Newcastle

Like all councils, Newcastle City Council works with partner organisations, both public and private, to which substantial amounts of its budget are devolved. Mark Scrimshaw, chair of Newcastle’s standards committee, stresses the importance of ensuring that such partners meet the high ethical standards that members and taxpayers rightly expect.

“[We work with] 400-odd partners,” he explains. “Now, we would like every one of them to have a charter, to have a code of conduct, but clearly some are far too small to go through that procedure. But we’ve identified – or our new partnerships manager alongside us has identified – the top 40 partners, who we’ve said must have codes of conduct similar to, if not the same as, our own. We’re getting to the point now where they all will have adopted a form of the code of conduct and that’s quite right. If they’re dealing with public money they should be working to the same criteria as councillors are.”

Partnerships are just one of the areas in which Newcastle City Council is setting an example. It has also carried out an ethical governance audit with members and officers, something that is recommended as good practice when it comes to standards.

“You’ve got to try and find the best way of gauging a real picture, rather than a rosy picture that might not actually be true,” says Mark. “Were people aware that we were here? Were they aware what we were here for? Were they aware of the presence of independent members – in other words, that we weren’t a political body run by councillors? We got a very good response. Most of the answers were way up on the last audit that we did in 2004. But it also showed some areas where we think we need to do a bit more work. So that’s ongoing work into the future.”

This kind of work is all part of building standards and ethics into the culture of an organisation – and there are some ways of doing this that are simple, but effective. One initiative that the standards committee at Newcastle introduced was asking all members to complete a gift and hospitality registration form on a monthly basis, even if they have nothing to declare. “It might seem to be a real pain, but actually it’s really important that people can look and say ‘ok, nothing that month’, and in the end [members] accepted that that was an entirely valid thing to do. It is now an accepted thing and we get almost 90% of returns sent in, which is a phenomenally high number, and we send them out with council minutes so that the forms are there.”

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