Agenda item

Gareth Price – Head of Law and Standards

Leanne Rowlands – Democratic and Electoral Services Manager

The Head of Law and Standards summarised the terms of reference and purpose of the Democratic Services Committee; which is to mainly oversee the effective discharge of the Council’s democratic functions and to ensure that there are sufficient resources to facilitate support for Members in discharging their roles. The Local Government Wales Measure made it a statutory requirement for all councils to have a Democratic Services Committee in place to discharge these statutory function.  The Measure was subsequently amended by the Local Government Democracy (Wales) Act 2013, to provide for a wider range of functions. The Committee also have oversight over the council’s written constitution and monitor and oversee Members training and development.

Committee Members were introduced to Leanne Rowlands, the Democratic and Electoral Services Manager, who is the designated statutory Head of Democratic Services, whose duty is to report annually on the resources of the Democratic Services team in supporting the Councillors.

Members were advised in previous annual reports, the Democratic Services Committee is a non-partisan board which looks into the council functions and is not generally a political meeting. It was mentioned that it is not a decision making committee, but however the Members can make recommendations to full council on the constitution and to improve the council’s corporate governance structure.

The officers welcomed questions from the Committee.

Committee raised the following points:

·       Councillor Spencer queried if there would be more ad-hoc meeting dates.

The Head of Service confirmed that the committee is expected to meet quarterly but could schedule more meetings in if frequent work comes in for the committee to review.

Committee was advised that they could also agree the frequency and timing of the meetings.

The Head of Law and Standards continued to give a brief overview of the rest of the report and covered what would be on the agenda in the forward work programme. The Lead Officer highlighted that the officers took a number of reports to full Council’s AGM in May 2022 for adoption to reflect the requirements of the Local Government and Elections (Wales) Act 2021; this includes hybrid meetings, the participation strategy and also the new petition scheme for the council. It was explained that the Committee are required to monitor the effectiveness of these policies and keep all of these under review and they can choose when to receive these monitoring reports.

As the petition scheme and hybrid meetings had only just been introduced as policies, the Head of Law & Standards recommended that the Committee defer monitoring these policies until later on in the year, if they would like that. It was highlighted that the participation and engagement strategy has a number of objectives which could be brought forward in the agenda if the Members would like to discuss those in future meetings.

For the September meeting, Members were advised that there is a legal requirement in legislation to produce a guide in the constitution to the decision making process. The officers intend to make the procedure easier to understand and will look to present on that to the Members in the next meeting.

Further to the discussion, the Lead Officer noted with the Committee that the other agenda item for next meeting, in light of engagement strategy will be the arrangement for ward meetings. It was highlighted that these have been down to the discretion of the ward councillors; as certain areas have a high turnout whereas others would not. Even if that does not change, the council would like to look into how the meetings are supported and structured; the officer advised they would look to bring suggestions in on how to move those arrangements forward.

The Committee agreed the forward work programme, as set out in the report and agreed the next meeting of Monday 12 September at 10am and timing of the meetings.