ACSeS hits back at minister in row over role of monitoring officers
The Association of Council Secretaries and Solicitors has hit back at criticism of the performance of monitoring officers in an open letter to Local Government Minister Brandon Lewis.
At a Westminster Hall debate last week Lewis accused some monitoring officers of giving poor advice and ‘gold-plating’ the revised standards regime.
His predecessor at the Department for Communities and Local Government, Bob Neill, also claimed during the debate that some monitoring officers had given bad advice on issues such as predetermination.
Neill, who was heavily involved in revising the standards regime during the passage of the Localism Act 2011, suggested as well that officers had not changed their mindset to reflect the localism agenda.
In the letter ACSeS President Philip McCourt said the issue of monitoring officers’ performance should be “addressed in their context and at a local level rather than ventilated intemperately in a public Parliamentary forum”.
He added: “We hope you would agree that it is surely wrong to effectively ‘name and shame’ individual council officers in such an elevated public forum, with an intrinsically one-sided and potentially partial set of accusations, when the officers in question have no right of reply.”
Criticising the citing during the debate of apparently anecdotal cases, McCourt also said that “most of the contributions to the Westminster Hall debate seemed to display an unfortunate degree of prejudice and animus towards monitoring officers generally”.
The ACSeS President continued: “Monitoring officers certainly have no wish to gold-plate or otherwise complicate existing statutory requirements. On the other hand, as I am sure you will appreciate, such officers already have their work cut out as senior authority advisers in a time of pressing financial austerity to ensure safe and sound corporate operations in the public interest, whilst also providing creative and pragmatic legal advice to yield increasing value from diminishing resources.”
The letter also said:
- It was local authorities and not central government who set the parameters for local standards regimes and consequently the place, timing, quality and context in which questions may be asked. “It should therefore be unsurprising that the answers to those questions may at times be variable”;
- The quality of advice is also a matter for the local authorities concerned. “Whilst ACSeS is a professional association, it is not a vetting or qualification body. It is the local authority which determines the quality of lawyer it appoints, if it in fact chooses to appoint a lawyer as monitoring officer”;
- Advice and guidance issued by ACSeS to members is framed as “practical, proportionate and pragmatic”. (The letter goes on to set out the association’s position on predetermination);
- ACSeS had raised a number of issues with the DCLG concerning interpretation of the standards provisions where the drafting had given rise to doubt and ambiguity. “However, we have not received a response which has the benefit of apparent legal input. In the absence of certainty from the legislation, some authorities have properly and reasonably sought external legal advice”;
- The wording of the 2011 Act and relevant regulations “does not always lend itself to the particular interpretation that ministers might desire”.
The ACSeS letter specifically rejected the minister’s comment in the debate that “Whether because of excessive caution, bureaucrats’ love of bureaucracy for its own sake, or a misplaced belief that they and not members should be in the driving seat on standards….”.
It said monitoring officers had “an unenviable task” to ensure high standards of corporate governance within their authorities and, where necessary, to speak truth to power.
McCourt said ACSeS would welcome a meeting with the minister and DCLG officials “so that relevant concerns can be addressed positively and constructively in the public interest”.
A copy of the letter can be viewed here.
Philip Hoult
