Former councillor kept access to all Council e mails for 3 weeks after election day.

Question

Only 2 of our former Parish councillors were re-elected in May.  One former councillor kept access to all council e mails for 3 weeks or more until our temporary Clerk could change all the passwords. (The clerk had resigned and we had to find a replacement as soon as we could). We believe the former councillors destroyed many documents. Is there someone we can report this to?

Answer 1

After an election, councillors remain councillors even if not re-elected for a short period after the election date and this year, because of the coronation bank holiday, the date when everyone changed over was 9th May.  The combination of a temporary clerk as you've described and pretty much every council in the country changing probably means a few didn't lose access to their emails instantly to be honest.  However, why were important documents being held in the email account of a councillor?  Surely they should have been within the files etc. of your clerk (temporary, newly appointed or otherwise) as they would belong to the council not any individual councillor?  Frankly rather poor document management if the only copy of a document is held by an individual councillor and no, there's probably nothing you can do if those documents are now lost unless your IT system administrators, if there is one, can recover them.

Answer 2

You could report it to the monitoring officer.    If it could be proved that they destroyed records, that would be in breach of the Nolan Principles and a breach of the code of conduct.  It is certainly information that any future cllrs should be aware of should they seek co option. The question is, what format were the records stored in? If they were electronic, they may be recoverable, but if shreaded hard copy, you have had it.  For E mails, it depends where and who runs your E mail server.  If you outsource E mail, the hosting company may be able to recover them.