(a)

under the general power of competence, a council could do anything that isn’t unlawful, this had little effect on this Council as current powers could generally be found to do anything;

(b)

the main change affecting this Council was the abolition of the Standards Committee and Standards Board for England.  This change meant that the worst that could happen to a member who had acted contrary to the code of conduct was a letter from the monitoring officer and attendant publicity;

(c)

an independent person would need to be appointed to review complaints.  Officers were looking at the best way to appoint an independent person;

(d)

a new type of interest – ‘disclosable pecuniary interests’ had come in to effect and a completed form for all members had been published on the Councils website;

(e)

‘Community Right to Challenge’, where members of the public could bid to run Council services had created additional work for the Legal and Procurement teams however this work had been absorbed into the existing workload.  Any successful bids would create a large amount of unplanned work that had not been budgeted for;

(f)

work around ‘Assets of community value’, a process which offers greater protection to community infrastructure which is considered to be of community value, had been absorbed by the Legal Services Team;

(g)

any referendum on excessive council tax increase would be managed by the Council and then recharged to the precept authority;

(h)

the act had also seen changes to the planning process however these had not impacted on Democracy and Governance.

 (i)

at present members of this council were only required to declare the statutory minimum information on their register of interests however, this would be looked at as part of the code of conduct review and there was potential to include a requirement to declare membership of closed societies such as freemasons;

(j)

there had been no requirement to use the general powers of competence as of yet;

(k)

officers proposals on the new code of conduct would be reviewed by the constitution working group, the Leader and Shadow Leader before submission to Council for final approval.

 (l)

the regulations had come into effect with little warning having been laid before parliament on 8 June 2012and coming into effect on 1 July 2012.  It was felt across the country that this new legislation was an answer to a problem that hadn’t existed;

(m)

there had been concerns about the need to publish all officer decisions, which could run into hundreds of thousands. Guidance was sought from the Department for Communities and Local Government who advised that only decisions specifically delegated by the Cabinet to officers would need to published;

(n)

changes had been absorbed by existing staff within the Democratic Support Team;

(o)

the law only affected Cabinet meetings and did not apply to other committees such as scrutiny;

(p)

due to the requirement to give 30 days’ notice of items which would be considered by the Cabinet under part II, officers have found themselves in the position where they need to make a best guess about whether an item may or may not need consideration under part II.

(1)

to request an update on the effects of the Localism Act on the Planning Service;

(2)

to request that the monitoring officer email advice to all members  on how the Local Authorities (Executive Arrangements) (Meetings and Access and Access to information) England Regulations 2012 affected committees.