Parish Council
If any Member of the Public wishes to see details of the correspondence or matters mentioned please contact the clerk, details below.
I have published the following pages/posts:
I attended the DALC Conference on October 1st. This is an opportunity to talk to other clerks and councillors, and to suppliers, Devon County Council (DCC) and other organisations. Talking to Devon Communities Together, I was able to initiate some action on the Emergency Plan and give feedback on our workshop. I also attended their workshop on the subject, which highlighted how organised different councils are, with smaller ones often more active than towns. I spoke to DCC about recycling, and was interested to find that some other districts are already recycling toothpaste tubes in kerbside collections. If you want to recycle yours, give them to a friend in East Devon, or lobby for West Devon to do it.
The most interesting workshop was on ‘Putting up the precept’, where two clerks spoke about how their councils had increased their precept immensely, one from zero to £54,000 in 6 years. Because they talked to the residents, and the residents asked for things, they took the residents with them, and there were only a handful of complaints, all of which were dropped when the reasons were explained to them. Their message was that If the council is active, people don’t mind paying. The slide show is available on the DALC website (login required).
Another interesting session was about the Devon and Torbay Combined County Authority which is already in place. Nobody seemed to mention what would happen to it when LGR occurred. It is taking responsibilities from DCC, Torbay and from the Government and will oversee Transport, Adult Education, Strategic Housing, Employment Support and Economic Development in the region. Personally, I’m sure that most of the public don’t even know it exists.
I attended a DALC Connect online event on LGR – ‘The changing role of town and parish councils’ on 16th October. It consisted of a speaker from Falmouth Town Council, explaining what happened when Cornwall went unitary in 2009. Unfortunately his council already had a £822,000 precept at that stage and now has a £3.7 million precept, so there was very little that was relevant to a tiny council like ours. The only lessons that could be learned were:
I attended an online meeting of small councils, like Sticklepath. The main item was a case study from Cumbria where the speaker had helped set up a ‘Place Action Hub’ which brought together people and organisations roughly relating to a principal authority ward to take actions forward. It involved parish councils, village halls, businesses, activists and any groups and individuals with a passion for where they live, including teenagers. They had an open session, offering food, to invite people to meet the MP, police, fire etc. They had a workshop there that picked what the shared priorities were from that group, and created an action plan, allocating leaders for each priority and enabling people to take action on those priorities. This sounded a very interesting idea. I have her slides with further information if anybody is interested.
NALC have called on the government to provide long-term, realistic funding to safeguard the future of the Post Office network, warning that without proper investment, communities, especially in rural areas, could lose a vital service. Read NALC’s response to the government’s Green Paper on the future of the Post Office.
Cllr Wooldridge has been working hard to ensure that the Sticklepath outreach post office is well supported, so that it survives.
This is an online conference for Clerks organised by Scribe Accounts. I missed much of the day due to the Okehampton Cluster Group meeting, and they haven’t yet put the slides online yet. One important session was by an experienced Auditor who talked about mistakes that councils make. One thing I found out that we are doing wrong is that the appointment of the Internal Auditor should involve a council resolution and a letter, not just an email, and should be done in March! She also mentioned that ½ the local councils (like us) are exempt from External Audit by an accountancy company, but 1/3 of those that aren’t fail their audit. In Wales they took away exemption so that every council had an external audit and they found an even higher percentage there. There was also warnings that the Annual Governance and Accountability Return, that we complete at the end of the financial year, may be undergoing major changes.
If you are not already subscribed to the Sticklepath.org website, do click on the link in the ‘Subscribe to Updates’ link in the top right corner of the home screen. Once registered, you will receive an email each time a new post is put on the website, keeping you up to date with what is happening in the village.
The meeting, to which 12 councils around Okehampton were invited, had attendance from only half of them. The minutes are in the shared folder. There were three major topics of discussion:
The authorities have issued new Financial Regulations this year, which I have compared with our existing ones and amended them. The Financial Regulations have some paragraphs that are in bold, these are required by law and we cannot change them. There were some minor changes to these, quoting new legislation that has come in, but I have not detailed them as we had no choice but to change them! The only other changes that I have made are:
The meeting dates are on the first Monday of the month, except for:
Councillors please see my previous email which is included in the shared folder for reference.