THE INVESTIGATION OF ALLEGATIONS OF MISCONDUCT BY AUTHORITY MEMBERS

By 28th January 2002 all county, county borough and community councils, all fire, national park and police authorities and all joint authorities in Wales must have a code of conduct (incorporating the provisions of the model code of conduct issued by the National Assembly for Wales on 28th July 2001) as to how their members should behave, and by 28th March 2002 (or within two months of the authority's adoption of such a code) all members must agree to abide by that code.

Once an authority has adopted a code and a member has agreed to abide by it, or the statutory two month period referred to above has elapsed, the Ombudsman will have jurisdiction to investigate allegations that members of those authorities have failed to comply with their authority's code of conduct. Until the outcome of investigations undertaken by the Ombudsman under his new jurisdiction and the decisions of the case tribunals to be established by the Adjudication Panel for Wales are known it will not be possible to publish actual examples of the kind of conduct which will amount to a contravention of the new codes.

However, over the last ten years or so the Ombudsman has published reports in which he had concluded that a member or members of a local authority had breached the predecessor to the new codes of conduct, the 1990 National Code of Local Government Conduct. Summaries of those reports which were issued between 1990 and 2000 are set out on the following pages. Some caution should be exercised in seeking to use these cases as a guide to the interpretation of the new code.

However, particularly as regard the obligation on members to declare private interests, they may give some useful guidance on the kind of issues which have arisen in the past. Any breaches of the new code of conduct can result in the member concerned being disqualified from office for up to five years by a case tribunal. A breach of the 1990 code did not give rise to any penalty, but the Ombudsman had a duty to identify the member who had breached the code of conduct in his report unless he considered that it would be unjust to do so.

Click here to download summaries of reports on complaints involving the 1990 National Code of Local Government Conduct, which are in pdf format, or right click your mouse on the link to save the file to your own computer.