Question

Does a PC need a resolution to amend minutes of a meeting?

Answer 1

Yes. The minutes are not final until they are approved by a council resolution (which must be done promptly). At the time the minutes are approved, the council can resolve to make changes to correct any errors in the minutes. Once the council has resolved to accept the minutes, they are final.

While the minutes are in draft, there is nothing to stop a councillor (or anyone else) from advising the clerk of an error, which the clerk may correct if the error is agreed. But this can only be done prior to the draft minutes being released as a supporting document along with the agenda for the meeting which will approve them. After that, the clerk can still advise the council of any errors that have been reported, prior to the resolution to approve the minutes.

Comments

We only get to see draft minutes as attachments to the agenda of meetings.  The draft minutes are not circulated to Councillors nor published on our website.  Sometimes the draft minutes only arrive several days after the agenda has been published, a day or two before the actual meeting.  Our Standing Orders require draft minutes to be published within 5 working days, the Clerk never meets this requirement.  There have now been two consecutive meetings in which Councillors have complained about the late delivery of attachments to the minutes;  despite assurances that things will get better, this is just not the case.  I can see that the Clerk is busy but Councillors do not get the opportunity to set the priorities for the Clerk in order to make more capacity for the bread-and-butter task of producing minutes.

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It's really a lot easier for the clerk if minutes are written promptly, and the clerk should be encouraged to do this. One trick employed by experienced clerks is that the minutes can be drafted ahead of the meeting, simply by adapting the agenda. This does not in any way preempt decisions by the council - it is easy to change "resolved" to "resolved not to". Where there are open ended agenda items, a space can be left in the draft minutes. The minutes are then close to being complete at the end of the meeting. The best time to complete them is the next day, while the meeting is still fresh in the mind.

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Can I be clear is a resolution needed only when draft minutes are altered ?
If they are unaltered is it OK to record like this? The minutes of the meeting held on 18th November, previously having been circulated, were confirmed as a correct record and signed by the Chairman.

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I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. Normally, there is an agenda item for the approval of the minutes. The council must vote on it before the chairman signs. If changes are needed, they must be agreed to, and the council is then voting to approve the minutes as amended. The changes are an amendment to the standard resolution in the agenda. Either way, there is a resolution to accept the minutes (with or without changes) and a vote.

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The last para of my previous posting is an extract from my PC minutes. It does not stated "It was resolved".  You appear to be saying all minutes whether correct or amended must be formally voted on and the result recorded as a resolution, in which case my PC are doing it incorrectly?

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The wording you quote seems unclear to me. Who does the confirming? The essence of it is that approving the minutes is a decision made by the council, and a council can only make a decision by having a vote. So if the wording means that the council voted to confirm that the minutes were correct, then that would be acceptable. It's not necessary to use the word "resolved". Other words such as "agreed" are commonly also used. The words are not critical, but it must be clear to all that the council decided to approve the minutes (with or without changes) by a vote.