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Do parishes need further regulation?
The National Association of Local Councils (NALC) gave a warm welcome to the Government’s idea of extending the jurisdiction of the Local Government Ombudsman to some parts of the local (parish and town) councils sector.
NALC has had a long-standing campaign for the remit of the Local Government Ombudsman to be extended to all local councils. The reasons behind this policy aim is that the public should be able to hold to account and complain about all parts of local government not just some tiers of it.
NALC is calling on its near 9,000 member local councils to respond to this Government consultation on two fronts:
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Whether the jurisdiction of the Local Government Ombudsman should be extended to larger local councils?
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How should larger local council be defined for this purpose?
NALC wants an open and transparent debate and discussions around this.
Chair of NALC, Cllr Ken Browse said: “NALC are the established lead organisation for the local council sector and we have long standing commitment and success in raising standards across parish and town councils and tackling poor performance in our sector. We want to hear from all our member councils on this issue.”
“Finally I am really pleased that the department for Communities and Local Government listened to NALC that the timescale for this important consultation was too short especially with elections coming up in May. So we welcome a decision to move the deadline to 30 June 2015.”