Leeds City Council

The only authority to have been shortlisted for the Standards and Ethics award two years in a row, Leeds City Council outlined a broad range of measures which highlighted a commitment to promoting high ethical standards throughout the authority.

“We were seeking to do well across a broad range of issues and areas,” explains Mike Wilkinson, Chair of Leeds City Council standards committee, “We feel we’ve benefitted from sharing ideas with Standards for England and with other authorities, so we decided to enter in the Standards and Ethics category again to highlight some of our working.”

A great deal of the work carried out by the authority in terms of standards has centred around the committee’s assessment and investigation procedures: “A lot of innovative work has been done in terms of our assessment process. We were also unhappy that investigations were taking too long so we addressed this. Much of the work we’ve done has been shared with other authorities.”

Leeds also took its lead from the First-tier Tribunal, focusing particularly on cases where standards committee decisions have been overturned.

“We have tried to be a learning committee,” says Mike, “The First-tier Tribunal have overturned some decisions because the original procedure was wrong. We’ve used guidance from Standards for England to prevent this from happening.”

Effective ethical governance can often be achieved through successful engagement of leadership within the authority. At Leeds, Mike meets with the monitoring officer and the leaders of all five political parties every quarter to keep them informed of developments and to hear their comments, which are then fed back to the standards committee.

The key, argues Mike, is to respond to concerns from members who might not fully understand the standards process, and to reassure them that ethical standards needn’t be “challenging and scary.”

Leeds carried out an internal survey into ethical standards, along with general staff surveys. The former has been built into inductions and training for new members and officers, with general feedback used as the basis for action plans to take ethical standards forward.
   
Communicating standards can be challenging, says Mike, but this has been successfully achieved in the authority through forging relationships and promoting transparency.

“It’s important that there’s a relationship in place between the standards committee and political leaders, to avoid misunderstandings. We want to emphasise that the committee isn’t there to impose itself on people, but to establish high ethical standards.”

The authority took a similar approach to ensuring its aims and purpose were also communicated to the public. Their website has been used to convey key messages, with an intention to develop this still further so that those without access to the internet will also be reached.

The independent members of the standards committee have also been joining elected members for their councillor surgeries, using the opportunity to meet with the public, and to enhance their understanding of the role of city councillors.