Issue - meetings

Code of Conduct

 

 

Meeting: 12/12/2022 - Council (Item 12)

12 Member Code of Conduct pdf icon PDF 204 KB

Report of the Leader

Additional documents:

Minutes:

The Leader introduced the report, which sought to ensure that the Code of Conduct remained up to date and aligned with best practice. The Code needed to be fit for purpose, and from a transparency point of view it was important to ensure that the public were not confused by differences between one authority and another across the county. In order to avoid this, the group of Monitoring Officers for the Gloucestershire councils had been involved in discussing and drafting a proposed unified Member Code of Conduct, taking into account the LGA model and their experiences of operating the present Codes in the individual Councils.

She added that the Code was now at a stage where councils had been actively consulting upon it and were moving towards adoption. There were a number of benefits of having a unified code, including Members sitting on more than one council having one consistent set of rules. She was aware of this from a personal point of view, as her husband was a county councillor and the differences in CBC and GCC’s constitutions were clear. The Code had been considered by the Standards Committee on 4th August and the Constitution Working Group on 14th October, both of whom agreed to recommend it to Council.

The Mayor moved into Member questions:

  • One Member noted that the Code was only as good as those who oversaw its implementation, and asked whether there was mandatory training for Standards Committee members. The Leader confirmed that there was, in addition to the training provided to the two Independent Members who sat on Standards.
  • One Member asked when exactly the Code applied to councillors’ conduct. The Leader clarified that the Code applied whenever they were acting in their role as a councillor, due to their role as public figures and their responsibility to represent their constituents.

 

The Mayor moved to the vote, where it was unanimously:

 

RESOLVED THAT:

1.    The Member Code of Conduct be adopted with effect from 1 January 2023.

 

FOR: 36

AGAINST: 0

ABSTAIN: 0