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4 December 2023
This is my final report on the Council’s meeting on 21 November. Then I take a break until the next meeting of Council on 19 January.
But first things first. Happy Christmas to you all.
The Parish Council will be having a social event before Christmas with invited guests. I am not going because I wouldn’t find it comfortable eating and drinking at taxpayers expense, particularly when many residents are struggling. Nor would I find it comfortable going to an event which Council hasn’t discussed, let alone approved.
Site Management Plan for Burnham Meadows and Spinney; Item 7.2 on the agenda
The work in producing a number of site management plans for the parish is covered by a contract with a company called Mike Deegan Consulting. This contract sets out the criteria for selecting “priority” sites and lists which sites have been selected. As the contract is confidential, I can’t tell you what they are.
However, I can tell you that the Site Management Plan for Burnham Meadows and Spinney was on the agenda of the Environment and Services Committee in October. So, I think you can assume that Burnham Meadows and Spinney is a priority site. I don’t know why.
The Plan was not included in the background papers for E&S Committee but was “to follow”. Nor was the Plan circulated to Council. E&S Committee recommended that Council approve the Plan and go out to get quotes to implement it. However, the Plan was not in the background papers for Council and I couldn’t find it anywhere.
Just as important, I understand that residents in Hughenden Valley haven’t seen the Plan either and have not been consulted.
For both these reasons, I didn’t think Council should be approving the Plan.
The Chair of E&S said it was not urgent and the item was deferred to the January Council meeting.
I can also tell you that Mike Deegan Consulting was paid £2319.90 in late September/October. I don’t know who authorised the payment but it was not the Council.
Playgrounds; Item 7.2
E&S Committee also considered a paper at their October meeting prepared by the Local Government Resource Centre (LGRC). LGRC is a private sector company, providing consultancy services to local councils, and locum and temporary staff. It has provided a number of locum Clerks to HPC including Mr Truppin, who was named by Council as its Proper Officer at the November meeting.
LGRC suggested in their paper, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Council outsource the procurement exercise to management consultants who could “supervise procurement of the playgrounds as a discrete exercise”, including community engagement.
LGRC concluded by saying it would be “very happy to discuss any aspect of the project and provide a firm proposal as necessary.” It also suggested other possible contractors who might be interested.
The paper is not online but is available on request from the Clerk.
E&S Committee agreed with the LGRC’s proposals and recommended Council should “engage project management services to move the playground project forward”.
No papers were provided to Council and no explanation provided at the Council meeting – just this one-line recommendation.
I tried to ask for clarification. In response, I think the Chair of E&S Committee, Cllr Cadwallader, said that, if the Council approved this recommendation, Mr Truppin would draw up a tender specification, and go out to tender for a contract with consultants. This would cover the whole project i.e. right through to procuring new playgrounds at Great Kingshill and Templewood; Council would be asked in January to approve the successful bidder.
I pointed out that, since I became a councillor in 2021, Council had not had even a discussion about these playgrounds, much less agreed that Council should procure new ones. I suggested that the first stage of a project was to explain why it was needed. I was shouted at and told to go and look at the playgrounds. (Actually, I had visited the playgrounds that weekend).
Council did not want a discussion and approved the recommendation.
Mr Truppin did not declare an interest in that he would be managing a tendering process which would probably have a bid from the company which provided his services to the Council.
So, I will say here what I would have said. This project may cost the Council in excess of £100k – in paying for consultants and the new playgrounds themselves. So I think Council needs to be clear exactly what it has agreed to do and why.
What would be helpful at this stage would be a professional assessment of the condition and viability of the playgrounds and their equipment. When was the last inspection of the playgrounds? What did the reports say?
I would also have suggested that expertise on managing playgrounds already exists in the parish i.e. in the Village Hall Committees of Naphill, Hughenden Valley, Widmer End, and North Dean who own and manage playgrounds. I suspect that their expertise would be better – and cheaper - than that of management consultants.
I cannot understand why, after all this time, something has not been prepared for Council explaining what the problem is with the playgrounds and why new playgrounds are needed.
I asked for a recorded vote and voted against.
Priorities; Item 9.2
I have been urging Council to agree some priorities for over 18 months but it has failed to do so, twice referring the issue back to working groups. So in October I put down a motion proposing Council agree eight priorities.
I explained that having no priorities meant there was no consensus on where Council should concentrate Council time and resources, nor any consensus for setting Council, Committee and staff objectives. Nor was it clear what parishioners could expect from the Council.
It meant individual councillors pursued their own agendas and Council could not plan its work or schedule items for its agendas.
My motion was put on the agenda at the end of the meeting.
One Councillor said the priorities seemed sensible. Another, Cllr Byrom, said priorities were a bureaucratic waste of time.
There was no more discussion. Council voted to refer the issue to a working group (for a third time) but failed to appoint any members to such a group.
So that was that – no priorities.
I thought I might just speculate on what might happen if Council had agreed these priorities:-
1. To recruit, induct and train staff and provide them with clear objectives and agreed workplans;
2. To provide prompt and effective burial and allotment services;
3. To meet statutory and compliance requirements, including commenting on planning applications and grass and hedge cutting;
4. To establish and maintain sound processes for receiving income and making payments;
5. To manage within budget supported by regular, clear accurate reporting;
6. To identify, assess and manage health and safety risks;
7. To review all outstanding decisions of Council and prioritise and plan their implementation;
8. To improve engagement with residents and encourage them to apply to be councillors.
To begin with, Council might have had a substantive discussion on its recruitment and retention problems for staff and councillors.
Yes, I know that other councillors believe I am the problem and, if I resigned and left the Council, everything would be OK.
However, I have to point out that, although I haven’t resigned, I have had very little to do with the Council since April. I resigned from all Committees and working groups in April and have had virtually no contact with Council staff. The only contact has been at Council meetings and by e-mail on constituent issues.
Staff have presumably been managed by HPC’s HR Committee.
I would also point out that Hughenden Parish Council has had these problems for many years.
In July 2011, when Lynne Turner, the then Clerk, resigned, the Council interviewed four candidates and the Council was up to full complement of 15 councillors. Lynne Turner had been the Clerk for over a decade. If you want to see what work the Council got through then, you could glance at the minutes for 12 July 2011 Microsoft Word - Cnclm110712 _1_ (hughenden-pc.gov.uk)
It was somewhat unfortunate that Mrs Turner was later found to have defrauded the Council of £28k.
Council then had 4 Clerks over the next 10 years, and never had more than 2 candidates for the post when it became vacant. Councillor vacancies were a continuing problem with only 5 councillors in June 2020 when the Council nearly went inquorate.
So, finding a Clerk is not a new problem. Nor is it unique to HPC; the supply of experienced and qualified Clerks does not meet the demand certainly in Bucks and probably more widely.
Nor is finding and retaining councillors a new problem or unique to HPC; it is common across Bucks and probably elsewhere.
HPC’s reputation does of course not help the situation.
However, if Council agreed my proposed priorities, then it should have a serious discussion, analysing the problems, considering its options and taking some actions.
Instead, all it considered, as a recommendation of the HR Committee, was to seek professional help to produce a staff handbook.
If Council had accepted my priorities, Council might also have asked for regular reports on the allotments and the burial services, and could have scheduled these into Council meetings.
It would also set up some kind of system for commenting on planning applications, at the very least for major developments.
It would also mean that non-priorities would very likely not get done.
But I won’t go on – I hope you get my drift.
Co-options; Item 5.2/5.3
Yvonne Wilding was co-opted to Great Kingshill ward. Kevin Cormack was co-opted to Naphill and Walters Ash ward (not Hughenden Valley as proposed on the agenda).
Cllr Main’s resignation; Item 5.1
Cllr Main’s resignation leaves a vacancy for Vice Chair. There was no proposal to elect another Vice Chair. So the post stays open, despite the vacancy triggering a state of emergency in the Council. (I did volunteer to stand for Vice Chair if the Council was desperate).
Draft minutes of Council meeting on 19 September; item 4
I put this last because the item was pretty boring although it took up a lot of time at the beginning of the meeting.
HPC’s previous practice was to circulate draft minutes to councillors before they are placed on the website. This allowed councillors to correct any obvious errors before they are made public and cut out the time taken at Council meetings.
These draft minutes, however, were placed on the website without circulating to councillors beforehand.
I put my suggested amendments to Mr Truppin before the Council meeting hoping that changes could be made where they were uncontentious. This would have saved time at this meeting. Mr Truppin said I would need to raise my concerns at the Council meeting.
So, I did. I had 9 points:-
a) The draft minutes, once again, did not include the list of payments authorised at the September meeting. This is required under HPC’s Financial Regulations as one of the internal control measures to prevent fraud and corruption;
b) Six points related to factual errors, particularly in the way I voted;
c) Under HPC’s Standing Orders, a Council meeting cannot exceed 2 hours. If councils want to exceed 2 hours, they can approve a resolution suspending Standing Orders. No such resolution was recorded.
It was 9.30pm i.e. at the 2- hour stage, when Council got to the confidential session. So, the meeting finished then and the minutes should have recorded that. However, the draft minutes didn’t.
Instead, the draft minutes went on to record what happened at the confidential session. This included a resolution which was not on the agenda; was not proposed or seconded; and for which no vote took place. And during a time when councillors were standing up, stacking chairs and leaving and would, if the meeting had been still going, have left the meeting inquorate.
The resolution is recorded as confirming the appointment of the RFO and this, in any case, would not have complied with HPC’s Scheme of Delegation.
My amendments were not voted on separately. The Chair read out which amendments he thought Council should accept (no, I have no idea which ones) and Council approved these. I asked for a recorded vote and voted against.
And that’s about it.
P.S. I sent my list of concerns to the internal auditor today. These are in addition to those I set out in my blog of 27 November 2023 about the lack of adequate internal controls, and in addition to the four reports from the internal auditor still not answered by Council.
I said that my concerns - more than 30 of them - covered pretty well every aspect of HPC’s financial arrangements and that Council was clearly not complying with the overarching requirements in its Financial Regulations i.e.
“1.2. The Council is responsible in law for ensuring that its financial management is adequate and effective and that the Council has a sound system of internal control which facilitates the effective exercise of the Council’s functions, including arrangements for the management of risk.”