Unauthorised expenditure by a Councillor

Question

What happens if a Councillor has personally committed the Council to a significant expenditure that was not authorised by the Parish Council?

Is the Councillor personally liable for the expenditure if the PC does not authorise the expenditure, even after the event.

The case is made more challenging in that the Clerk has recently resigned and the PC had not yet resolved to appoint a Councillor as a temporary Clerk when the Councillor went ahead and took the personal decision for a number of significant expenditures with no prior delegated authority.

Answer 1

In theory, this should be simple enough.  A councillor has no power to make decisions for the council.  The clerk may have delegated powers, set by the council, but otherwise can only implement council decisions.  Council decisions can only be made in a properly constituted meeting.

A councillor can be appointed clerk, but this must be done by a council decision.  A councillor cannot receive payment from the council while a councillor or for a year afterwards.  A councillor acting as clerk should be very careful to keep separate the role of clerk and that of councillor.

In practice, things rather depend on the exact circumstances.  If a council account has been used, it may be difficult to repudiate the transaction.  If the council wants to keep whatever was purchased, it would be unreasonable not to pay for it.  If, however, the councillor has made a purchase at their own expense, then the council has the option of refusing to accept the transaction and leaving the councillor to extricate themselves.

Comments

Thanks for coming back to me on this.

Yes, we know in theory that a councillor has no powers to make decisions for the council, and that is probably the nub of the problem. Whilst it may seem that things were ok when we had a Clerk, there are suspicions about who was doing what.

But now the clerk has gone, the councillor in question has been writing cheques with a single signature (and yes we know that is wrong and we are now trying to sort that out) and making payments using the online banking system. These payments have been done without PC authorisation.

It feels like we will need to reject one or more unauthorised payments at the next meeting of the council and that will give us the opportunity to reclaim the expenditure from the councillor who made the payment.