Agenda item

Report of Independent Governance Review  

 

To introduce Max Caller CBE to the Council, to present his report on a review of our Corporate Governance arrangements. Group Leaders have been consulted on the arrangements for the meeting and the proposed recommendations set out in the report.

Report of Independent Governance Review

 

The Leader introduced Max Caller CBE and his team to the Council, to present his report on a review of the Council’s Corporate Governance arrangements. Mr Caller was accompanied by Mr Jim Taylor and Mr Gordon Mitchell and they spoke briefly to members about their background and experience. Members had been provided with a copy of the report at 1.00 pm.

 

Mr Caller stressed that the report was an honest reflection of their views and had not been influenced by any member of the Council. There were issues about trust, confidence and working together and about how reports were handled. The Leader had asked for this review to be done when he had taken office and this should have been facilitated by the Chief Executive at that time. Instead the Leader and Deputy Leader had exercised delegated authority to bring it about and it was a pity that that had had to happen as it had affected member confidence in the process from the start.

 

Mr Caller and his team went through the report sections in some detail. The Business Chair then invited member questions which included:-

 

·       Councillor Dickinson felt there was a need to draw the line under this but members couldn’t pretend none of this had happened. The Council needed to look at the detail and put things right and build on the good work of the Executive Team. He asked what Mr Caller would recommend in terms of moving forward.

·       Councillor Kennedy felt that the current situation stemmed from 2017 and evolved into the control failures, staff turnover and expensive interims which existed now. He asked Mr Caller what he felt the Council’s chances were of getting things right.

·       Councillor Reid thanked the team for the report. Members now had to accept the advice which was being provided and tackle the issues. 

·       Councillor Morphet welcomed the review and looked forward to dealing with the matters in hand.

 

Mr Caller responded that 2017 had seemed the appropriate point to start from. The Council had chosen to appoint a Chief Executive on a part time basis. In the team’s experience and judgement, running a unitary authority of this size and complexity was a hard job. The Council should have thought harder at the time about the specification for the Chief Executive and what was to be done, and what effort was required to achieve that before making a permanent appointment. He acknowledged points from the Leader regarding current interims, but running the Council on these appointments was not the way to make progress. Permanent committed appointments was how local government worked. He urged members to see the report as an agenda to move forward and the LGA could support them on this.

 

·       Councillor Bridget asked Mr Caller if he believed it was the role of a backbench member to challenge the Administration and officers to ensure the interest of residents and the County were represented adequately.

·       Councillor J. Watson asked if the team were aware that Advance had received unqualified acceptance of its accounts this year. Also the Advance Board had made recommendations before Christmas regarding the independent people and no progress had been made for months.

·       Councillor Hill felt the report was quite damning. It focussed a lot on officers which betrayed the fact that councillors were in charge, and Conservative members had been in leadership over this mess since 2017. Page 37 referred to a fundamental reset and the need for a seasoned local government professional input to start the process of change. She felt there was a need for more radical intervention and asked if there were opportunities for more robust support.

 

Mr Caller replied that they had not been aware of the Advance accounts but were aware of the other matters and they had been taken into account. He would defend the rights of councillors to ask robust questions of Administrations and officers but there was a requirement to behave with respect and some behaviours had been unacceptable. Matters should not become personal. Two of the team had been commissioners in intervention authorities and he did not feel members would want to be in this position as it removed their powers to act as democratically elected individuals.

 

·       Councillor Dale asked whether Mr Caller felt the issue of member training was sufficiently covered in the report as there was no specific recommendation on it.

·       Councillor Ferguson asked if there was a need for a robust system to ensure the uptake of member training so that they had the knowledge to carry out their roles and he asked if Mr Caller believed there had been any unlawful activity either by the Council or by individuals.

·       Councillor Ball asked how long the Council would get to improve and how and when would this be judged.

 

Mr Caller replied that para 10.1 identified that training was a fundamental part of this. However, members needed to help to fulfil their role and a change in mindset was needed. It was up to the Council if things were going to be any different.

 

·       Councillor Murphy asked what Mr Caller’s view was of the system inherited by officers and that it may not have been the best that it could have been. She wondered how much of the blame was systemic.

·       Councillor Bawn asked Mr Caller what he would have done if he as leader to ensure the review had been carried out when it had been requested by the Leader.

·       Councillor Ezhilchelvan asked how Mr Caller would rate the Council on a scale of 1-10 for the last five years and how he thought it could perform in the future.

 

Mr Caller replied that officers should not allow bad situations to stop them doing the jobs they were employed to do. He would not rate councils as he had never known one to be either all good or all bad. A motion could have been taken to Council but it was unheard of for a leader not to be able to get an item on a Cabinet agenda.

 

·       Councillor Oliver commented on the three process themes identified in the report and asked how the Council could deal with the override of process theme.

·       Councillor Dodd asked whether there was a need for a further look at the role and purpose of Scrutiny.

·       Councillor Robinson asked if there had been a systems failure or a personnel failure, or both and if so, what needed to be tackled first.

 

Mr Caller replied that the authority could not move on until the right leadership was in place at officer level to carry this forward. Systems were operated by people and if the right people were operating the systems, then the override did not happen. If it did, the Scrutiny would pick it up. The Council might want to do a separate review by the Centre for Public Scrutiny.

 

·       Councillor Cessford asked whether Mr Caller had seen any information which indicated any actions or decisions which had bene less than lawful. If so, did he recommend any higher level investigation of these issues?

·       Councillor Renner Thompson asked whether the democratic deficit which seemed evident was a common theme or unique to this Authority.

·       Councillor Wearmouth referred to paragraphs 6.13 and 7.11 and asked if the issues related to members or staff. He also asked how the workstreams would be taken forward and how many there were likely to be. He hoped Mr Caller and his team had not ben asked to sign NDAs as referenced earlier.

 

Mr Caller advised that officers had to be robust sometimes in performance of their duties but that didn’t mean that they should not respect the role of members. This was an issue for the Authority. There would be issues which came out and they would be referred to the individuals concerned but the aim was to focus on the future . They would be having conversations with the external auditors and he expected that the workstreams would come from the recommendations. Regarding NDAs, the Government had advised that these should not be used in the public sector, yet they seemed to be used a lot here, and not arising from any agreed policy. They had interviewed all the people who had been subject to NDAs and it seemed that some good people had been lost who would have performed well for the Council. This indicated concerns about how things were being run and there were policy and practice issues flowing from that.

 

·       Councillor Gallacher commented that scrutiny task and finish groups did good work but often there was no outcome resulting from the work they did. He had been asking for planning training for a year without success and this was needed for old and new members.

·       Councillor Swinburn asked whether the staffing structure should be decided from the top down with officers or by members. Should the structure be in place first?

·       Councillor Jackson asked whether Mr Caller felt that the poor treatment of staff was more than a cultural issue and pointed to how HR had been managed for the last few years, and did this roll on into the potential unlawful activity

 

Mr Caller replied that Scrutiny should not be looking at policy and practice as it was being developed. The point about the structure came from having a chief executive in place who worked with members to follow it through. The structure and detail and delegation was a matter for the Council to decide. It was too difficult in this kind of review to respond to Councillor Jackson’s points

 

·       Councillor Hunter asked if Mr Caller had any suggestions should the Authority struggle to recruit to the new positions. Mr Caller replied that he would be surprised if this was the case. There were great opportunities at Northumberland.

 

The Leader made some closing remarks and thanked the team for the report. He proposed the report’s recommendations, which was seconded by Councillor Wearmouth. On the required number of members asking for a named vote on the issue, the votes were cast as follows:

 

FOR:39

 

Bawn, D.	Mather, M.
Beynon, J.	Morphet, N.
Carr, D.	Oliver, N.
Cessford, T.	Pattison, W.
Chicken, E.	Reid, J.
Dale, A.	Renner Thompson, G.
Darwin, L.	Riddle, J.
Dodd, R.R.	Robinson, M.
Dunbar, C.	Sanderson, H.G.H.
Ezhilchelvan, P.	Seymour, C.
Ferguson, D.	Sharp, A.
Flux, B.	Stewart, G.
Hardy, C.	Swinbank, M.
Horncastle, C.W.	Swinburn, M.
Humphrey, C.	Taylor, C.
Hunter, E.I.	Thorne, T.N.
Hutchinson, J.I.	Towns, D.
Jackson, P.A.	Watson, J.
Jones, V.	Wearmouth, R.
Kennedy, D.

 

AGAINST: 3

 

Hill, G.	Waddell, H.
Lee, S.

 

ABSTENTIONS: 18

 

Ball, C.	Lang, J.
Bowman, L.	Murphy, M.
Bridgett, S.	Nisbet, K.
Clark, T.	Purvis, M.
Dickinson, S.	Scott, A.
Dunn, L.	Simpson, E.
Foster, J.	Wallace, A.
Gallacher, B.	Watson, A.
Grimshaw, L.	Wilczek, R.

 

It was therefore RESOLVED that:-

 

(a)           Council thank Mr Caller and the whole review team for their work and their report and recommendations;

 

(b)           a Steering Group be formed on a task and finish basis, consisting of:

 

a.    The Leader and Deputy Leader of the Council

b.    The Business Chair

c.     The Vice Chair of the Audit Committee (Cllr Towns)

d.    The Leaders of the Labour, Independent, Liberal Democrat and Green Groups

e.    A second Member of the Labour Group nominated by the Labour Group Leader.

 

The Steering Group to meet within the next 7 days to consider the Council’s response to the Caller Review and its recommendations and report back to the County Council on 21 June 2022; and

 

(c)       an Extraordinary meeting of the Council be convened on Tuesday 21 June 2022 to receive the report of the Steering Group. 

 

The meeting adjourned for a short break at 4.10 pm and reconvened at 4.30 pm.