Northumberland County Council's complaints procedure looks set to be overhauled after lawyers warned it was taking too long to investigate issues raised about its councillors.
The council's advisory challenge board recommended an independent review of the way the authority dealt with a number of complaints about elected members.
Lawyer Simon Goacher of Weightmans LLP carried out the review, and warned that the council was taking "a lot longer" than best practice guidance to conclude complaints, but accepted there were "mitigating factors" behind this.
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Speaking at Friday's meeting of the council's standards committee, Mr Goacher said: "The headline outcome, which may be no surprise to you, is that a lot of the assessments and the investigations took a lot longer than would be suggested by best practice guidelines, and in our experience than is usual in those cases.
"There are a number of specific contextual factors which apply in respect of your authority and in respect of those complaints which can explain why they took a lot longer than you would have hoped and you would have normally expected.
"These include changes within the council and monitoring officer team, goal posts being moved in terms of issues being raised, the volume of complaints and issues identified in the way the complaints procedure was being used in the Caller report."
The damning Max Caller report into governance at the county council, published last summer, found that there were some 30 conduct complaints - almost all from officers and members - despite the fact the process is meant to be for use by members of the public. This has led to senior officers and senior members deemed to be "compromised" and unable to communicate on a daily basis.
Mr Goacher's report made a number of recommendations for the handling of complaints in the future. These included:
- A review of the arrangements for handling code of conduct complaints
- Ensuring clear deadlines for investigations are agreed
- Any delays beyond six months are reported to the standards committee
- The standards committee receives regular updates on the number of complaints made and the progress made with ongoing complaints
The independent chairman of the standards committee, Joe Jackson, felt there had been mistakes made when the council set up the new arrangements for dealing with complaints over a decade ago, and added there had been no reviews of the process since.
He said: "This is a golden opportunity to reset that. We recognise that there is an issue.
"Caller highlighted it and the challenge board has looked to get this put together. I would suggest it is a tremendous template to move us forward."
The committee unanimously agreed to proceed with the reports recommendations.
At the same meeting, members were also given an update on the progress of complaints received by the authority. The report noted there had been a significant fall in the number of complaints received so far in 2023 compared with the last three years.
Furthermore, there had been no complaints made by officers or councillors against other members this year - a vast improvement on previous years. There were 10 ongoing complaints against county councillors submitted across 2022 and 2023, as well as four against parish councillors.
The earliest open complaint against a county councillor dated back to February 2022.
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