Question

Are residents entitled to see councillors' responses to their complaints?

Answer 1

A bit more information is needed for there to be a clear, detailed answer.

A complaint to the council should receive a whole council response, not individual councillors.  It should be dealt with under the council's complaint policy.  The response should come from the Chair.

A complaint about a councillor should be sent to the Monitoring Officer and this should be treated under the Local Authority's code of conduct complaint procedure.

If you are asking whether you can see correspondence on the complaint between councillors, then you would need to submit a Freedom of Information request to the council but your required responses might not be forthcoming.

Comments

Thank you for responding..
Our District Council has included all of the Nolan Principles as part of their Code of Conduct for councillors.
Anyone who stands for election will therefore be aware that they must be prepared to be  'answerable to the public for their actions and decisions and be subject to the scrutiny necessary to achieve this'.
They do not anticipate being answerable to an unelected official, i.e. a Monitoring Officer, whose duty must surely be, as an administrator, to ensure that councillors' responses to complaints are passed on to complainants?
Our DC's MO has simply said that he 'Cannot provide the councillor's response to my complaint'  thereby denying that his council adopted the Nolan Principles which are on their web site.
Such secrecy cannot surely be acceptable in our country which is the envy of many throughout the world for our open and accessible democracy?

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I cannot see any reason why you have not been given the councillors response to your code of conduct complaint.  What is the reason the MO has given?  If they have not given a reason, put in a complaint about them and or raise an FOI with them.

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A FOI request would fail as it contains personal information. What is needed is a Subject Access Request.

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Our District Council has joined with two neighbouring ones to provide Building Control, legal and other services.
My complaint was referred to them by the MO and their Information Management Team responded referring to the Environmental Information Regulations 2004.
'Any person who is the subject of a complaint and resulting investigation has the right to reply with the expectation any information provided by them be treated in confidence unless there is a statutory duty for disclosure.
We consider such material will be classed as personal data of Councillor.........and as such Section 40(2)  - personal data of third parties - will apply. Section 40 is an absolute exemption and no further explanation is required.' .
This seems to be a way of deterring anyone from making complaints against their councillors who can behave with impunity knowing that the Nolan Principle of accountability 'to the public' in the DC's Code of Conduct is a 'hollow promise'.
I have found today that the chair of the joint body is actually the district councillor against whom I lodged my complaint!
What do you think about the way my complaint is being dealt with?.