And quite often, we see, 'Oh, yes, they've signed the declaration', but, as you say, without any real thought about what that means and what they should be doing as a result of that. 

There is a lot of training in the town and community council sector, and I know you're speaking to One Voice Wales as well, and they do a lot of good training. But we still see too many councillors who say, 'Well, no, I've not been to any training; I've not done it'—again, in the town and community council sector. And I think it is a tricky area. I think the focus should be more on that and supporting town and community councillors to understand fully what they're signing up to, giving them training and support on doing the right thing, I think, rather than changing the code, to be honest.

Do you think that, sometimes, it's a generational thing as well? It sounds like an awful thing to say, but I've got community councils in my own patch where some people have been on the community council for 40 years—they're of a certain age; they went on there when they were 40 and they're still there now. It's that type of thing. And then you've got younger people coming on, perhaps who've got different expectations, they understand what the codes are. Do you think there are some, sometimes, generational issues across standards of behaviour and what people think they can get away with?

I would tend to agree with the observation, but I've got no evidence—we've not looked at the data. We don't collect data like that; we don't ask people their age when we're dealing with complaints. But you're right, I think we've developed a lot in the sector, haven't we, around what is good behaviour, around the code of conduct, and those things wouldn't have been there a few decades ago if councillors had come in and had been councillors for many, many years.

There's another interesting area, which we'll probably come on to, around members who are co-opted and do they—? I think there's an even bigger challenge there in terms of them understanding what the declaration means and what the code means, because they've probably been encouraged to come on to the council for good reason rather than going through that election process. So, there's a different, perhaps, motivation. 

Yes. I'll just bring in Altaf for a minute.

Just a quick point about that. I have been a community councillor and I was also elected to the council for Bridgend County Borough Council and you feel privileged in one and not in the other. With regards to code of conduct, they hand over your copy, that's it, and you have to go through it yourself. You're absolutely right that you sign the declaration and, again, it ends there. I've been a governor of two schools and, in both schools, they were running a lot of those training courses and, if you could not do one or two, you would be told off and you would be told, 'No, you don't need to be here as a governor anymore.' Is there any possibility of having those things for community councillors or councillors, really?

I think there is a role—. My colleagues—ex-colleagues—in local government won't thank me for saying it. I think there is a role for the principal councils there, because they obviously have—. I know they're stretched, but they do have resource and expertise around this. But I think, importantly as well, there's an important role for the standards committees, because, if we go back to the Richard Penn review that was done a few years ago, he pointed out, in my view quite correctly, that the standards committee is not there just to deal with hearings arising from complaints that I may refer to them, but, actually, they've got a role to be a bit more proactive in promoting good standards and supporting councillors in that. So, it seems to me that, you know—. It's a question I would be encouraging chairs and members of standards committees to be asking: what arrangements are there in place for training town and community councillors, and how are we monitoring that? So, I think there is a role there for that structure, if you like, which is set up to deal with promoting good standards.

Okay, James?

I know it'll be extra time, Chair; I'll try and be quick. The complaints process—. Here, for example, or in actually local government, there is quite a clear complaints process. Normally, you go to the monitoring officer first, and then try and deal with complaints; a lot of the public go to the monitoring officers, actually, in county councils. Going to the public services ombudsman tends to be the nuclear option, if nothing can get done—we wouldn't do it here, but within county councils. When I was a councillor, that's always how it seemed to be. Within the community council sector, because there is no sort of complaints process—you are the complaints process, really, aren't you—it is seen to be that people go to the public services ombudsman for any sort of complaint. Do you think there is a role there, perhaps, as you said earlier about the principal councils, for how a complaints process could perhaps work for community councils as well? So, they're not referring everything perhaps straight to you, but actually there is a process in place

—I know we're going to probably touch on local resolution—for how all that can work before they actually refer to you, so you know that everything has gone through as much as it can do to address an issue before it comes to you. Really, people should only be coming to you for the most serious complaints, shouldn't they, not for just a little tit for tat that happened in a meeting, really.

They should, you're right. And we get the serious and we get the low-level, and that's the judgment call we have to make in terms of what we investigate and what we don't. The reality is, if people have got a complaint about an elected member in a principal council or a town and community council in Wales, then they can come straight to us. They don't have to go through the principal body. They often do, and that is helpful, I think, because it offers an opportunity for local resolution, for things that can be sorted out locally to be sorted out, perhaps behaviours corrected, an apology made, whatever. That doesn't escalate it. So, I think that is helpful.

Really, in answer to your question, I would go back to the local resolution procedure, because the regulations for town and community councils do include that step of local resolution, and we would always encourage all councils, but town and community councils as well, to look to the local resolution procedure first to see if it can be resolved locally before, so that it doesn't escalate onto us. But I think, again, there's another challenge there.

But it's always difficult, though, isn't it, because, in the local authority, you've got an independent arbitrator, which tends to be the monitoring officer. In a community council, who have you got? You've got John, Sue and Dave, and they're all complaining about each other, and you've got one community councillor in the middle who's going to have to be this independent arbitrator between all of them.

Exactly. You're exactly right. So, the local resolution procedure's there, it signposts town and community councils to One Voice Wales, and I think what they've got in the regulations, the procedure they've got in place, is good, and I know they do do work with town and community councils on this. But you're right, again, it's back to their capacity and capability to deal with things at a local resolution point. There's far more capacity and capability and expertise within a principal council, and I think that's the difficulty. Then you go back to—and I know you've touched on this already in your evidence with the Welsh Local Government Association—that, for some councils, it might be just a handful of town and community councils, and actually they could do something more proactive, but—Powys is a good example; Pembrokeshire—huge numbers of town and community councils would place a huge burden on local authorities who are already quite stretched. So, it is difficult about how do you resource and support the town and community council sector to be able to deal with these difficult situations, because they do arise.

Lovely. Diolch, Cadeirydd.

That's alright, James. Lee, we've got 11 minutes left. Not very long, I'm afraid. Perhaps we could deal with the arbitration point.

Yes, sure. I imagine this is quite a burden on your team as well. I can't imagine they come to work with a spring in their step: 'Yippee! We're going to sort out quarrelling councillors today.'

I've got a good team. [Laughter.]

Yes, well, I'm sure you have. You need to have a good team, and a resilient one, I'd imagine. But do you think there's a place for some kind of interim level of arbitration that stops short of your formal investigation? You've just mentioned that local resolution is imperfect. Is there a role for some middle option that you could have a role in?

I think the local resolution procedure is fine. It's fit for purpose as it stands, it's about the support that's needed, particularly in the town and—

It's just not used enough.

No, it isn't.

Okay. There's a reason for that, though, isn't there?

Yes, and I think that's about capacity and capability within the sector. So, your point about arbitration I think is a very good one, because a lot of these low-level issues are about individuals and relationships, and they lend themselves to being able to be sorted out through arbitration. It would certainly be worth exploring whether that could be developed, either as part of the local resolution procedure, or alongside it, so that councils have that option to—

Do you think your office should have a role in that, before it escalates?

I'm not convinced that my office should be the organisation responsible for that, and the reason I say that is because what's important for us is our independence and impartiality. That's really important, that when people bring complaints to us, whatever they are, public service complaints and code-of-conduct complaints, they can have confidence in our independence and impartiality. I think if we were drawn into doing arbitration, that might introduce a bit of a grey area. So, say you try an arbitration and it fails, and then you end investigating, we might be perceived to have already been involved. So, I don't think we're the best body, but I think there is some merit in exploring that.

Okay. Thank you, Chair.

Diolch yn fawr, Lee. Altaf, perhaps we could deal with mandation.

Yes. I think what I need to know is: we talked about the training—who should be responsible for the funding and delivery of this, and would it require legislation?

For mandating training—

That's correct.

—in codes of conduct. I've not taken legal advice on it, and colleagues in Welsh Government may well have done so, but I do think it's worth looking at whether it really is necessary to have legislation for this, because, as we've already discussed, members are asked to sign up to a declaration when they're appointed, and they are required to sign up to the code of conduct and that they will comply with it. I believe, at that point, you could also be requiring them to attend training, so it's not only, 'You will agree to it', but 'You will attend training.' So, there might be ways of bringing it into that declaration process that doesn't require a big legislation process. But I think that training is important, and it's important—even if members are returning, it's a refresher to remind them, and through the term of a council, which can be four or five years, it would be good to do at least one refresher session during that time as well. But there is a role there for local authorities and, particularly, standards committees to make sure there are good arrangements in place for training town and community councillors and monitoring compliance with that.

Thank you very much.

Okay, Altaf? Diolch yn fawr. Siân Gwenllian.

I don't have the power to suspend the activity of a town or community council. There is provision, however, in the Act and the work that we do to seek suspension of a councillor while we investigate a matter. But, to be honest, it's quite a long, convoluted process and you almost have to provide as much evidence for that as you do for the actual investigation, so it's not a quick thing to do. But we did do it last year. We put it to the Adjudication Panel for Wales, and they did agree the suspension of that councillor while we investigated. So, I think it's difficult, the suspension of town and community councils, because, as I said at the outset, increasingly, they're delivering local services, managing local facilities, and if you suspend the activity of that body, then what happens to those services and facilities that the community will rely on? So, I think, really, the focus needs to be on the individuals, and, as I said, there is a provision for suspension, but it's quite high bar to get someone suspended while you investigate them, to be honest.

That example I gave you, what we will do with that and what we've done is to try and bring those complaints together, so that we can, if you like—it's not fast-tracking, but what we're doing with those complaints is we group the complaints under one investigation, rather than doing separate investigations, to try and get through that as quickly as we can. And, of course, we can prioritise where we feel there's a real risk to the governance of that body. And we speak to Audit Wales as well where we've got joint concerns about what might be happening in certain town and community councils. But, as I said, it is a handful, but where it happens, it's serious for that community and it does tarnish the reputation, unfortunately, of the sector.

There are clearly huge advantages to councils having a good website with all the relevant documentation on it, that is accessible to people, that they can understand better the work of the council, and that there's some openness, transparency and accountability on the part of those councillors as well. So, that's obviously the optimal position that we would want to be in. But I know you've discussed this with the auditor general, and I agree with his comments that we're back to the capacity of the sector to actually do that. If you've got small town and community councils—well, small community councils, with clerks working very few hours in a week, it's putting a burden on them, and so there needs to be some thought as to how that support could be put in place to enable them to do that. I mean, certainly from our point of view, when we commence an investigation, we will ask for lots of documentation and evidence documentation that we need to support the investigation. It would certainly be a lot swifter, in many cases, if we could just go to a website and draw that information off a website, rather than having to ask people to look for it. So, there would definitely be advantages from the point of view of us undertaking our work.

Okay. Altaf.

Just about websites—maintaining a website is costly and there has to be somebody to administer it. Who should that be? Because most of these councillors don't have the training and clerks don't have the training. So, that is always a concern.

Yes, and I don't have a ready answer to that. Obviously, you can employ companies that will support your website and keep it running and help with administration, but then there's a cost, and already a lot of small councils will be spending most of their money on administration and governance. So, there's not an easy answer there, I'm afraid. But I suppose it's back to a few of the answers I've given you this morning—it's back to the capacity that the sector has to deal with some of this in order to lift to a higher level their standards of behaviour and code of conduct and governance.

Yes. Thank you.

Okay, Altaf? Just one final question, ombudsman, on co-option and election. We've touched on this already, haven't we, but when you talk about the difference between co-opted members and elected members, has that been a significant factor in terms of dysfunctionality? Is there evidence—? Do you have evidence to support the importance of that distinction and the problems that sometimes arise?

It's not always the case that problems arise with co-opted members—I'm not saying that. But I go back to that small number of cases I talked about at the beginning of my evidence session—a small number of cases taking up a lot of complaints. Then, there's definitely a pattern within those councils around discourse between elected members and people who've been co-opted on at a later stage, and with complaints coming in against the co-opted member. So, that is about the behaviours not being what they need to be et cetera, and then, as you say, disagreement between councillors. So, there is some evidence, definitely, within our current case work, of, what can I say, perhaps a higher risk that we'll get complaints relating to some co-opted members than not.

Okay. Ombudsman, thank you very much indeed for coming in to give evidence to committee this morning. You will be sent a transcript to check for factual accuracy in the usual way. Diolch yn fawr.

Diolch yn fawr. Thank you.

Okay, committee, we'll break very briefly for five minutes.

Item 3 on our agenda today, then, is our fourth evidence session, with the Society of Local Council Clerks, and I'm very pleased to welcome two witnesses joining us remotely: Emma Smith, who is Welsh policy liaison officer with the Society of Local Council Clerks; and Michael King, who is head of policy and external communications. Thank you, both, for joining committee this morning.

I'll begin with an initial question or two and then we’ll move on to other members of the committee. Firstly, in terms of the role of community and town councils and the relationship between them and principal councils, could you describe how you see that relationship and to what extent it varies across Wales?

Bore da. Good morning. In terms of the relationship between principal councils and community councils, the feedback that we get from our members is that the relationship is patchy. In some areas, it’s mostly praise, it’s fairly good, but there are still some problems with departments within those local authority areas. And that’s the thing about the variation: it’s not just down to local authority level, it’s down to the departments within that principal council.

I understand that some areas have charters. Sometimes, they’re a success. Other times, they’re largely forgotten about some time after they’re drawn up. Others don’t have charters but still have reasonably good communication, while others might struggle to make contact. And again, that will vary on a department level, rather than on a principal council level. Some of the things that they struggle with are getting through to them either on the phone or getting that direct contact, and delayed response, for example. So, there is a mixed picture across Wales, with lots of issues being brought to our attention.

In terms of departments within local authorities, is there a pattern there? Are there particular departments that tend to—?

No. It can vary. It might be highways with one principal council, it might be planning with another. It really does depend on the officer and the relationship that the clerk or member of staff can have with individual officers. Sometimes, historically, there might be a good relationship with officers, but once they leave and move on, that communication and that link is broken down and it can be hard to re-establish those links.

I see. You note in the evidence that you’ve provided to committee that more and more is being passed on, as it were, from principal authorities to town and community councils in terms of responsibilities and service delivery. Is that significant in terms of these relationship issues? Has it become more fraught as that process has continued?

It can do. Sometimes, things are done in a supportive way, where asset transfers, for example, are discussed and take place over a number of years, where there’s negotiation and give and take about how things are done. Otherwise, it can be quite adversarial, with the assumption that the town or community council might take it on, and that can lead to problems where there’s conflict between the town or community council and the principal authority.

We heard from the North and Mid Wales Association of Local Councils that relationships are generally poor, in their view. I think you’ve said that they could be improved. Would you go as far as to say that they’re generally poor, in terms of the experience of your members, or not?

Again, it’s a varied picture. I wouldn’t say it’s generally poor, I’d say there’s generally room for improvement to varying degrees with all authorities.

Okay, Emma, thanks very much. 

Chair, if I may, to some extent it's coloured by the relative positioning of the two parts of local government. I think you heard last week that community councils are not being incorporated in a description of statutory authorities, but of course community councils are statutory bodies, they are governed by statute. Where the principal council understands that and works within that framework, then often the relationships are much easier to manage and to transact. Where that isn’t fully understood or fully accepted, and community councils are treated like voluntary or third sector groups or a community group in some way, then the wrong approach is made. So, it’s often about just laying the ground and generally those working within and around principal councils fully understanding the relationship in terms of the hierarchy and the tiers. That’s an issue in Wales, but it’s an issue across England and Wales, where the same sorts of issues apply.

Is that particularly an issue for the leadership in principal councils, would you say? Is it the leader's responsibility to set the tone for the relationship?

Leaders often do, and leaders and chief officers establish working protocols. They work with charters and they have clear guidelines, and often an intended road map in terms of asset and service devolution and discussions around community involvement in particular projects. Sometimes, the barriers can be officer led, but often they're governed by their own—. General audit requirements in terms of how you achieve the value for the transfer of an asset, for example, or legal requirements to go through a particular process in a particular way, can introduce barriers that are unintended when it's signed off at the highest level.

Diolch yn fawr. Siân Gwenllian.

Michael, do you want to answer that one?

I can, yes. There are a number of specific and very measured examples. Emma's much closer to the examples in Wales and will be able to cite some of those.

The great benefit and the beauty of a community council is that it speaks about and represents its community in the way that the community wants to define itself. If a community wants a council that represents a small number of people living in one or more villages in a rural area, and that delivers the appropriate level of services for them, they will operate differently, they will want to engage differently than a large town. The services that are capable of being delivered by both of those councils will vary, but they'll be the right services for that community. If you push those communities together, you dilute the offering to one or the other, and you disenfranchise those local communities in one way or another.

The benefit of the community council as the most ultra-local means of delivery is that it can respond to its community. And if the community wants to cluster and if the community wants to merge, or if the community wants to see more services like they have over the hill in the town, then that's open to them to engage with that process and to push for it as well, and councils would always do well to follow what the community wants to do. And clerks are very adept at managing those expectations and filtering those community requirements into their councils.

Diolch yn fawr, Siân. Okay, we will move on then to James Evans. 

Diolch, Gadeirydd. I want to talk about standards and behaviour and the role of the local authorities in standards and behaviour. Do you think that local authorities have got a role in the complaints process, that they can safeguard the well-being of all the individuals concerned? Because we've heard through evidence that perhaps there is a role for them to play in this process. I'm just interested in what your views on that would be. Anyone can start. 

I think there is because, often, there are solo clerks, solo members of staff and so on, there's no human resources department and there's nowhere for our members to turn. They come to us for advice, but of course we're an advice service rather than being able to get actively involved. And I think there is a role, potentially, for the monitoring officer, for example. They do take up more of that role over the border in England and they will advise, but, generally, the first port of call is the ombudsman, who is oversubscribed as well. If some of this stuff could be resolved locally before it got to that level, I think it would be helpful. And I think, as the ombudsman has pointed out in her evidence to the committee, it doesn't need to get this far, really. There can be a long time where there's maybe a clerk with a grievance against a councillor, and they have to continue working together for maybe six months or more, which puts incredible strain on both the clerk and the councillor, and it can make the council dysfunctional—maybe people will be off sick, for example. [Interruption.]

If you want to silence your phone for a second, that's fine, don't worry. 

Had you concluded your response in any event, Emma? 

Yes, sorry about that. 

No, it's okay. 

So, I think that's where we do see our members under strain, and we've had some really difficult conversations over the years, really, with clerks under pressure who sometimes have attempted to take their own lives, for example, because of the pressure that they are under. So, that intervention at an early stage, I think, is critical.

Yes. You talked there about early intervention. I think that's really important because, in the ombudsman's evidence, she did talk about an additional mechanism within the local authority. So, if you're a county councillor, for example—I was discussing this in the evidence that she just gave—there is, through the monitoring officer, a clear process when complaints happen. If they go to the monitoring officer, they go through dispute resolution processes, with local resolution to try and address a problem before it gets anywhere. As you've just outlined, town and community councils don't have monitoring officers—they don't have that independent arbitrator to go between people. As you said, it tends to be that the independent arbitrator is either the clerk or another community councillor, if the clerk and another have got an issue, which I think is sometimes inappropriate, because in community councils, especially rural ones, people have relationships with each other, they're normally friends and go drinking down the pub together.

So, do you think there is a role there for the local authorities to help with that independent arbitration, as an additional mechanism, with local resolution, to try and stop some of the issues, the tit-for-tat issues, going to the public services ombudsman, when they could actually be resolved at a local level through just a bit of dialogue, which sometimes gets hard to do when there are smaller councils with limited people involved?

There is, but the mechanisms need to be proportionate and appropriate. There's an absolute contrast and comparator with the English scenario, where the monitoring officer has very much that role, but it does become absorbed in the formal response to complaints being raised, and is not focused on informal resolution and making that work. So, the mechanism would need to be around moderating the dialogue and helping in those scenarios, as Emma says, where the clerk is often the only member of staff, and, even if they're not, as an organisation, community councils run out of people to deal with things internally, to mediate and to moderate around informal resolution. So, some intervention from the principal council along those lines is useful, but putting it all in the hands of the monitoring officer has distinct limitations. There are countless examples from across England, for example, where that is just not working effectively, and the changes that are mooted in the standards regime in England are reflective of the fact that that isn't currently working very well.

Okay. Right. Thank you. Do you think then, following on from what you said, there's a role there for standards committees, and standards committee chairs as well, to drive up standards and behaviours across the town and community council sector across Wales? Do you think they do enough to improve standards across the board? Anyone who wants to go is fine.

At the moment, I think the standards committees struggle because they don't have sufficient sanctions to deal with things. For example, more often than not, if they are going to put a sanction on a member of council, they will perhaps disqualify them for six months, and then the member returns and the same thing happens. So, I think it's not so much the effectiveness of the standards committees, but the tools that they have available to them, which maybe need further consideration.

Okay. Lovely. I think I'm done, Cadeirydd. I think the next set of questions is where I'd like to go next, and I'll leave that to another Member.

Okay, James. Just to ask Michael about the way things operate in England just a little bit more: so, they're looking at their systems in England at the moment, aren't they, and, as you say, a greater role for the monitoring officer, but possibly that creates problems as well. Is there anything in England that does seem to be working particularly well that we might usefully consider for Wales, would you say?

I think one of the most useful aspects of the English system, following the Committee on Standards in Public Life's review of the sector, well, of local councils and principal councils generally, in 2019, was the unification around a standard set of code of conducts, so that virtually every council—principal council and local council—in England has adopted a consistent set of standards. So, everybody's being held to the same standard, and it means that monitoring officers can compare and contrast what they're able to do.

The major deficiency in England isn't just the paucity of the sanctions, it's the lack of them altogether. So, there's no suspension, there's no ability to do anything other than to recommend either an apology or training, and the training isn't binding. It's really important that if training is identified as being necessary, then it should be mandated; it should be part of a councillor coming back up to speed and being an active participant again. Because, consistently, what we see is that if councillors, and indeed clerks, aren't engaged and trained and don't understand the system that they're working within, that will lead to conflict and errors between members, between members and officers, and between the council and its community. So, it's really important that everybody's trained and aware, and if training is mandated as a result of a complaints process and an outcome and a standards inquiry, then it's really important that that is driven through and required to be done.

Okay, Michael. Thank you very much for that; we are in fact moving on to training and qualifications. Altaf Hussain.

Thanks, Chair. Now, with regard to training and qualifications, could you please tell us your view on favouring having code of conduct training made mandatory for all councillors, to improve standards, and should it be applied to the council clerks as well? If so, who would be responsible for its funding and delivery?

Okay. I'm happy to come in on this one first, Michael. We support the view of the ombudsman, which she's put in her evidence, that the code of conduct training should be mandatory. Even though members have to sign a declaration of acceptance of office to say that they've observed the code of conduct, she has demonstrated in her evidence that councillors aren't aware of the requirement of the code and, very often, that's a wider problem within the council as well. So, for that reason, we believe it should be mandatory for members.

In terms of clerks, clerks are governed by a separate code of conduct for local government employees, which was a statutory instrument from 2001, so that governs their behaviour and their conduct. But also they do tend to sit in, and should sit in, on code of conduct training for members, because, obviously, when you're in a meeting and faced with members who don't know if they need to declare an interest, for example, it's their decision if they do that, but they will often turn to the clerk for advice. So, it's useful and recommended that clerks, deputy clerks, et cetera, sit in on those meetings, so that they are also informed and aware of the requirements of the code.

In terms of resourcing it, the training is already readily available from organisations such as One Voice Wales, but also local authorities sometimes provide it and invite community councillors in, and they do that free of charge, or the One Voice Wales training is very reasonable and can be funded by councillors themselves as an appropriate measure.

Thank you very much. Thanks, Chair

Okay, Altaf. And Lee Waters.

Thank you. Yes, we've had evidence from clerks who suggest that a pooling of resource, with local authority line managing clerks in some community councils who feel quite isolated, would be a great help. The WLGA's evidence was less keen on that. I just wondered what your reflections were on those arrangements.

As we've already said in a way, it's inappropriate because clerks aren't simply providing a secretarial service. It characterises the clerk in a slightly pejorative way. Clerks are the proper officers and the responsible financial officers as well. Their autonomy and independence, and their responsibility to the council as the employer, are paramount. To pool clerks weakens that bond and it misrepresents what the role is about and how it operates.

Sorry, can I just jump in there? I take that point of principle, and that would certainly apply to larger town councils, but when you're talking about councils who employ clerks for two hours, clearly there's a great deal of variation, and might there not be a more sort of granular approach that would be appropriate, taking your point into account?

I accept that, but the primacy of the role would still exist; they would still be the proper officer, as defined in law, and then that's picked up in subsequent legislation. So, the clerk is the individual, the officer who's responsible on behalf of the council for responding to Government and to other regulators. So, to dilute that and to make the responsible financial officer and the head of paid service, effectively, be responsible elsewhere—. And notwithstanding that, yes, they're only working two or three hours a week, they are still doing that role and they're doing that on behalf of the council and not on behalf of someone else. The risk would be that, if you operate from a pool, inevitably you don't get the same clerk every month or every meeting or responding to a chain of correspondence. It's diluted for all sorts of reasons, because if the economies of scale work, if they make any sense, then it is only that they make sense because the pool resource is provided as a one size fits all.

Perhaps I can jump in again, if you don't mind the conversational nature of this exchange. But that assumes all other things are equal, doesn't it? And this is coming from clerks themselves, and they're saying, 'Yes, I understand the theory of the point you're making, but in some councils, a large number of smaller councils, this system that you describe, in theory, is not working in practice.' There is a power imbalance, the clerks are not feeling supported, they're not feeling they have the capacity, ability, confidence, wherewithal to act as this independent proper officer that the theorists suggest they should, and they think that some support for them from a local authority and a pool of other clerks would help them to be able to address that imbalance.

If I could come in here. I think there are locum services available, for example to address gaps when councils are looking to recruit or maybe when a member of staff is off sick. But we also offer mentoring within the SLCC. So we have mentors in each area who will be there to support and advise clerks. It’s just another clerk from a nearby council who is there to support and to help. So, we have these things in place, and we have branch meetings where clerks meet up to share experiences and to draw from each other, really. So, there are mechanisms in place for supporting, and they don't have to operate in silos, really, and they can use those services that are available to them.

So, how do you account for the evidence we've received from clerks, then?

I think it was the chair of the standards committee forum that was supportive of pooling, actually, Lee.

Well, and in the private session we had with clerks as well, Chair—

Oh, did it come through—

There were a number of clerks who raised it at that. I appreciate that's not in the public domain, but we have had a number of clerks make that point to us.

Right.

I think those sorts of issues raised by clerks could possibly be addressed by the use of locums, for example. But on a more casual basis, for example, I helped a neighbouring council recently who had been without a clerk for a while. So, I've clerked their meetings for them, but on a more informal basis. So, these things do exist. Whether it needs to be a formal pool—Michael has pointed out the legal issues that there are around that, in terms of if a council appoints its RFO from one of its officers, for example, so there would be legislation that would get in the way.

Okay, that's a fair counter. Thank you. Just to move on to audit arrangements, and whether or not a one-size-fits-all approach, which is effectively what we have, is appropriate, and how that compares with England—.

If I can answer that from the first point, or working backwards. One size fits all is not necessarily the best mechanism, and certainly in England, that isn't absolutely the case. Within the 'smaller authority' definition in England, which includes virtually all local councils, there are layers at which councils self-certify their accounts, and submit them in different ways, and auditors make a limited assurance review, and the intensity of that review increases as the size of the council increases. So, they are banded. This has meant that local council audit in England is operating broadly successfully, audits are being completed on time, and communities have access to auditors and to comment.

It's interesting to note that the Comptroller and Auditor General has refused to sign off the whole of Government accounts because of the principal council audit problems in England, which are driven by the scale and complexity and the lack of capacity in the external audit market, which obviously operates on a completely different basis. But that underpins some of the issues around the different layers within the English system, so that local councils are working currently within a more limited assurance regime more effectively than principal councils are able to.

I think, within Wales, some layering, or some structuring might be beneficial. There are other brake and checks within the system and the way that it operates, and the interaction with councils that Emma can probably comment on in more detail, particularly the interaction of audit with other processes, and I know we'll come to general power of competence later. But the administrative requirements around audit, and the delays that you will have heard about in discussions with Audit Wales on those issues, just lead to perhaps unintended delays in the system, or problems that are generated by the nature of the system, rather than, actually, what it’s achieving. But Emma may have more detail, just to exemplify that.

Yes, certainly feedback we get from our members is that it’s very onerous, and you might have a precept, or a turnover of £3,000 to over £1 million, and you’d be carrying out the same process, for example. And I think there are sufficient checks for some of these councils in self-certifying, and also your internal audit report, which you’re required to have, and that if that were submitted, for example, that could be a layering, then, as Michael said, that would be appropriate. And the auditor general also recognised that there is potential to review the system and to look at the regime again, with that in mind, really. So, I would agree with what Michael said there, really, from our own personal experience as well.

Thank you. You say in your evidence that the finance and governance toolkit that you’re involved in developing with One Voice Wales and the Welsh Government is all that’s needed, and, certainly, the evidence we had from some clerks was very complimentary about that toolkit. But despite that, there are still, we hear, a number of local councils who have failed to submit their annual accounts. And I think it was just mentioned, the consequence of that, on an England level, for the whole confidence in public accounts, is not insignificant, and yet in Wales we seem to shrug it off. So, even though the guidance is there, and the need for it is clear, it’s clearly not working in all cases. So, you clearly need to do something that goes beyond guidance. So, I wonder what, practically, you think we might consider suggesting that would help.

I think it would be a review of the regime, really. What the detail of that is, I don’t know, but, certainly, to gather more evidence from smaller councils about their experience, and to look at what’s happening in England as a comparator, really, and learn from there, potentially. Very often, the sector in England is learning from us in Wales, with many of the things that we are doing well and ahead of the game, really. So, maybe there’s an opportunity to take some learning from their system there. I’m sure it’s not without its faults, but it’s a good place to start.

Thank you, Chair. 

Okay, thank you, Lee. Michael, as you mentioned, we’re coming on to general power of competence. And I wondered, really, whether you consider the requirements for community and town councils proportionate in terms of how they make themselves eligible to exercise that general power of competence, and how the Local Government and Elections (Wales) Act 2021 has impacted that.

Yes, they are proportionate, but what is perhaps not proportionate is the need to reassert annually. That causes an administrative burden in order to maintain that. It is entirely proportionate that members should be elected and the clerk should be qualified, and, indeed, that there should be a clean audit history. But given the difficulties that councils have had in getting an up-to-date audit opinion in time to self-certify for the following year, there may be better ways of looking at that that make it less of an administrative burden to hang on to.

The issue with general competence—and, I suppose, we’d like to challenge some of the assertions that have been made previously—is that it is, and remains, a power of first resort. We’re not aware of it being challenged through the judicial review system, other than where communities have challenged an authority, and, in this case in England, where a principal authority has failed to act on its power of general competence, and the judicial review identified that, because the responsibility was a health service responsibility, it wasn’t appropriate for a GPC to be used to enact it.

So, our belief is—and there are plenty of examples in Wales, and in England, of GPC being used to deliver services that are important to communities and couldn’t be otherwise done under existing powers—that it just frees up councils to react to local demand, to talk on a different level with principal councils, as well as with other providers in the community, and step into gaps in service provision. And, certainly, over the last 10 to 15 years, a lot of vital, local community services have suffered first as public spending, but also discretionary spending within communities, has pulled back. And even things like the loss of high-street banking services, and other issues of that nature, the diminution of high streets, even in very small communities—it allows local councils to step into some of those breaches and to do things that there aren't primary powers for but it's just common sense to have a general power of competence to do that.

So, making it difficult and making the reassertion of it annually a bit of an administrative beanfeast is probably a bit of a break on people taking it forwards enthusiastically. You could shift that. It would be possible to view that the other way around and say that, by exception, if you're maintaining these things, then of course it should be maintained. The English example is obviously that the reassertion follows the annual meeting after every round of council elections. So, for the term of that council it can assert GPC. That appears, on the whole, to work well and successfully. It might be an alternative that could be considered that is seen as slightly less onerous. 

Okay. I wonder, though, would you have figures on the number of clerks who have undertaken the certificate in local council administration since that 2021 Act was passed, and whether there are any discernible effects on the recruitment and retention of clerks.

In terms of the absolute numbers, pre the 2021 syllabus, completions were 76, but 19 of those were in 2021 and 2022. And then, following the 2021 syllabus, which reflects the changes, there have been 35. So, in total, there are 111. In terms of the retention of clerks, we don't have any figures on that per se, but we do know that that's where we are with CiLCA in Wales at the moment, and there are 22 clerks who are studying for CiLCA but have yet to achieve the award.

Okay. In your evidence, you mentioned that the requirement for two thirds of members to be elected does exclude councils that are competent and properly run, but I think you said earlier, Michael, that you accept that requirement. So, is that your position? Do you think that that should be revisited, or are you quite content with that?

On the face of it, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and, of course, at an election, to be elected unopposed is still to be elected. So, the two thirds requirement isn't in and of itself an immense barrier if a community is engaged and can identify candidates when the round of normal elections comes up. There are problems that, if that can't be satisfied, it doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't community engagement, sometimes it's that councillors or members of the public are put off joining the council for one reason or another, and standards and behaviour is one issue, the perceived administrative burden is another. And also, during the term of a council, if it loses councillors for whatever reason and they're replaced by co-option, that can impinge very quickly. And, again, the English scenario would allow GPC to carry through to the next set of elections, when there's usually a lot more attention paid to that process than there is to any by-election following a casual vacancy. So, the two things are related and fundamentally the two thirds elected is a reasonable measure of the extent to which the community is actively engaged in populating its council.

Yes. Okay. Just sticking with that general power of competence and its impact on councils and clerks, we heard from the Building Communities Trust that they did feel that those additional responsibilities from the general power of competence appear to be onerous for councils and clerks. I know we've touched on this, but do you see where they're coming from, or is that not your view?

Our view would be that it isn't what GPC allows you to do that is onerous. Indeed, it's a power that frees councils to be more responsive, entrepreneurial, to respect that community's wishes far more directly and quickly. The only notion of there being any administrative burden is in demonstrating annually that those conditions are met.

Just touching on that a little bit further, those annual reports and training plans, they improve transparency and accountability really, don't they, but I take it that your view is, 'Yes, that's fine', but, as you say, it's that annual requirement that's the real issue and that's been, obviously, quite significant then for the work of clerks.

Can I come in on this one? I think initially, clerks were a little bit reticent with regard to annual reports, but since they've started doing them—. And of course, the Welsh Government guidance says that they should be proportionate to the size of the council, so, you could be talking one, two sides of paper here in terms of an annual report that would be appropriate for some of the smaller councils. So, it's not burdensome really.

A lot of the larger councils with a turnover of about £200,000 were reporting annually anyway under the power of well-being, and also, they've just modified those reports to make them more inclusive of council activities and also included the biodiversity reporting duty within that as well so that you've got one report covering it all. So, in some ways, it's made it easier for those larger councils and, for the smaller councils, it's a way of being transparent, sharing the good news with the community and also being accountable—sharing who the councillors are and so on.

In terms of transparency and accountability as well, we report annually on members' allowances and declarations of interest as well as publishing the annual return and accounts and things like that. So, there are a lot of measures in place in addition to that, but the annual report gives you the opportunity to share some of the more proactive, creative, positive news that's happening in the community.

Yes, I see. Thank you very much for that. I think a final question, probably, from Altaf Hussain. 

It's just about digital. Could the SLCC share some examples of how artificial intelligence has helped to support clerks, especially how the technology has assisted audits?

In terms of the use that is currently made by clerks who are venturing into the world of AI, it's for things like grant applications, producing social media quotes, for example, press releases, newsletters, writing policies, creating booking forms and writing letters, for example—all with the appropriate checks and measures in place to ensure that the content is appropriate and correct and so on. It's something that the SLCC has taken up through its training programme by offering webinars on ChatGPT, for example. There was one just yesterday, which was fully booked, so clerks are taking this on and learning how to use new technology.

Thank you very much.

Emma, Michael, thank you very much both of you for giving evidence to committee this morning. You will be sent a transcript to check for factual accuracy. Diolch yn fawr. Committee will break briefly for just over 10 minutes until 11:05. 

We've reached item 4 on our agenda this morning, evidence session 5 on our inquiry into the role of governance and accountability of the community and town council sector. I'm very pleased to welcome, joining us here in person, Lyn Cadwallader, chief executive of one One Voice Wales, his colleague Mike Theodoulou, chair, and Paul Egan, deputy chief executive, and then for the North and Mid Wales Association of Local Councils, councillor Ian Hodge, and Robert Robertson, who is secretary to the association. Welcome to you all. Thanks very much for coming in to give evidence to the committee today. We will begin with a question from Siân Gwenllian, who joins us remotely. 

Ian, do you want to start?

Hello. Good morning, everybody. My name is Ian Hodge. I'm the chair of the North and Mid Wales Association of Local Councils. I was taken a bit by surprise to be the first to speak. In general, the relationship is quite good, especially with the bigger town councils, and obviously the county councils. They are more in touch; they tend to have county councillors on the town council, which improves the relationship. My council is Holywell, so we're a level 2 town council, so we actually have three county councillors, myself included, on the town council. So, there is a lot of interaction between us. I would say with regard to the smaller councils, not so much, and I think that's something that needs looking at and perhaps a bit of improvement. And also, with some of the smaller councils, you've got to argue are they really capable of fulfilling the full function, because of their size, et cetera. 

Perhaps that would be the best way. As Ian has said, really, there's a big difference between the bigger councils and those that are a bit smaller. I was at Welshpool council for 13 years, and in that time, it was a big council, relationships were very good, very positive. We know that coming over the hill are more cuts in services where the county councils are looking to hand more down to town and community councils. We need warning of that, not have it suddenly lumped on us with three months' notice. The difficulty we've had in Powys is they just won't come clean. They won't tell us what's happening, they just totally ignore the smaller councils. So, relationships are very patchy.

I'll ask Lyn to give a detailed answer in a minute, but I don't agree that One Voice Wales is removed from what's going on. One Voice Wales is run by councils themselves. I am a councillor, working for my community and deeply involved in exactly what's going on and the relationship with our county council. But in terms of the detailed answer, Lyn, if you could.

I'd probably concur, to a degree, with colleagues from the north Wales association. I think, historically, you would probably argue that relationships between the two tiers of local government haven't been particularly great. I would probably agree, to an extent, that the current picture is still probably mixed, to a degree. There are some fantastic examples of unitary authorities that are working very, very well with community and town councils, and then there are one or two relationships that probably need more work on them. We've certainly seen, over recent years, much more collaboration between the two tiers of government. There's been a lot more support for community and town councils via the unitary authorities around things like professional services.

I can talk about how, in your part of the world, Ms Gwenllian, Gwynedd provide internal audit services to a lot of community and town councils. In Carmarthenshire, in my chair's area, Carmarthenshire provide a lot of HR support to community and town councils, and then the deputy chief executive, Paul, who also happens to be a community council clerk, so is very much at the coalface, is a clerk in Llandough, and, again, Vale of Glamorgan provide IT services to community and town councils in that area.

What I would say in terms of the relationships is the game changer has really been the last five years or so. We've had COVID, we've had the cost of living, and I think, through the COVID period, unitary authorities really recognised the work that community and town councils can actually do in reacting to adverse environments. So, what we have seen is much closer working relationships between unitary authorities and community councils as a consequence, lots of arrangements being put in place around a range of initiatives, and what that has culminated in is much, much closer working between One Voice Wales and the Welsh Local Government Association, culminating in, last month, at our national conference, us signing a new memorandum of understanding between the WLGA and One Voice Wales, which is setting out a comprehensive joint working programme around how the two membership bodies can promote better work and support local democracy and better public services.

Just very quickly—I'm obviously conscious of time—we've already committed to joint working around the outcomes of the democratic health programme, working together on the work of the Cabinet Secretary's programme on tackling abuse in politics, and then there are some very broad areas where we've been doing a lot of work with unitary authority colleagues and the WLGA around the digital health programme, Local Places for Nature, the national training advisory group for the whole of the sector. The WLGA are very heavily involved in One Voice Wales's national awards programme, which promotes improvement, development and case studies and best practice. And then we are active around the whole climate strategy panel agenda and the resourceful communities partnership programme that was run through the Welsh Government. So, a lot of really active and vibrant work going on between the two tiers. I won’t read out what I’ve had, but I’ve had a really interesting e-mail from the town clerk at Pontypridd in the last day or so exemplifying the work of the two tiers of government around the whole issue of storm Bert and flooding in Pontypridd, where the town council acted extremely quickly, because of previous issues of flooding, and were able to bring in dehumidifiers and act very quickly on the ground to support businesses and local people, and then that was followed up with some fantastic support through RCT on the bigger strategic and the heavy-lifting activity. So, there are some really good examples, and I think we need to springboard, from what’s happening between the two tiers at the moment, forward into a much more collegiate and collaborative environment.

Thank you very much. Siân.

First of all, I’d agree. The model charter was designed back in 2008. It needs reviewing, it needs updating. This is my fifteenth year as chief executive of One Voice Wales. The first two or three years, we got the numbers up to about 17 charters between unitary authorities and community and town councils in their area. Obviously, five areas never had a charter. But some of those areas, including areas represented by the north Wales association—. Flint didn’t have a charter, but they had a very strong community liaison committee that used to meet on a quarterly basis with the community and town councils. So, it wasn’t a charter, but actually, to all intents, it was a charter.

Interestingly, I and my south Wales development officer had meetings with the director for corporate services for RCT. They want to refresh their charter, and one of the things we both recognised is that the content of the model charter, which most unitary authorities use, is probably too onerous and needs a refresh. And one of the things we’re going to do is to look at refreshing and using that, and using the refresh to help inform the work we do with the WLGA so we can cascade that out across the other 21 unitary authority areas.

Can I just add a bit to that, if I may? Charters are important but they’re not the only tool in the box. At the moment, there is a different approach between authorities and our sector. Some are good, some need improving. But the most important tool we need to fix this is a clear strategy, a clear vision from the Government about what this sector is about. What are we there for? What are we supposed to do? What are the outputs expected of us? How can you measure how effective we are if there is no clear plan, no clear strategy, no clear vision from the Government? It’s not One Voice Wales’s job to provide that vision, that Wales vision about the sector, and it’s not individual councils’, and it’s not the principal councils’; it is the job of Government. And there is no clear vision, no clear strategy, and in that scenario, individual perceptions will rule and you will get inconsistencies across all of Wales.

Okay, Mike. And Robert.

Just quickly, on the charter front, it really does vary in local authorities. Both at Welshpool and Llanfair Caereinon in the Powys county—. Welshpool eventually got a charter, which then ran out and they wouldn't renew, and, of the smaller councils, not one of them has been able to do it, and it's not for the lack of trying. So, I think it needs to be the push behind it, to make sure the local authorities adhere to that.

The second thing I'd say—sorry, Lyn—is, if one of the small town and community councils were sitting here now, they'd have gone to sleep. They're not interested in all this big stuff; they're interested in what happens in their town, with their village hall, with their streets. That's where the issues lie. Further up the scale, interest dies out as it goes up, probably because they feel—. Taking the subject that we're talking about today, we started talking about this in 2008, and here we are in 2024 and we haven't got anywhere yet. That's why people lose interest. What we need is exactly what was said by the gentleman on the end. We need clarity, and let's get on with it.

Okay. There we are. Siân.

Okay. Who would like to—? Yes, Rob.

I'm happy to start off. I think it's kind of been dictated to us, to a certain extent, because, as I understand it, from those members of our association talking about their county councils, and having had some county council chief executives come to talk to us, there are a lot more cuts to come, and they're going to be looking—in fact, on 3 December, I'll know what Powys has in mind—at handing down a lot more services. Now, if you live in Newtown, Powys, you've got 5,500 band D properties. You come to Llanfair, you've got 800, so £1 on the council tax paints that pillar over there. And so size is a very, very important thing if we're going to be asked to do so much more. But I think, also, you've got to take into account the cultural changes. You can be half a mile from one council to another, and one is totally Welsh and one isn't, and so there's a lot of cultural things that come into that as well.

Okay, Robert. I'll just bring Ian in, and then I'll come to you, James, if that's okay. Ian.

With regard to the question regarding clustering, I'll just keep it parochial, because, obviously, I understand what's happening in Holywell. For Holywell, a level 2 town council, seven years ago, Flintshire decided to change the way they delivered leisure and library services. They opened up a council-run working group sort of association called Aura, but Aura cherry-picked which ones they wanted. Holywell leisure centre, which is one of the only two swimming venues in Flintshire, decided they didn't want it. Subsequently, an asset transfer put Holywell leisure centre, with its internal library—because they closed the library itself—to become a charity. That charity has been supported by Holywell Town Council to the tune of £100,000 over the last seven years—£20,000 for the first three, and subsequently still, per year, £10,000. Now, that leisure centre supplies valuable swimming and leisure facilities for a host of small community councils around us, and yet the financial burden sits firmly on Holywell Town Council. So, with respect to the suggestion of clustering, I think it has to be looked at in a very positive manner, so that you look at what the amenities are in a certain area, not necessarily council by council, but in an area, and who benefits from those facilities and who should support the financial running of those facilities. So, I fully support that.

And also, on another similar item, we now have town council caretakers, who are supplementing some of the needs of Holywell that would normally have been done by Flintshire but, with cuts, they haven't been able to provide them. Again, clustering, putting together a council that's fit for purpose to fulfil the needs of the communities, not just the one in Holywell, but the surrounding areas, I think is a positive way forward, to lump areas together in order to provide a viable and efficient way forward with regard to supplying for the needs of the community.

Thank you very much, Ian. James.

I just want to talk about having a clear direction from the Government. I've always believed there are far too many town and community councils, especially community councils in Powys, for example—there are 600 of them. There are an awful lot of town and community councils across the area. And trying to have a cohesive message from the Government to try and inspire all of those is very difficult, isn't it? When I first became a community councillor, before I went on to different things here, I was the youngest in my community council by about 55 years. I wanted to do things. I wanted to look to take on local services. The other ones just wanted to give £100 a year to the church to cut the grass. So, actually, do you think the demographic of councillors is important as well? If you want that cohesive message from councillors, increasing the demographic of who are community councillors, the type of community councils that you actually have, because the bigger ones you have, the more eagerness there may be to take on local services—. So, the community council that I represent in Gwernyfed, which represents only about 300 houses and about 300 people, basically, they're not going to want to do anything, really. They're not interested in a certain demographic, and the people there don't really want to do anything. They see it as a bit of a pillar-of-the-community job, and it isn't really that role anymore. I’m just interested in your views on that, perhaps on cutting numbers back, collaborating, as Siân said, together, to actually give them more of a focus from the Government, so the Government could say, ‘Right, now there's not as many of you, we want you to do this.’ Because asking my community council to do something, and asking Rob when he was in Welshpool to do something, are very different.

I'd just say quickly that it can work—having a larger council and having a sub-group, if you like, a mini-council within it for each community that feeds to the one at the top. Now, what that does, it creates a cluster situation, but it formalises it so they can't duck out of it. You're pulled together. I'll just throw that on the table for all it's worth.

Okay. Thanks, Robert. Yes, Lyn.

So, the position for One Voice Wales is we've got 883 defined community boundaries in Wales, 732 of which are precepted, or they've got a community and town council. So, as a national membership body, the line that we've always taken is that we respect the sovereignty of the individual councils and we want that retained. We would like to see, and we've put in previous manifestos, 100 per cent geographic coverage of community and town councils. If you just take Cardiff alone, there are 350,000 people in Cardiff that don't have representation by a community and town council, which represents a tenth of the population of Wales, which is a bit of an interesting anomaly, because when our sector is criticised for its lack of diversity, actually there's a lack of community and town councils in our most diverse communities across Wales. Newport, Chair, is exactly the same. It hasn't got community and town councils in its centre. Swansea, in the more urban areas, lacks community and town councils, for example.

That said, we are not averse, and we haven't been averse as a sector and as a national membership body for the last 20 years—. The Aberystwyth study referenced clustering as a methodology. We've argued that we should be looking more seriously into clustering as a national body in previous representations on these legislative committees and in our responses to the independent review panel back in 2018. There are some considerations, though, and I think our chair has already touched on them. If we are going to look at clustering, and we are going to look at different models, then in the round we've got to look at and we've got to ensure that there's a clear identified purpose for these new entities, whatever they are, in the future, and that there is proper resourcing of the transitioning from where they are to where perhaps the Government would like to see them be in the future. There are differing views within One Voice Wales, personal views, between executive members and individual council members. My salutary anecdote to my executive is that we need to be very careful when we hear the language of, 'Oh, if we have larger, they'll be more efficient and they'll be more effective.' I can think of a few amalgamations over the last 10 years in Wales where things haven't quite turned out more efficient and more effective, and there are some big financial gaps. There's a big entity in north Wales with huge procurement problems with lots and lots of millions of pounds that haven't been accounted for. So, bigger is not necessarily better. 

What I would also say is that the idea of if we're having fewer, there's this concept of merging pots; well, actually, if a larger council—. It's not more money; it's just merging councils. So, if you want to talk about more money then we're talking about raising precepts. We're talking about raising—. If you want councils to do more and if that's the purpose of councils, to do delivery, then either money comes from Government to supplement the work of community and town councils, or we're talking a higher tax agenda for local communities to deliver things that they want and value in their local communities, which are under threat, maybe, because of the financial pressures on unitary authorities. So, be very wary of that. 

And the final thing I would say about this, because I've said this to all political parties in the last 10 to 12 years, where I've heard, 'There need to be fewer community and town councils': beware of what you wish for. Because, in certain political manifestos, I've read that 150-odd councils would be a good number to have across Wales. But I'll just remind Members of the Senedd that there are nearly 8,000 community and town councillors in Wales who are giving active service to civic society in Wales for next to nothing.

And what you're asking for is to reduce it to maybe 150 area councils because it's going to be more efficient, with no more money, but then you're going to give extra responsibilities to maybe an individual council, which will have 20 members—do the maths: 8,000, 3,000—more responsibilities being placed on wherever these new representatives are, and there are going to be implications then if they're going to be taking on services for things like remuneration of those members in whatever guise they take in the future. So, this is not a zero-cost exercise. This is potentially a very complex matter and I think it needs to be really considered in a lot of detail. We'd be asking Welsh Government to look at maybe a period of a year or two to really examine this because we need to be careful of the unintended consequences, potentially.  

Okay, Mike. 

I think that there's an issue here that we need to think about very carefully, and that's the whole localism agenda. We talk about it, parties commit themselves to it, we run it up the flagpole and everybody salutes it, but what does it actually mean? And if you get rid of very small, rural councils, whose role is to be the voice of that community, you're not developing your localism agenda. Now, the point comes, as James Evans has said, 'If they're that small, don't expect them to be in a position to deliver services', so how do we square that circle? And I'll come back to my opening remark: where is the vision and where is the strategy from Government?

Can I quickly come back on that, Chair? 

Yes, James. 

There's an ex-Government Minister around the table who might have more expertise than me, but it is difficult, I can imagine, for Welsh Government to set an overarching strategy that says what they want town and community councils to deliver, for the simple reason that a lot of the local services that you would like to be delivered are up to local authorities to decide how they're delivered—they're not for the Welsh Government or the UK Government to say to Powys, for example, 'This is how you will run your roads system, this is how you will run your bin collection system, this is how you will run this.' That's not the job of Government to do that at a top level, so I would think perhaps it's more for Government to be talking more to local authorities to develop those plans in their localities more as to how they can work better with town and community councils.

As Rob said, with the relationships that Powys have, there should be a clear plan in place there, because I would worry with the way the accountability structures work, with Government starting to tell Powys how to run their bin collection services, I don't think that's a job for the Welsh Government, in my opinion. Being an executive member as I was on Powys County Council, I wouldn't have felt very happy with the Welsh Government telling me how I should run housing allocation policy in my local authority area either.  

I totally agree with that; absolute common sense and you can't argue with that. What we need is a conversation between Welsh Government, WLGA and our sector to agree how we move forward, to agree a Wales partnership strategy for making the local government family work more effectively and more efficiently for the people we serve.

Can I—

Yes, Ian, please.

I heard the comments with regard to localism and the local councils. But if you go back to 22, one of the big issues with regard to local town and community councils was the number of seats that were co-opted, the number of seats where we have members who are not only on one council, but on multiple councils, to fill the seats. We also have a dearth of councillors who like the idea of becoming a town councillor, get themselves elected, and we see them six months later. So, I accept the localism, but you want the people in place who are going to actually care and are actually going to do the work. And also, to me, the rules with regard to co-option and the rules with regard to sitting councillors need to be looked at, clarified and perhaps strengthened. Councillors should sit initiation sessions before they put themselves forward for council, to fully understand what the role is going to be. And I would suggest that, with regard to maintaining themselves as councillors, an attendance regime should be inducted, rather than just once every six months. We've actually had a situation where two councillors turned up after six months, sat for one meeting, and we'll see them again probably the other side of Christmas. So, I appreciate what's said about localism and the number of town councillors, but town councillors and community councillors need to step up to the mark, and that probably means fewer than we have at the moment, and a more rigid regime of making sure that they know what's expected of them and that they continue to carry out that expectation.

Okay, Ian. Thanks very much. Just very quickly from me before we move on, because time is rapidly disappearing in front of our eyes. With local authorities, principal authorities, where there was that debate about numbers and proposed reorganisation, we remain with the 22, but there have been regional groupings and clustering, in a way, around specific responsibilities—maybe economic development or transport. We've got the corporate joint committees now, the CJCs. Is there anything in that in terms of the way town and community councils operate, and clustering? It might not be clustering particular authorities for everything they do, but just around particular responsibilities, or is that terribly messy and complicated?

It needn't be, no. I think it's coming down to clarity, again. If a local authority is saying, 'We haven't got enough money; we need someone to empty the litter bins, someone to sweep the streets, someone to cut the grass', instead of saying, 'Oh, we're going to be sustainable'—nobody knows what that means; they want to hear about what they actually want on the ground. And that's where we're losing a lot of the interest of the town and community councils. When you see the attendance at our meetings, at yours, the number of people that turn up on community councils is not representative of the number that could turn up. Why? Because they're losing interest, because it's all taking too long.

Just touching on the elections, if you want to stop co-options, frankly, principal councils or Welsh Government have got to pay for them. Because if you are a council, and, on the list from Audit Wales here, there are 209 councils that have less than £10,000 as a precept, for one election, the county will charge you about £3,000. That is why they're not doing it. It needs to be funded differently to be able to attract them.

Chair, the answer to your question is 'yes', and it's happening. We have an exhibition in the Senedd right now. If you go and have a look at that, there are examples of three or four local councils that have got together and are dealing with a specific issue. And there are other examples, and it's growing. It's been slow, but it's certainly happening.

Okay, Mike. Lee Waters.

Thanks. I'd like to focus on audit arrangements. We've had evidence from the auditor general that he thought that the one-size-fits-all audit regime was disproportionate for the smallest of councils, but he's bound by legislation to apply it. One Voice Wales, along with others, have produced a toolkit, which has been widely praised, and it's the view that if councils just got on with that, they would do what was necessary. But, nonetheless, clearly, there are a number of small councils who are really struggling with it. The auditor general said they just need to give basic information, and they're not even doing that. So, what do you think? In that minority of councils that are causing the biggest problems or are having the most difficulty, what targeted support do you think can be designed to provide practical help?

I'll take that question. I think that, as Robert alluded to just now, the majority of councils in Wales are pretty small, and our view is that the audit regime is based on a one size fits all, but it doesn't fit. For the small councils, we believe that it's disproportionate for the element of financial risk actually involved. That's not to say we don't think there should be any audit, because councils are required to have internal audit anyway, and if they have an internal auditor that's up to the job, it'd be identified if there were any shortcomings anyway. So, our suggestions are that it should be a lighter touch audit in Wales, especially for the smaller councils, as it is in England. And, in England, councils with an annual turnover not exceeding £25,000 will be exempt from routine external audit.

The other issue that comes up for smaller councils is the triennial, what's called a full audit, where you have to put all your papers together and they go off to Audit Wales. That is quite an imposition on a clerk who may only work a few hours a week. So, we think that some review should be undertaken of when that full audit should occur, if at all.

We're happy with the reasonable assurance method. We think that the burden on smaller councils should be reviewed, possibly modelled something on the lines of what happens in England, and, for our part, what we've done to try and help councils with their financial management arrangements, is published practice development guidance on the financial timetable in-year—it's been very well received, by the way. We also offer three specific training modules on this subject area, and we are grateful for the funding from the Welsh Government that supports funding for two places on six core modules, three of which are in the financial-related field.

I think that one thing, if we were to—. Because if we had an ask list, we'll always ask, won't we? If you don't ask, you don't get. So, I think if there was a feeling that One Voice Wales should give much greater support to councils in relation to audits, then possibly we would be looking for some funding for an OVW specialist adviser, who could support those councils who have received qualified audit pinnings, maybe on a sequential basis. So, that's our view.

We've also got some views about how audit opinions are expressed. Do you want me to move on to that now or wait for another question?

Yes. If you can briefly, yes.

Okay. I think the current approach of issuing qualified or unqualified opinions needs to be reviewed. We know there's a lot of qualified opinions, but when you look at the reasons for those, some are, 'Councils have really got all this wrong, the RFO is not doing the job'—okay, we understand that, there will be some bad cases. But, in the main, I suspect when you look at it in some depth—and I think maybe the auditor general alluded to this possibility—some of the reasons for qualification are what might be regarded by people as being a minor infringement of law, if there's such a thing as a minor infringement. That's just our feeling, that it might be. So, what we suggest is that the basis of any issues raised about audits should be based on a traffic light system: green being unqualified, okay, no problems whatsoever; amber, unqualified with some improvement recommendations, which could be improvements relating to compliance with law; and then the red one is for those worst-case scenarios where, quite rightly, those councils should have a qualified audit where there are significant issues involves.

And I think the other suggestion we'd make is that the annual audit process for smaller councils—and we have to define what they are—might be replaced with a triennial rather than an annual audit. I think that's it.

Thank you. So, you've obviously made a pitch for extra funding to provide some targeted support. So, what do you think is the type of support those councils who are struggling the most would practically benefit from?

Well, I think that, probably, we’d need to devise some kind of questionnaire about the issues faced by clerks or RFOs putting together accounts. We'd then need to go out, if you like, and hand hold, up to a point, with the councillors as well, maybe just the chair. That hand hold will point out to them what do they need to do in future to improve the position. We can do as many practice development guidance notes as you like; the question is: are they being read? But if you go out there—even if it's an online meeting; we don't have to travel out there—at least then you can make sure that people's attention is focused on the key issues.

Given that this is a well-known problem, you don't have the capacity to do that anyway.

Not within our current resources, no, we wouldn't.

Okay, thank you.

Chair, can I just point out one very important thing? We don't treat the private sector this way—one size fits all. We don't treat the third sector as one size fits all, in terms of audits. In England, they don't treat our sector as one size fits all. We're the only one that does it. It's not right.

No.

And it creates bad perceptions out there. It creates bad press, It creates a view that we don't know what we're doing, when we're not being judged fairly.  

I think there's an interesting—sorry about my throat—piece of paper in the Audit Wales response. It shows the number of qualified audits is significantly high. And I take on board everything that's been said by One Voice Wales here, but I wonder whether we've not recognised that the clerk, you're almost asking him to be God. He's got to be so involved in so many different aspects. I can't think of many jobs where you're asked to do so many diverse things, which is probably behind why some of these things are in the position they are.

Okay. Well, we'll have to move on in any event. James.

I want to talk about standards and behaviour. I think it would be remiss of us not to touch on standards and behaviour. I want to talk about the complaints process in community and town councils. Do you think the complaints process is adequate as it currently stands? The auditor general—not the auditor general, the public services ombudsman—said perhaps an additional mechanism could be put in place. Do you think that's something that could be done? And do you think, actually, the complaints process is fit for purpose? I don't know who wants to start. You're all coughing now. I don't know if that's a hint. [Laughter.] 

Okay, I'll answer that one. Well, our belief is there should be a strong expectation that all councillors should be trained in the code of conduct, and that wouldn't be a one-off for life, but maybe you do it once, and then if you start as an elected member or are co-opted in the next session of office, then you'd have to do it again. So, it would be once every five years.

Yes.

At the moment, many councils have in their standing orders that there is a requirement and expectation that you'll be selected and attend the code-of-conduct training. And in the main, I suspect there's quite a lot of councillors who are trained, and we know that from the rising numbers of councillors attending our training programmes. And good on the introduction of training plans—I think that's made a bit of a difference. But we know there are councillors who are also not trained, and they could be amongst the group that cause many of the problems.

So, we know these programmes are supported. One Voice Wales has a module on code of conduct; it's well received. In fact, it's very welcomed by some county councils in Wales, because they've commissioned us to deliver it for them, and that's happened in Ynys Môn and in the Vale of Glamorgan, and they actually pay for it. So, councillors come on our training, but the county council fund that. What a great idea. I don't know how many more county councils would be prepared to do that, but that would be a good development. And we do a kind of hands-on type training. Even though it's online, there's engagement with the audience. It's not just chalk and talk. We do have funding from Welsh Government to offer two free places for every council on the code of conduct—that's one of the six core modules—and that's well taken up.

But, in terms of how things could be improved, I agree with you, we need a better complaints system. There is a model complaints procedure for members of the public to complain about the body corporate, and I think that is used occasionally. I don't think councils really are fully au fait about how they use that. So, our one suggestion is that we have a bespoke complaints procedure designed by whoever that may be—it could be One Voice Wales and the society of clerks together—that is designed to be a best fit, i.e. something people understand.

And, secondly, in terms of the model informal resolution protocol, which we designed in conjunction with the ombudsman, I don’t know how well that works. It’s very difficult if you have what are regarded as low-level or frivolous complaints, member to member, for the council around it to engage with that. They could better engage with it, in our opinion, if you had some independent external support. And our suggestion, although I don’t know whether the monitoring officers would like this very much, is that maybe monitoring officers, or one of their staff, could actually join the council in helping manage those processes. I think it might have a deterrent effect for bad behaviour, in some respects, but, on the other hand, it might be a useful method.

I agree—

Can I—? Oh, sorry.

I agree that it’s not working. I think part of the problem is the ombudsman. They’re overloaded—absolutely overloaded. Their time is focused on NHS cases that are heavy and important. I think one of the things we’ve got to do is filter the cases that have to go to the ombudsman, and the mechanism that Paul has just described is one way of doing that. But also the local resolution protocol that’s in place now needs to be strengthened. At the moment, it only applies on councillor to councillor; it should also apply councillor and clerk to clerk. So, if we strengthen the local resolution protocol, it would bring in an independent to help deal with that. Hopefully, that will filter and reduce the number of cases ending up with the ombudsman, and they will then be better able to deal with those.

So, if I bring Ian in quickly—. I tend to agree with you. Do you think there could be some collaboration, then, between other town and community councils? Say, at the local authority level, there is the low-level complaint, member to member, ‘I didn’t like the way they spoke to me’, and it’s not too serious, it’s a tit for tat back and fore. At the local council, if councillors fall out like that, you have a disputes resolution process, you’ve got the process we can all go through, you sit down with the monitoring officer, you sort of thrash it out around the table and you all agree, written apology, say, ‘Thank you very much, we’ll agree to disagree, we’ll move on.' Do you think there’s a way that could work, if it isn’t from monitoring officers coming down to town and community councils, whether there could be sort of a network within, perhaps, One Voice Wales, or another system, where another councillor who’s trained to an appropriate level could go in and actually support other community councils through a disputes resolution process rather than asking the monitoring officer? As I say, with Powys, for example, there are numerous town and community councils, where they could be going to a meeting every night of the week. For example, if there was somebody trained within the network, could that be something to help?

It’s possible. I think it’s something worth looking at, and we will look at that—we will look at that.

One Voice Wales, it’s not a service we could offer at the moment. We do offer a mediation service, but it’s a consultancy-based service, and we have a trained, qualified mediator. But, when I quote the prices on these, very few councils are interested in taking that up.  

It’s amazing the skills you do have within town and community councils. One I visited when I was an executive member, they had two people on there trained in HR. It’s amazing. If you could identify people, you never know, they may want to help with sorts of roles.   

Absolutely. I think it's worth looking at. 

Yes. I'll bring Ian in, sorry, Chair. 

Ian. 

Yes. As a member of Flintshire standards committee, and having sat through hearings, et cetera, in the last few months, a couple of suggestions. One: I did say that anybody who puts themselves forward for a town and county council would benefit from—even if just a candidate—some pre education, a meeting to let them know what the expectations are. And I think, coupled with that, would be a code of conduct discussion, what would be expected of them, before they even sit on a council, because, unfortunately, these issues can turn up within the first couple of months of sitting on the council, before any code of conduct training has taken place, and, three years later, we have the ombudsman’s complaint and a standards committee.

So, those are two proposals. In Flint, the monitoring officer regularly invites all the town and community councils to put people forward for Zoom meetings with regards to code of conduct. Gareth does an excellent job. The trouble is the take-up. So, I think that what we have to do is to put in practice a mechanism where it's not advisory, it's not a suggestion, it's mandatory. That might sound draconian, but it would stop a lot of the tit-for-tats if every councillor was fully code of conduct trained from the beginning of their term of office. We wouldn't have the expectation where somebody says, 'Well, I hadn't been trained, so I didn't know when I insulted the clerk', or 'when I insulted the other councillor'. So, practically, I would suggest code of conduct training being mandatory when people take up the position as a councillor, and also the fact that we get some pre training beforehand. But, for Flintshire, the monitoring officer regularly takes it on himself to do training for the town and community councillors in Flintshire. 

Yes. Pre training beforehand, I don't think it could be for town and community councils; I think that could roll out at every level of government, to be honest with you, but there we go.

It is very sad, isn't it, that we are sitting here talking about code of conduct documents when all we need is four words: be nice to each other. It's a pity it doesn't work that way. The one issue that I have found when I have been asked to go and mediate between councillors and clerks is the timescale. It takes so long that there's this stress period between the start of the process and the end, and, if that could be truncated, I think that would be a great step forward.

Yes, that was something that the ombudsman raised, wasn't it—

It was, actually, yes.

—the amount of time that it does take to get things resolved.

I know you're looking at me for time, Chair; I will move on very quickly to training, if that's okay. Actually, in recognition of the clerks and the great work that they actually do, I know that there is some training that One Voice Wales offer, but do you think that there should be more specific training that clerks should do, mandatory training, before they actually do the job? I know some clerks who are just appointed and don't tend to do any level of training, they just sort of fire through the dark and see how they get on, in a way. But, actually, do you think that, when you're appointing a clerk, there should be some clear expectations around training so that they actually have that level of HR competence, level of legal competence and the financial competence as well? And it gives them that status then as well. They know, on mediation, also how they are to be treated and how members should be treating each other as well. That's me, then, finished, Cadeirydd.

Diolch yn fawr, James. Paul. 

Shall I take that one? I hold the brief for the training of councillors in One Voice Wales, but actually I'm a holder of that and the CiLCA qualification and I'm also a CiLCA trainer, so I know what's involved in trying to get that qualification. Actually, at the moment, there are over 100 clerks who have the qualification—I can't say whether they're still all in the sector—and some of them will be clerks in more than one council. So, the benefit would go over more than just one council. It's a qualification that can take anything up to 12 months to 15 months to complete. I think it's within the competence of most clerks who undertake the preparatory training that I and a few colleagues deliver, but, on the other hand, for clerks with low numbers of hours because they work for a small council, finding the hours to actually fulfil this qualification—. Because it's not about listening to somebody like me and then turning up for an exam; it's about putting a portfolio together. It's hard work. I've done it myself. It can take a lot of your time. And I think that maybe clerks of very small councils would find this beyond their scope. Having said that, I've actually trained a few who are clerks of very small councils and they passed. But it is way outside the scope of many small council clerks.  

On the other hand, the number of registrations for CiLCA is going up, or being maintained. That's good news. There's a bursary available from the Welsh Government, so the actual direct cost of signing up has been removed from councils. That's good news as well. And I think that we'll see a growing number of clerks with this qualification. But it's not all about getting CiLCA, it's about other training routes. The SLCC, if you saw what they offer, you'd be impressed. They offer a wide range of subject courses on all the areas that clerks would want to be trained in, and they also offer alternatives to CiLCA, or a lead-up to doing CiLCA, in a course called ILCA and one called FILCA. The 'f' in FILCA is one about finance. That's an online learning module—

That's a lot of acronyms.

Thank you for explaining that. [Laughter.]

You don't get a qualification from it, but it's still good training. 

And the other issue that was in the list of questions, if I could just touch on it, I think was about remuneration—is it inappropriate? Just to let you know that there is a national review of the 2004 national job evaluation scheme. Also One Voice Wales has produced a recruitment and retention guide for all councils in Wales. So, we're doing our utmost, I think, to put the importance of clerks right on the top of the agenda. I'll stop there.

Okay, yes, I'm afraid you have to stop there, Paul, because we're going to have to truncate questions and answers now. [Laughter.] Altaf.

Thank you very much, John. Thanks, Paul. Paul has been great to our whole community, really, in Pen-y-fai, and John would be, all the time, in correspondence with you. My question, really, is, as we have accepted that training should be mandatory for all councillors, who should be funding and delivering it. You said that you're doing it, but who else?

This comes back to the size of the council again, doesn't it? Again, taking the chart from Audit Wales, 209 councils have a budget of less than £10,000. That's where your issue lies. If I was at Welshpool, funding training wasn't an issue. I have a certain amount of funding in our budget at Llanfair, which is a £50,000 precept. If I had a £10,000 one, which had to pay for everything, I would have a problem with it. I think also there are an awful lot of smaller councils that are quite happy for their clerks to go ahead and do CiLCA, but they don't want them to do it during working hours.

Can I just—?

Yes.

I agree with you—it should be compulsory. The cost of small councils and costs—. I mean, some of our training costs £20 or £40 for basic training that small councils would benefit tremendously from. And even with a precept of £10,000, that should be manageable. It's a question of priorities and, clearly, this is not given enough of a priority by individual councils. I agree it should be mandatory.

Okay, Altaf?

Thank you.

Lee.

Yes, I just wanted to ask about some of the evidence that we've had from some clerks, in the smaller councils, where they don't feel supported and sometimes it can be a very difficult and challenging environment for them. And the evidence we've had is that they think there's merit in them being employed by the county council so that they can be part of broader pool and have more line-management support. I just wanted your view on that.

I think the first thing I would come and say to you—. I'll give you a quick example. When I took on Welshpool council, my councillors there wanted to do a whole range of things—they wanted to take on the day centre, they wanted to take on the tourist information, the street cleaning and so on. And I said to them, 'Yes, we can do it, no problem, but you've got to run it like a business. If you run it like a council, you can't afford to do it'. Once you start getting town and community councils to take on county-council-level paid staff, the precept will shoot through the roof. It's not affordable.

It's a slightly different point from the one I was asking, I think.

Sorry.

I don't like the idea, and the reason why I don't like the idea is that it would be difficult to take the chief officer of a body corporate and have that person employed by somebody outside that body corporate. It would be difficult to deal with potential conflicts of interest when it comes to transferring place-based services et cetera. It would be difficult to deal with disciplinary issues. It would be difficult to maintain that little bit of clear water between a community council and the primary authority. I think that independence of our sector is hugely important, and without that independence, you're fighting this issue about who's responsible for what. I actually think it's a terrible idea. I think it'll lead to a lot of problems.

Can I just step in?

Yes, go on, Ian.

Obviously, I'm a town and county councillor, so, obviously I have to be very careful with the cross-over and my position when I'm sitting in the town council meetings. But one of the methods that the town council uses in raising issues with the county council is for the clerk to write a letter to the county council on behalf of the town council. Now, being quite simple, if the clerk's employed by the county council, he's going to have a lot of difficulty actually writing a letter of complaint to his employers on behalf of the town council. So, I feel it's a non-starter. The clerk has to stay completely independent and an employee of the town council.

Absolutely.

All right, Lee? Yes. Okay. Moving on, then, to the general power of competence and the requirements of the 2021 Act, do you consider they are proportionate, those requirements, and what sort of impact have they had?

Limited, I think, so far.

I don't know how many councils have claimed eligibility, so I can only give you a feeling of how many that could be. It could be around about the 30 mark. I think one of the problems with it is how often you have to reaffirm your eligibility. So, for example, let's say I was in a council that had the democratic and unqualified audits all sorted out, and the only thing left was me getting that CiLCA qualification, and I got it yesterday, I could put it to the next meeting of the council, if they wanted to, whether they'd like to claim eligibility. If they did decide, then that would be fine and they'd put details of the resolution on the website. The next annual meeting, then, they'd need to review and claim that eligibility again, a reaffirmation. If one of those three criteria changed, then it might be we're no longer eligible. So, you'd only have a short period of time being able to use GPOC. I know you can continue with anything you started, relying on that power, but you can't start anything new. That it a bit of a put-off. In England, you only have to reaffirm eligibility at the first annual meeting after an ordinary election, so you could have five years' worth of it. You might lose one eligibility criterion, but then you could carry on as you are until the ordinary elections. That seems to be more sensible. I would suggest One Voice Wales would strongly support a change to that.

And the other thing is, maybe, a possible review in the future about the criteria in relation to the democratic side, and also there may be a change, depending on whether there's change in the audit regime, that might make this a power that councils are more capable of obtaining. But that's all we can say, I think, at the moment, unless Lyn or the chair wants to add to that.

The only thing I would add to it is that my own council's qualified. I've advised them not to go for it because of the short term of one year. And if you've got it and you start planning larger projects for your community, the planning and preparation is more than a year in most large projects, so I could waste a lot of my staff's time developing something that I could lose before I could deliver the project. So, until I get five years of certainty, I will not be advising my council to go for it.

Paul's point about being able to continue with something that you've started doesn't fully address your point, Mike, because you would have had to get to that stage within a year, then. 

Yes.

Okay. All right. Thanks very much for that. I don't know, Paul, whether you might want to offer a view on this, but the annual reports and training plans, getting back to how often these things are required. Has that been a step forward in terms of accountability and transparency, and, in terms of how onerous it is as a requirement on the clerks and the councils, is that a real issue?

Well, as a clerk, I've done both. I worked for a small- to medium-sized council, and not within that very small council range, so I know what's involved. I think, if it's done properly, the annual report, it does make the council more open and transparent. If it's widely circulated within even a small community, people better understand what is being done, so, potentially, I would say it was a very good development. I wouldn't have thought even the clerks in the smallest councils would have difficulty in putting it together. The guidance contained in the statutory guidance supporting the 2021 Act is pretty good, easy to follow.

As far as the training plans are concerned, I think we'll always have some reluctance on the part of some councillors to subjecting themselves to training. I suspect we will, unless it was all made mandatory, which maybe it won't. So, there'll always be that. But the evidence is that One Voice Wales's success in delivering training has markedly changed since the last elections, which is about the time training plans were published. Somewhere in the region of 540 councils have all had some training from us. That would have been unheard of if you would step back about seven or eight years ago. In the current last 12-month period, we've nearly hit the 3,000 training bookings mark. As a trainer myself—I do online training—I see a different audience, as well. I see very keen people who are anxious to do a lot more of our training. So, I've seen a difference over the years, and I've been training online for a while, but training online and in person for a long time. I'll stop there.

Okay, Paul. That's very useful. Thank you.

On the annual reports, my council does them every year; not something that we used to when I first joined them three years ago. They had to be introduced to it. I did try and look at a lot of council websites of a similar size to us, and I found very few. So, if they've done them, they're not publishing them. But they're not difficult to do. There's no prescribed method that means you've got to do something very big. There's no reason why they shouldn't be done, but I think it needs to be pushed more to actually get councils not only to produce them, but to at least publish them on the website.

Okay, Robert. Thanks very much. Just to conclude, then, with a couple of issues around digital. On the digital health programme, what do you think its impact has been, what its impact is and how is the Welsh Government funding One Voice Wales? Are there any issues around that? Lyn.

I'll try and be as pithy as possible. So, we've had two individual years-worth of funding from the Welsh Government, two allocations of £150,000 each, which is, obviously, incredibly welcomed, if not a little late. This was earmarked four or five years ago, because we recognised that there have been issues around digital capacity and capability within the sector. The argument we made to one of the former Cabinet Secretaries was that, as a consequence of COVID and some brilliant work by Welsh Government officials in putting the regulations in place to allow community and town councils to work remotely, lots of councils—we did a survey within six months of the COVID lockdown—85 per cent of councils had moved to remote working, we found, which was fantastic. If we hadn't had COVID and all the ills associated with it, would we have had a cultural change or some sort of way of helping our sector to move swiftly into a digital environment? Probably not. We'd probably be still doing the face-to-face stuff, and not getting all the efficiencies of digital.

So, three years ago, the WLGA, with the Welsh Government, did a survey, identified issues in the sector, and then we had the first batch of funding. As we currently stand, there is no commitment to funding beyond this financial year. So, what we've done with this money is there's been a lot of research that's been undertaken, but we will be delivering a brand-new website for One Voice Wales, where it'll become a repository for a lot of new information that perhaps has not necessarily been provided previously. There's a whole range of guidance documents bespoke to the sector, particularly for clerks and for councillors, to enable them to manage digital programmes more efficiently. We've got training programmes that will fall out of the guidance documents that have been produced, and they will be online training programmes, and we've got a community of practice. It's fewer than 100 councils, but it's a start, and we're hoping that that will then springboard again the benefits and the learning from that to the wider sector.

One of the things we certainly have done in the second year of the programme, which has proven to be particularly successful, is we've been undertaking digital maturity assessments of individual councils. So, we send out a survey form or we contact them directly ourselves. About 120 of those have been done now, and it's given us a rich picture of the issues facing the sector, going forward. So, because we were unsure as to whether there was funding, potentially, for next year, what we wanted to do was to actually provide a state of the nation report as to, 'Well, this is the current status. You can do nothing or, hopefully, you can see the issues that are coming out of the digital maturity assessments.'

In terms of some of the, perhaps—. Shall I move on? I know there's a second question around challenges with the technology. Do you want me very quickly to cover that, John?

Shall I bring Altaf Hussain in at this point, then? Altaf.

Thanks, John. Well, One Voice Wales highlighted how many community and town councils are finding that providing training and funding digitally is very challenging. Now, we know also that creating websites and the maintaining and administration of those websites by the councils is taxing. So, my question is: what practical and financial support do community and town councils need in relation to their IT capability and capacity?

Okay. So, that neatly follows on from what we're finding from the digital maturity assessment exercise with the councils. The sorts of areas—. The one message that we're getting loud and clear is that individual councils want concrete individual support; they want that hand-holding, which is a difficulty for One Voice Wales. We haven't got that level of resource, although we've got a digital project manager for the duration of the funding, that person can't go into 732 councils and handle them through development exercises. So, what we've found from our work is that there seems to be a focus on several themes. The first one is around better understanding of e-mail and the collaboration services that are available for councils. So, for example, what we've found from maturity assessments is that 30 per cent of councils are not providing e-mail services for their staff—30 per cent, a significant number. Fifty-six per cent of councils are not providing e-mail services to their councillors. Sixty-four per cent of councils have had some staff or councillors using personal e-mails for council business. We've provided guidance on this saying, 'Don't do it', but it's still happening. And approximately 30 per cent of councils are not even using online backup to protect key files and data that the council holds. So, there are these issues.

The second theme that seems to be an issue is around domain names for websites—I won't go into too much detail there, I'm conscious of time, as there are a few other things here that we've found. Another big issue, which has come out of the requirements around hybrid meetings, is connectivity for community buildings. So, lots of community and town councils are using community buildings that are not in their ownership and then there are difficulties around actually getting Wi-Fi access and being able to comply with the hybrid requirements. On provision of equipment for staff and councillors, pleasingly, 90 per cent of councils now provide equipment such as a laptop for their clerk, which is a significant shift from maybe six or seven years ago—that figure was a lot lower. In terms of councillors, though, less than 10 per cent of councillors in the sector get any sort of digital provision from their council.

So, our recommendations—. If I can just surmise here, we feel that there needs to be a standard package of IT for community and town councils, a standard package that would cover off things like multilocation meetings, would cover off things that relate to core finance and governance activities—again, to improve the qualified audit arrangements. And also, we think—and, again, this is something that we could not do, as One Voice Wales, going forward—we feel that perhaps there should be some sort of central service desk that all community and town councils are able to ring into for support. So, there would be economies there in terms of not having individual councils spending lots of money perhaps seeking out on an individual basis—that's not the most cost-effective way of doing things. So, we would like to see a hub development for the sector and procuring in a different way.

John, can I ask a last question, really?

Please, yes.

Since you're in the process of making a new website, should there be a section for all the community councils?

The majority of what we are producing for our new website is actually public-facing. We recognise that we've got nearly 93 per cent, now, of all 732 councils in membership, so 93 per cent of our sector can have access to even—. Obviously, there's some information that's going to be behind a firewall, we're a membership organisation and that's part of the build of the website, but for the digital information, that will be on the front end of our website, because it's being funded through Welsh Government and not through just the membership fees of One Voice Wales. And likewise, with any Government-funded programme, that is at the front end and is available for all 732 councils, not just the members of One Voice Wales.

Can I just add, though, when websites were first being pushed, funding was provided—I think it was £500 at the time—to community councils. They got it and were under an obligation to produce a website. If you really want to get this hybrid thing up and done, we need to say, ‘Here’s some money, but you’ve got to do it.’ I think also we need to bear very much in mind that, in this world of ours, not everybody yet is digital. I reckon there’s probably nearly 25 per cent of my community that haven’t got a computer, don’t ever want to go near one, want nothing to do with it, and we mustn’t push it so that we end up with everything being digital and not having the option for people to have it in another source.

Okay, Robert. And, finally, Mike, then. Mike.

Just my last comment, really. I was a member of the task and finish group looking at democratic health. We worked hard, we took evidence from a lot of people, we met very regularly, we put in a lot of effort. Every time we made suggestions, they were filtered through civil servants looking at it, 'Oh, I don’t think that could be funded', 'Oh, I think that would cost too much.' So, really, my final contribution here today, John, is: democracy costs money. You cannot have democracy on the cheap. But there’s been an attitude from Government, from WLGA, from everywhere we’ve look at, that, 'Oh, that’s going to cost too much', yet the complaints about not putting it right keep coming. I think we need to square that circle. You’ve heard that the majority of our members are very small councils with very small precepts, small amounts of income. Don’t look at them to find the money. If you want democracy to develop, and if you want this sector to work to the full, then change the attitude about how we fund things. You cannot have democracy on the cheap. If you try, it will be a cheap democracy.

Okay, Mike. Thank you very much. And thank you all very much for coming in to give evidence to committee today, and I thank Ian for joining us remotely. Diolch yn fawr. You will be sent a transcript to check for factual accuracy. Diolch yn fawr.

The next item we have on our agenda is papers to note. We have correspondence from the Welsh Cladiators on building safety; a letter from Severn Wye regarding Rebate to Renovate; a letter from the Llywydd to Tracy Gilbert MP on the Absent Voting (Elections in Scotland and Wales) Bill; correspondence from the Cabinet Secretary for Housing and Local Government, with additional information following our meeting of 10 October; and a letter from Building Communities Trust, with additional information following the meeting of 14 November. Is committee prepared to note those papers? I can see that you are. Thank you very much.

Item 6 is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public from the remainder of this meeting. Is committee content to do so? You are. We will move into private session.