Could you spare five minutes to read an article?

Question

Respected and award-winning political investigative journalist David Hencke has today published an article on his website highlighting a history of issues within my parish centred around the actions of the Parish Council, District Council, a community interest company (CIC) and local police. While possibly at the extreme-end in terms of the issues, I do believe these issues are not at all unique to our parish and I'm sure there are plenty of people on this forum who have experienced similar. The root cause (in my humble opinion) is poor governance and lack of authority any regulatory body has over the actions at a local government level. Millions of pounds of tax-payers money is being wasted as a result on toothless investigations into parish councils/councillors that don't result in any real change, as well as on projects that our communities either don't want or need.

I am hopeful that this article - which is far from the whole story - gets some traction across the country, resulting in other news/media outlets picking it up and other councillors (current or former) and clerks coming forward with their own stories. To do this, it would be great if you could at least read through the article, but commenting on it and sharing it amongst any other political forums you belong to would be even better.

I appreciate this isn't what this forum was set up for and I understand if this post is removed, but I do feel it might resonate with many people on here and give hope to those who feel like they're constantly hitting a brick wall when trying to do the right thing for their community.

If you can spare the time, the article can be found here: https://davidhencke.com/2024/09/02/exclusive-northiam-the-picture-postcard-sussex-village-that-hides-a-fractious-community-of-hate-and-harassment/

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

My PC is bad but not in this league

A neighbouring one poured a huge amount of S106 money into a single white elephant project that competes with local businesses and appears to have created a permanent drain on finances resulting in a 162% hike in precept
There was a 120 year lease granted but no idea who approved it

Staff members family were employed
One Councillor had a major contract with the Council but didn’t declare it on their declaration of interests yet still took part in meetings about it no idea how the contact was granted

Comments

Oh my goodness! Some of our councillors partners are "members" (like shareholders) of the CIC and have a financial liability (albeit for £1) if the company goes bust. One councillor was a director of it too. According to the companies articles of association, he was still liable for the company up to a year of after his resignation (which happened in May 2023) In September 2023, all these people voted to grant the company £3,000 of council money.

I wrote to the district council to complain, as I felt it was an undeclared interest, but they decided that on speaking to those people, they were happy that no foul had been committed on the basis that they all said they hadn't directly gained from the money being given to the company. Without it though, the company would barely break even; last year it had a surplus of £800.

I put a number of arguments back to the monitoring officer, but "the decision was made". I took it to the ombudsmen who told me if I could always take the matter to the police myself. Needless to say, getting the police to investigate "usual" crimes under laws that a 5 year old knows is hard enough, so I didn't bother.

Answer 2

https://townandparishcouncillors.co.uk/newsarticles/

Your parish council’s story features on the ‘news’ pages of this website…

Comments

The real problem is the total lack of accountability which exists for PCs.  Until that happens Councillors and Clerks alike will abuse the system.  Most attempts at some form of control (auditors and Monitoring Officers) are generally toothless.   This situation in turn leads to many good Councillors walking away and general public apathy.   Currently it seems to me that NALC seek to promote the importance of the clerk  at the expense of Councillors and until the latter "take back control" nothing will change.   That being said there are obviously many good PCs out there who work well together but surely some better oversight is needed and that has to come through legislation