Monitoring Officer Report April 2018 LocalGovernmentLawyer 20 Local Government Lawyer’s monitoring officer survey and subsequent round table discussions, revealed fascinating insights into issues facing monitoring officers. It was clear from comments to the survey that most see the role as one of broader corporate governance, which does not always sit easily with the requirement to handle standards complaints. The current standards regime, and lack of sanctions, is seen as unhelpful. In fact, “insufficient powers provided by the current standards regime” was the biggest single challenge revealed by the survey, with 57% of respondents citing it in their top three challenges, and 29% giving it as first choice response. In response to the question “how well is the Standards Regime working in your experience?” 32% responded that “it is not generally working very well, with multiple problems”, and a further 12% responded that it was “practically dysfunctional”. The responses indicate that monitoring officers consider this to be a significant problem, with the Standards Regime causing considerable challenges, and from the comments and the discussion at the round table, it was clear these issues are particularly challenging for monitoring officers responsible for large numbers of parish councils. A monitoring officer faced with a potentially overwhelming number of complaints to be investigated and resolved, needs to find a solution to ensure that they do not consume so much time that there is no time to deal with the broader elements of the role. One suggestion was to appoint a number of deputy monitoring officers to deal primarily with standards complaints. Another was to reduce the number of complaints by having a clear council policy that complaints by members about each other, should be dealt with by their group, not the monitoring officer. Whatever solution is found, the difficulties and obvious challenge presented by the current Standards regime must not be allowed to consume all the monitoring officer’s time, because this is not the only challenge. The second highest scoring challenge was “lack of resources/time to perform the role adequately”, with 55% of respondents citing that in their top three, and 26% citing it as their biggest challenge. Although only the second highest response behind issues with the Standards Regime, seen as a whole with other responses, this suggests an overall challenge of carrying out that broader, overall governance role. Other responses cited as challenges, relevant in this context, are: “Commercialisation and outsourcing creating greater complexity” 36% (16% first choice) ● “Change in attitude of members and officers to risk” 34% (7% first choice) ● “Status in corporate hierarchy/ status of the role within the organisation” 25% (7% first choice) ● “Lack of governance experience in legal teams as legal roles become more specialist” 24% (4% first choice) This combination of responses and comments paints a picture of monitoring officers faced with the challenges presented by councils having to take a different approach to deal with issues caused by reduced funding, including commercialisation and outsourcing. Monitoring officers are having to tackle these challenges with less automatic status than might come with a more The power of the network Tim Morel looks at the importance of building connections between monitoring officers to ensure that they are supported when push comes to shove.