Can we be prevented from voting at a co option procedure?

Question

Two candidates recently applied for one vacancy on our council. One candidate is a trustee for a potential CIO that was submitted to the Charities Commission a week ago. Three other councillors, including myself, will also become trustees if the CIO is granted making a total of four councillors out of the full quota of eleven for our town.

When the discussion began (candidates and public having left the room) the Chair stated that the three potential trustee councillors should have disclosed an interest and also that if the trustee candidate was co opted then "it would break the council" because if a grant application from the CIO was submitted to the council in the future and other councillors were absent due to holidays or sickness there would be a potential quorate issue. We were told that they had already written to NALC before the co option meeting but no reply had been received. The discussion was then stopped and we were prevented from voting for either candidate until NALC responds.

I would like to ask two questions

1. Should the three of us, as potential trustees, have declared an interest in the candidate?

2. Can we be prevented from voting at the rescheduled co option meeting?

I hope I have explained my question clearly enough for you to answer. Thank you.

Answer 1

I presume that several members of the Council know one or both of the candidates, as this is the norm. You're voting to co-opt them onto the Council, so you have a pecuniary interest only if their co-option would benefit you or a member of your immediate family financially. If not, you have no pecuniary interest.

If you are an associate of one or both of the candidates, you could declare a non-pecuniary interest, although I can't see why this would be relevant to the matter in hand. Your code of conduct will dictate how non-pecs are handled, but it is unlikely that you will be prevented from participating in the discussion or vote.

Why were the candidates and public excluded from the meeting? The grounds for exclusion are clearly set out in the legislation and the resolution to exclude must state which of the reasons is being applied. This must also appear in the minutes.

As for breaking the Council, perhaps you could suggest that the Chair reads the section of the standing orders relating to dispensations.

Comments

Thank you for your reply. In answer to your question as to why the candidates and public were excluded from the meeting. They were only excluded whilst councillors held a discussion on both candidates and this was on the agenda as ; Local Government Act 1972 - Exclusion of Public
To move “That under Section 100(A)(4) of the Local Government Act 1972 the public
be excluded from the meeting for the following items of business on the grounds
that they involve the likely disclosure of exempt information as defined in Paragraph
3 of Part 1 of Schedule 12A of the Act".

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For the record, Section 100A(4) refers specifically and exclusively to principal councils, not parish councils. Paragraph 3 specifies "Information relating to the financial or business affairs of any particular person". Assuming you haven't carried out credit reference checks on the candidates, knowing what somebody does for a living is not a confidential matter. It is for the candidates to determine how much of their business affairs they wish to make public at the co-option stage and, once selected, they will be required to provide full disclosure in their register of interests anyway.

It's also worth bearing in mind the GDPR principle of the balance between the right to privacy and the public interest in disclosing information. You are selecting somebody for public office to make important decisions on behalf of the electorate, including spending their money. Surely the public interest outweighs the right to privacy in this case.

Answer 2

Your clerk, chair (and importantly, all of your Cllrs that voted in favour of excluding the public (assuming there was a vote(?) AND the public AND the candidates) all should have said "no," it is neither appropriate nor lawful to exclude the public in this instance.  

Predominantly, the clerk and chair are directly responsible for this maladministration (clerk as (supposedly) the proper officer and chair as the person facilitating the meeting.)

If Cllrs were invited to vote to exclude public they should have voted no.  

If any member of the public or the candidates had their wits about them they could simply have expressed a disinclination to acquiesce to the request / direction (?) to leave the meeting.

It should not have happened that way.