Who do I complain to about clerk if mayor refuses to action complaint

Question

Over the last few years myself and other councilors, and indeed at least one member of the public has attempted to raise complaints and issues regarding clerk. The mayor routinely dismisses them. My most recent attempt to complain was regarding the clerk proposing to one of our tenants a scheme that is essentially tax evasion.

Answer 1

There are three essential policies that your council should have:  a complaints policy, a discipline policy and a grievance policy.  Each should have clearly defined procedures for handling complaints against the council and against council staff.  Without them, your council is already at a disadvantage if or when a complaint is made, whether a valid complaint or not.  Those documents should be your starting point.
The Clerk is an employee of the council and you have referred to "other councillors" when referring to complaints about the clerk.  You, the Council, are the clerk's employer and must act as such.  The Mayor alone has no jurisdiction unless or until you have followed the disciplinary/complaints procedure.

If your complaint is about the actions of the clerk/council in a financial matter, then you can and should raise this with your internal and external auditor.

Comments

Is it acceptable to raise issues of procedure or governance directly with the auditor?  If so, which auditor in the first instance?
Can this be done in confidence?

Answer 2

This is quite common and apart from replacing the Clerks managers there’s nothing you can do about it

I’ve suffered the same thing and I’ve witnessed behaviour that would result in instant dismissal in the real world just brushed under the carpet

Comments

My thought was they're in breach of code of conduct by not following the council complaint policy? Not showing leadership etc.

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Funnily enough I went down that route and lodged a complaint to the Monitoring Officer that the Chair was permitting the poor behaviour of the Clerk but this was rejected
The real reason was that if they had ruled in my favour  they would have been publicly acknowledging that the Clerk was out of order
Even when false information about me was submitted to various public bodies including the ICO, Police and MO nothing happened
My experience is that a lot of Parish Councils have little or no idea how to manage staff and some employees exploit this

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Spot on Jules!

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Having spoken to the MO today it is instantly looking like your right .. words to the effect of "well it would be  a stretch to be a breach .. "