Agenda item
Members' Attendance, Timesheets and Declaration of Interests: Monitoring Report
The report updates the Committee on a range of matters related to Councillors’ attendance at formal meetings and training events, completion of timesheets and the register of interests.
Minutes:
Matthew Mannion, Committee Services Manager, introduced the report setting out updates on Member attendance at Committee meetings, submission of timesheets and declarations of interest and engagement in Member Development Training.
The Committee began its discussion by looking at Member attendance at meetings. There was a general request to explore other ways of presenting the data. For example looking at percentage attendance as well as raw numbers. Officers promised to provide the Committee with examples of the different ways the data could be extracted from the Committee software to see which was most useful.
Members discussed the report and when looking at Member Development Training, stated that additional detail was useful in highlighting the different types of training, including workshops and setting out clearly when Members were required to attend and when it was optional or not relevant to that Member. It was noted that the Governance Review Working Group was exploring options for refreshing the training programme. Councillor Sirajul Islam noted that he should also be listed as having undertaken Appointments Sub-Committee training. It was noted that officers as well as Members would benefit from some of the training, such as around probity and it was suggested that officer training on responsiveness to enquiries by the public would be valuable.
The Committee then looked at the Appendix setting out the Timesheets submitted by Members over recent months. It was noted that, whilst many Members were complying with the requirement to submit timesheets a significant number were not.
It was noted that the Committee would regularly agree that the Chair should write to all Members setting out the importance of filling in timesheets and the view of the Standards (Advisory) Committee that they are an important part of the transparent monitoring of the work of Councillors. However, these regular letters did not appear to be improving the number of Members complying with the process and there was no sanction that could be applied to those that failed to comply.
A number of issues were noted with the system including:
· Members had not been shown how to submit timesheets electronically.
· The system required the submission of meeting attendance details when these were already known elsewhere in the system.
· The fields in the form were not all up to date.
Points noted in the general discussion included that:
· The Conservative Group had taken a group position that they did not have the time available to submit timesheets as responding to issues from the public had to take precedence with the time they had available.
· Timesheets were an inexact science and there were suggestions that some submissions were more accurate than others.
· No evidence had been produced to demonstrate that Timesheets were useful.
· How could Councillors demonstrate that they were working hard for their community if they were not reporting on their activity.
· The view of the Standards (Advisory) Committee (and the Standards Committee before it) had consistently been that submission of Timesheets was a valuable process and important in monitoring the work of Councillors.
· Submitting Timesheets should be a policy for all Councillors or else it was not worth doing.
· Tower Hamlets was unusual in requiring Members to submit Timesheets.
It was suggested that a cross-party decision was required as to whether Timesheets were going to be supported or not. It was therefore proposed to refer the issue to the Governance Review Working Group with the request that they take a view and report it back to the Standards (Advisory) Committee.
RESOLVED
1. That the report be noted.
2. That the Governance Review Working Group consider the use of the Member Timesheet system and report back to the Standards (Advisory) Committee.
Supporting documents: