A REMINDER:  Please send us your hearing decision notices

As you may already be aware, authorities are required to send Standards for England (SfE) copies of their hearing decision notices. The legal basis for this can be found in the Standards Committee (England) Regulations 2008 under regulation 20(1)(a). However, not all authorities have complied with this requirement.

Hearing decision notices provide a valuable source of information from which SfE can draw conclusions about how the local standards framework is functioning.  We have decided to give greater emphasis to our analysis of the notices and we will share our conclusions with you. 

What you need to do

Please send us a copy of the full decision notice for any determinations made by your Standards Committee. At the end of each quarter (from 1 April 2010) we will check whether we have received a decision notice for all the hearings completed that quarter and then contact authorities for any that are missing.

We prefer to receive decision notices as an email attachment in Word or PDF format if possible.

You can send them to authorityreturns@standardsforengland.gov.uk.

If you are unable to send them electronically, please post your decision notices to:

The Monitoring Team
Standards for England
4th floor, Griffin House
40 Lever Street
Manchester M1 1BB

When writing the decision notices, please ensure that you include all the legal requirements set out in paragraph 20 of the Standards Committee (England) Regulations 2008.  We also recommend that you refer to our guidance, which you can find in your local standards framework guide or online at

http://www.standardsforengland.gov.uk/determinations

Note: Please do not send us decision notices for any other type of decision such as initial assessments, reviews or consideration meetings. This is not a legal requirement and we will not be using them in our analysis.

What we will do

We will use the notices to help widen our knowledge of how the local standards framework is operating and provide some context to the quarterly returns data. The notices may also highlight areas where we can produce new guidance or improve on what we have already published.

Thank you for your co-operation. We will keep you informed of how the decision notices help us to support the local standards framework.

Previous Section  |  Contents  |  Next Section