Sunday 21 June 2020

Throw back Sunday - 6.1 revealed

One of the astonishing revelations from Ammanford Town Council's Clerk (~£32K pa) was that he couldn't find correspondence presented to full Council on 9 December 2019,when he attended his first meeting to take up the reins on a full time basis {see Liar, Liar, Townhall on fire (pt4)} .

By virtue of  Section 57 of Local Government (Democracy) (Wales) Act 2013 these documents should have been made available electronically to the public when Councillors were summoned to the Meeting .

So, to be helpful, I thought I'd serialise things - having suitably redacted as the Council should have done to comply with the DPA2018 (GDPR) .

Let's start with item 6.1, of 28 August 2019: 


Lessons to learn:

  • The Council has never formally acknowledged receipt - complaints policy says five days (despite a phone call chasing). It certainly didn't resolve the issue within 20 working days - like the policy says "most" complaints will.
  • Taking over three months to bring an item before Council is worrisome.
  • Councillors should have reviewed the correspondence and asked questions.
  • Dating items presented, as a policy, would have covered all these issues, and "protected" against an FOI request.
  • Publishing the documents referenced in an Agenda, per Welsh Law would have stopped this ever becoming an issue, currently corona-parked with the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales.
Watch out for 6.2 tomorrow.