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22 November 2023
I thought you might like to see the BFP’s article on HPC’s Full Council meeting on 21 November.
The article is at Parish council chaos as members shout at each other | Bucks Free Press.
I’m afraid you have to subscribe to the BFP to read all but the headlines.
I have commented on the BFP’s website as below. I will report on other issues discussed at the meeting when I have time.
“It is not surprising in the confusion that the BFP has not understood what was being said.
The issues are important, although somewhat boring.
The power of appointing officers to Hughenden Parish Council is reserved under HPC’s Scheme of Delegation to the Council itself. HPC’s Scheme of Delegation is based on national guidance issued by the National Association of Local Councils. This power is reserved to Councils (rather than to an officer or individual councillors) to ensure that the appointment is transparent and fair.
Appointments have to be decided at a public meeting and have to be minuted so that the public can see who has been appointed, when and by whom.
Officers of local councils have considerable powers and responsibilities and are paid by the taxpayer. The requirement for the appointment of the officers by the Council reduces the risks of nepotism, fraud and negligence and the misuse of public money.
One of the posts of a parish council, that of the Responsible Financial Officer (RFO), is a statutory post and the legislation sets out what qualifications the RFO should have.
The official guidance says that:-
Council has a statutory duty for the overall financial administration of the council and a key way in discharging this function is the requirement that councils secure that one of their officers has responsibility for the administration of those affairs.
Section 113 of the Local Government Finance Act goes further and requires that this officer is a qualified member of one of the accountancy institutes (such as, but not exclusively, The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, CIPFA). Therefore, every council designates a specific officer as their responsible financial officer, also known as the council’s Section 151 officer’.
At the beginning of the meeting when Council was asked to approve the draft minutes, I queried a resolution in the draft which said that Council had confirmed the appointment of the RFO. I queried it for two reasons.
First, because it was not for Council to confirm the appointment by someone else; it was for Council to approve the actual appointment.
I also queried it because, if the draft minutes were correct, Council had confirmed the appointment without being informed of anything about the person involved, neither her background, experience nor her qualifications. I had asked for this information of the locum Clerk who was at the previous meeting and had been refused the information. All Council had been informed of was the person’s name (and I wasn’t, at the time, even sure about that).
It was particularly important to know this person’s qualifications because of the statutory requirement.
It was also important because, under the emergency powers that had been taken by the locum Clerk at the November meeting, the RFO was now authorizing all payments by the Council (rather than the Council) and this would continue for the foreseeable future.
It was against this background, known to the Council and the locum Clerk, that I mentioned the qualifications of the RFO.
This is the point at which the locum Clerk at this meeting lost his temper and shouted at me.
When he stopped shouting, I said it was not unreasonable for a councillor to ask for information about the RFO including their qualifications, before their appointment.
I still have no information about the person in this post except her name.
Later in the meeting, Council was asked to name the locum Clerk at the meeting as the Proper Officer of HPC. I made a similar point that Council needed to know something about the locum Clerk before appointing him but no information had been provided.
I also asked whether his taking the emergency powers he had taken was lawful because, at the time he took them, he had not been appointed by the Council as its Clerk or Proper Officer.
These are just some of the issues that the Council did not wish to address; they merely saw my concerns as disrupting the meeting and wished to move on.
I should add that HPC has had four internal auditor’s reports in the last 2 years and has responded to none of them.
It did not comply with its Statutory Governance Requirement for the last financial year on 3 counts including not having an adequate system of internal control including measures to prevent and detect fraud and corruption.
The Council was the victim of fraud by its then Clerk about 10 years ago.
I made no personal comments at the meeting and remained quiet and calm.
Linda Derrick
Councillor for Widmer End
Hughenden Parish Council
PS. Cllr Main who resigned a month ago was not the RFO; the last RFO was Cllr Jones, on a temporary basis, resigning in September.”