Newark & Sherwood

Newark & Sherwood District Council is not only committed to good practice when it comes to standards and ethics – it also shares that good practice with other authorities and takes every opportunity to play a part in formulating it.

“We understood that the transfer of further responsibility to local standards committees was coming,” says Andrew Muter, the council’s chief executive, talking about the move to local assessment of standards complaints that happened in May 2008. “We volunteered to be a pilot for that. It enabled us to get ready for dealing with local complaints handling, and we were able to influence the national framework. A third benefit, that I think perhaps we didn’t anticipate but which was really helpful, was that we were able to spread some of the good practice and the learning that we had gone through.

“We worked with our neighbouring councils to talk them through the experience that we’d had. We ran a number of training sessions for other councils locally and we took part in the national dissemination and discussion about how to do local assessment work. We have a neighbouring authority which was struggling with the introduction of local assessment and we actually spent some time with their own standards committee to help them think through the process.”

Andrew explains that Newark & Sherwood benefits from this just as much as other councils. “It brings something back to this authority,” he says, “because we learn from the situation. You always learn something from working with another council. And working nationally is very important to us. We get access to advance information about what’s going to happen, but we can shape policy as well.”

Andrew is also proud of the work that Newark & Sherwood has done with its 83 parishes to make sure they are engaging with the standards agenda. “We’ve done a huge amount of training, not only with parish councillors but also with parish council clerks, and there’s been involvement of parish councillors within our standards committee. And we’ve also run a helpline for parish councillors so they can actually ring us if they have a problem and can involve us at an early stage.”

Getting the ethical message across to the public can be difficult, Andrew acknowledges, as the standards committee’s work is “such a technical area. But what we’ve tended to do is use our newsletter and include some articles that focus on very straightforward aspects of why standards are important, and we’ve tried to personalise it by focusing an article on the chair of the standards committee, saying in their own words what’s important about standards and how it’s relevant to local people.”

Above all, Andrew stresses that standards and ethics are a core part of his authority. “It’s not an extra that we have to do. It’s not bolted on. It’s fundamental to how we run our organisation. For us, when we talk about our vision for the community, about our pride in the community, standards and ethics are at the heart of that.”

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