Clerk’s Report November 2023

Parish Clerk Report for 20^th November 2023

Completed Actions

Copies of all letters and emails will be available to view at the meeting.

• Having forwarded the suggested new dates for meetings to the councillors, I have notified the village hall and publicised the dates on the website and noticeboard (with thanks to Cllr Weaver).
• I have received confirmation that the pothole near the car park in Skaigh Lane has been fixed.
• I have responded to an enquiry from Devon County Council about the flooding in September, indicating that no properties in Belstone Parish were affected by flooding from the heavy rainfall on 16^th -18^th September.
• Following an enquiry from Cllr Weaver, I have asked our Neighbourhood Highways Officer about responsibility for the verge at Tongue End. He has confirmed that Highways are responsible for the verge at the very bottom of the junction from Belstone direction on the right-hand side. He is happy to trim small areas if necessary next year.
• I have followed the correct procedures upon the resignation of Paul Boyce, notifying West Devon Borough Council and putting the Notice of Vacancy on the website and noticeboard.
• I have written to the Cricket Club regarding parking, they will discuss it at their next meeting in mid-January.
• I have written to Dartmoor House suggesting that their guests might like to use the car park.
• I have written to Michael Reddaway regarding the ownership and permissions on the coronation stone.
• Following consultation with Cllr Hill I have published information on the website about:
  • West Devon Borough Council consultation on dog fouling rules.
  • Farming Resilience training.
  • West Devon Borough Council local consultation on housing.
• I have circulated information about the closure of the Outreach Post Office, but having received no response I did not take any action. The website editors published information about the closure on the website.
• Cllr Hill and I have started the process of increasing my banking permissions.
• I have responded to an enquiry about a memorial bench for a person who “often walked from Belstone”, to explain that they did not meet our policy on memorials – “new applications to donate seating will only be considered from those who are either resident in Belstone or have close links to the village.”
• Okehampton District Community Transport Group is one of the organisations that the Council support. After 15 years as manager there, Sue Wonnacott, who is known personally to many locals, has stepped down. The Council may wish to consider sending thanks to her.

Events Attended

Scribefest

This is a free online conference put on by a council software provider. They are the supplier of the software that we are going to trial. About 70 people attended. It included lots of items interesting to local councils. I know there’s quite a lot here, but there might be something that councillors want to pick up on.  They will be sending me the recordings and slides soon, which I could forward to anyone interested. The highlights for Belstone were:

• Slow Ways – They are trying to create a network of walking routes between towns, functional walking rather than rambling. They are looking for people to walk the suggested routes and review them, so that it becomes a resource only for routes that work and have been verified by three different people.

• Participatory Budgeting – This was an idea to get residents involved in what they want the council’s money spent on. They would have a sort of workshop evening to explore ideas and could vote for ideas by putting tokens in buckets. It apparently gives a great feeling of community ownership of the work of the council, as they feel they made the decisions.

• Agendas, Summons and Minutes – Roger Taylor, a lawyer, gave some information on what the legal requirements actually are for parish council procedures. There were so many questions that he just didn’t have time to answer them, the chat feed was scrolling continuously!! They’ve promised to bring him back for a full training session. Highlights were –

1. The Clerk can publish the minutes without any scrutiny from within the council.
2. There cannot be any decisions on items not proposed on the agenda, so reports are not decision items. Proposals must be specified on the agenda or brought back next month. Items cannot be added to the agenda after the summons is sent out.
3. It is illegal to decide planning items between meetings, an extension should be obtained or an extraordinary meeting arranged.
4. Apologies have to have a reason, but I didn’t find out if that has to be minuted.
5. The proposer of every decision has to be recorded, not necessarily the seconder.
6. NALC (National Association of Local Councils) state that there is no such thing as a working party, all proposals should go to the Council or a properly constituted committee.
7. Committee summons must be sent out by the Clerk.
8. Names of members of the public should not be included in minutes.
9. It should be minuted when a payment is under Section 137 legislation, i.e. we do not have a specific Parish Council Power to spend money on that thing. He mentioned that the power should be specified for each payment, but I didn’t gather whether that had to be minuted.

• Dealing with Difficult People – This was a very good talk by Jackie Weaver of Handforth Parish Council You Tube fame. She had some good tips on how to handle councillors. Of course I don’t need them in Belstone! Again the questions never stopped coming, and they’re inviting her back. She talked about the NALC Civility and Respect project, more than half the councils there have signed up to a pledge to improve training, governance and reporting within their council and support the lobbying for sanctions.  This ties in with the agenda item on complaints below. This tied in with a later talk ‘From Divided Council Meetings to Christmas Dinners’ which described how a Clerk turned a council around.

• Exploring the applications of ChatGPT for local Councils – This was a fascinating demonstration of how Artificial Intelligence can be used to write our articles and reports. I think I should try it.

Devon SLCC Meeting

The Society of Local Council Clerks held their online Devon meeting on 19^th September. There was an interesting presentation on Martyn’s Law which is due to become law next year. All halls with a capacity of over 100 will need an Anti-Terrorism Policy following the Manchester Arena bombings.

Newton Abbot Town Council are horrified that they cut the verges for DCC Highways and then DCC makes them pay to dispose of the waste. There was a general picture of the cuts at all levels of local government, and the way in which each level is out for itself, rather than working together.

DALC Conference

Devon Association of Local Councils work on behalf of Parish and Town Councils in Devon to provide advice and training, and liaise with and lobby the National Association and other larger bodies. Their conference was a chance to hear about what they and other supporting organisations were doing. There were displays from DCC and WDBC and from suppliers which I briefly viewed.

DALC (like everyone) is short of money, so will be increasing the subscription costs in order to resource their advice service properly, 25% of the subscription goes to NALC. They are run by a board of 9 councillors, for which any councillors can stand, with several full-time staff . They are hoping to liaise more with their 356 member councils to provide the service that we need. Subscriptions are based on the number of electors for a parish, we are on the minimum. I, and some other tiny councils were asking that training costs should be on a sliding scale depending on council size too. They do not plan to increase training costs.

We had talks from NALC, DCC and the Devon Lord Lieutenant’s Office. DCC in particular were very badly received, with councillors and clerks angry that they are being ignored and overridden. There were case studies from Seaton and Broadclyst which were very interesting. I attended a workshop on communicating and engaging with communities, but I think we have a unique situation in Belstone in that more people came to our Parking Meeting in person than responded to our Lamp Survey online.

It was useful to learn more about the sector, and in particular appreciate the difference in sizes between the councils. I got a chance to meet my SLCC mentor in person. There were 70 councils represented there, with over 100 delegates.

Active Travel

South West Devon (WDBC and South Hams Council) have written to update us on the studies they have been doing on cycling and walking in the area. They have identified some obstacles that prevent people from using more active forms of travel and will be publishing a strategy on how to overcome them by March.

They have identified 8 priority cycling routes in West Devon, one of which is a route from Chagford to Okehampton which comes from Sticklepath up near Belstone, Cllr Lynn Daniel has been championing this route. South West Devon are working with a travel consultant firm (Phil Jones Associates) to audit the routes and prioritise interventions to make them safer and encourage more people to use them.

Agenda Item

2023/24-104 Accounts Software

The main advantage of using software over a spreadsheet is that it cannot be accidentally deleted, or overwritten. It also has checks and balances that ensure that the accounts always add up correctly, and saves data such as suppliers, budgets and balances across years, rather than having to copy the spreadsheet and empty it for the new year.

It would be easier to train any new clerk on it as it has help files to explain how to use it.

We have reviewed two software packages.

1) Scribe Accounts Lite £144 a year (paid monthly) – This is an online system by a well-known company in the local council sector. It is online, so there is no concern about losing the information, and it can be accessed by two logins.

a) Budget Codes – Because we are using the cheapest, cut-down version of the software we cannot choose our cost codes/budget categories. Therefore on the reports there will be some categories that we do not use such as utilities and loan repayments. I propose using utilities as the village hall rent, and combining some other categories as follows:
Audit & Professional Fees = Internal Auditor Honorarium + Information Commissioner’s Fee
Communications = Website + Email + Accounts Software
Open Spaces = Car Park
Other = Asset Repairs + Capital Spending + Projects + Contingency

b) Reports – The reports are not very flexible, particularly on budgeting. For the Lite system there is no useful forecasting, so I would still need to export it to Excel to produce a report in which I could enter the forecast for the half year budget. That would probably still save time.

c) End of Year – It would definitely save time at the end of the year, as all the necessary reports would be produced at the click of a button.

2) Semata – £75 a year. This is a package which is installed on my computer, which poses a risk should my computer fail, and means it can only be accessed by me. It does however have backup facilities and the ability to import and export data from spreadsheets, so could be restored. It would allow us to enter all our own budget codes, but does not have a concept of reserves, these would need to be catered for in rather a strange way, but I think it could be done. The reports are even more basic than on Scribe, and they only do one of the end of year reports.

I am still in the process of evaluating them along with Cllr Hill and Cllr Pike so will discuss further at the meeting.