Monitoring Officer Report April 2018 LocalGovernmentLawyer 4 "It is the best of roles and the worst of roles." Local Government Lawyer's inaugural survey of monitoring officers comes at an important juncture. It is now more than five years since the significant changes introduced by the Localism Act 2011, such as the abolition of the Standards Board for England and the introduction of local codes of conduct and a criminal offence in relation to disclosable pecuniary interests. And in January 2018, the Committee for Standards in Public Life announced a review of local government ethical standards. One hundred-and-eleven monitoring officers took part in the survey and they were asked a series of questions about standards and governance, including: What are the three key challenges they face? Has the role become riskier? Do you need to be legally qualified to be the monitoring officer? How is the standards regime working in practice? And what does the future hold? Up for the challenge? When the 111 respondents were asked what the three main challenges facing monitoring officers were at present, two issues came to the fore - the insufficient powers provided by the current standards regime (57% put this in the first three) and a lack of resources or time to perform the role adequately (55%). "Anecdotal evidence suggests that repeat or persistent standards complaints concerning a relatively small number of members, and the inability to do anything meaningful, is a significant problem for many councils and their MOs," wrote one respondent. Another berated the number of "futile" standards complaints, which suggests that the 2011 Act changes introduced by Eric Pickles have not been successful everywhere in tackling one of the key problems the then Communities Secretary sought to address, namely vexatious complaints. A particular problem for some respondents is standards at the third tier of local government - one monitoring officer suggested his number one challenge was "dealing with delinquent parish councils". Another revealed it could be difficult to deal with the aspirations of parish clerks, when there are no effective sanctions, and that parishes could "in effect ignore a monitoring officer's recommendation which leads to a parish council becoming dysfunctional". [See the separate article on page 12 for a fuller discussion on the standards regime and what improvements could be made] A lack of time and/or resources is a huge issue, indicated one respondent, "as is the blame culture, alive and kicking at the top of most councils, and the councillors' unwillingness to allocate resources to what they see as a back office function". Some monitoring officers pointed to the difficulties of carrying out the role in an era when advice and experts are undervalued, and social media demands instant redress and provides an outlet for "ill-informed commentators….attracting the ear of councillors". Other challenges highlighted were the vogue for greater commercialisation and increased outsourcing creating in turn greater complexity (36% of respondents putting this in their top three) and a change in the attitude of members and officers to risk (34%). "As councils have less resources, the ambition to make areas better still continues, which results in risker decisions being made at a pace which involves greater turnaround times," suggested one monitoring officer. The heart of the matter Philip Hoult looks at the future of the monitoring officer role in the light of Local Government Lawyer’s exclusive survey.