To receive a report of the Corporate Director of Governance and Community Strategy.

The chair provide an introduction to the report that had been circulated. The Chair then handed over to the Monitoring Officer to add any additional points. The Monitoring Officer added that the Model Code of Conduct had not changed significantly from the draft that the Committee received September 2020. There were a number of areas that required clarification through guidance that the LGA were to release and some required legislation to be passed before Council’s could enact them. The aspects of the code were very similar to those within the Council’s current code of conduct with the main difference being the way the code was written. When the previous model code came out Trafford had led on a GM review of the model code by the Chief Legal Officers, which led to the creation of a GM Code of Conduct used by all ten authorities. The Chief Legal officers were to look at the New Model Code in two weeks’ time and it was proposed that work should dovetail with the work Trafford were doing to ensure that the Council ended up with a Code that worked from a GM perspective as well as the Trafford perspective.

Councillor Blackburn noted that point 2.3 of the report mentioned the variations between GM authorities and asked whether it was known as to what the variations might be. The Monitoring Officer responded that the local variations were usually around how breeches of the code were dealt with in an area. The Monitoring Officer offered to provide some examples of the variations across GM when the item was being considered by the working group.

Councillor Blackburn asked about the large percentage of Council’s that were not planning to adopt the code. The Monitoring Officer responded that percentage reflected the number of Council’s who had no plans to adopt the code at that time but it was expected that the number would decrease especially once the guidance had been released.

An independent Person noted that at the last meeting an action plan was brought to the meeting which had a number of items still outstanding and asked whether this work superseded that work. The Mentoring Officer responded that updating the Councils Code of Conduct was a continuation of that work rather than superseding it. The independent Person followed up by asking whether any points regarding the New Model Code should be raised at the meeting or whether they should be submitted afterwards for consideration by the working group. The Monitoring Officer responded that any feedback should be provided to the working group to inform their considerations.

The Chair asked when volunteers for the working group would need to express their interest. The Monitoring Officer asked for Committee Members to contact the Governance Officer with their expression of interest in joining the group.

RESOLVED:

1)    That the report be noted.

2)    That the recommendations of the report be agreed.

3)    That Members contact the Governance Officer if they wish to take part in the Code of Conduct review.