Jacob Williams https://jacobwilliams.com

You may remember a few months back I covered the very first gathering of the Dyfed-Powys Police and Crime Panel members (see Bob a job.)

This outfit, like others up and down the country, was set up to scrutinise the performance and decision-making of the new commissioner.

Not as a replacement for the members of the old police authorities – those scalps were taken by the commissioners themselves – but as a secondary safeguard, if you like, to keep things in check.

The Dyfed-Powys panel is made up of twelve county councillors – three each from Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Powys; and two ‘independent’ co-optees who are lay members and not councillors.

This inaugural meeting as a ‘shadow’ panel took place on October 11th, a month before the election of the commissioner. The day afterwards I reported news from a couple of sources who told me that during the meeting disgruntlement was expressed over the terms of remuneration.

For their efforts on our behalf, the co-opted lay members of the panel were to receive a daily allowance of £198 per meeting or £98 for a half day, plus travelling expenses. However, councillors attending the same meetings and for the same purpose were only entitled to claim for their reasonable travelling expenses.

A year before the commissioner election, back in November 2011, guidance was issued by the Local Government Association setting out the expectations of the new panels and their members. The guidance makes quite clear that councillor members are to be unpaid, and that, should authorities wish to create special reponsibility allowances for their councillors serving on this panel, it would be up to the councils to decide and fund, and not the panels themselves or the Home Office.

The matter of remuneration must have been the topic at the top of everybody’s list of questions because in the LGA’s document ‘Guidance on role and composition’ the question is laid bare:

Back to the inaugural meeting.

I have now stumbled upon the minutes of the shadow panel meeting, and I quote from it below:

Reference was made to agenda item 4, and the reference in page 23 thereof to the sum of £920 being made available for each member of the panel to support their work to cover attendance at meetings and travel expenses. It was clarified that the allowance was not payable to each member individually but was to be regarded as a total available spend.

I think you can probably guess where things are going. The very next paragraph of the minutes for the meeting records:

Reference was made to the proposal in Part 7 for the payment of a fee for the two co-opted members of the Panel. Views were expressed that similar fees should be payable to the elected member representatives. The Panel was advised that should it be agreeable to such payments, the cost would have to be met from the £53k Home Office Grant and, be approved by the Home Secretary.

A number of resolutions were passed by members at the meeting, and those relevant to the matter of remuneration and expenses are:

• The £920 per member expenses allowance be paid into a pot to meet travelling/subsistence costs.

• The proposed allowance fee payable to co-opted members being also payable to the Elected Member representatives on the Panel.

At the following meeting of the panel which took place on 6th December 2012 (by which time it was fully-fledged and no longer in ‘shadow’ form) item eleven on the agenda confirmed that the Home Secretary had given the thumbs up to this payment deal for local authority panel members:

11. PANEL ARRANGEMENTS
The Panel was advised that further to the decision made at the Shadow Meeting (minute no. 8 refers) the draft Panel Arrangements had been forwarded to the Home Office for approval and confirmation had been received that these had been formally approved and adopted by the Home Secretary.

This slide from a Home Office presentation delivered in March 2012 sets out its position as it then stood:

Either the Home Office has changed its tune and is colluding with local authorities amid the backlash from panel members who feel they are worth far more than their mileage claims, or Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Powys County Councils are very quietly picking up the tab. As the Home Secretary has “formally approved” the panel’s decision, it seems likely to be the former.

Through the back door, these panel memberships have become bona fide positions on the gravy train, and they were expressly intended not to be. The very fact that this negotiated pay package was precipitated by the shadow panel members at their inaugural meeting where they were supposed to be “focused exclusively on the development of internal and external systems to enable [the panel] to carry out its work,” speaks volumes.