Bulletin – 12th October

‘Highways and Rights of Way -Your choices’

New Staffordshire County Council website designed to support local councils in helping to keep their areas looking good and working well

Staffordshire’s local councils will soon be able to access a wealth of information and advice about their options to keep their areas looking good and working well.From Monday 16th October, the new ‘Highways and Rights of Way -Your choices’ website will be live and ready for all local councils to explore.

Many parish and town councils are already taking the initiative tomake a difference to the appearance ofStaffordshire's 6,000km of roads and over 4,500km rights of ways, including co-ordinating volunteers to keep local footways clear of snow and ice,maintaining hedges and planting areas andapplying to the Community Paths Initiative Fund to support projects that improve or promote countryside access and rights of way. But now every council has access to information to help them explore all of their options and get local people involved and taking pride in their local area.

From April 2018, the county council’s income will reduce further whilst demand for services such as adult social care continues to increase. Whilst considerable savings have been made across the county council, the council needs to find new ways of working in everything it does - which includes supporting the local community to take action themselves on local issues important to them.

As well as detailing the change in local government income and role in the community, the website also showcases:

  • the tasks that local councils have the powers to manage including those largely aesthetic, non-statutory tasks that have historically been delivered through the Lengthsman scheme and by the Neighbourhood Highways Teams
  • the tasks that local councils can carry out on the rights of way network
  • advice on what to consider when carrying out specific tasks - with all the information you need on one page
  • case studies of local councils both in Staffordshire and beyond who have liaised with the county council for help and advice and then gone on to successfully manage tasks such as stiles maintenance, hedge cutting, winter gritting on pathways and vegetation on pathways and verges
  • case studies of local councils working together to administer and fund lengthsman services
  • additional resources and documents to recruit and maintain a volunteer network and links to independent help and advice from the National Local Council Association.

The website also gives local councils direct access to more information about the rights of way consultation, which starts on Monday 16th October for ten weeks. The consultation will propose new standards for how the county council maintains public footpaths and bridleways from April 2018, and will give everyone with a passion for our rights of way network the chance to help maintain these important community assets.

A letter will be sent to each local council on Monday 16th October with information on how to access the website and the Rights of Way consultation.

Data Protection

Please find attached a letter sent to NALC identifying the progress made so far with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on the introduction of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and theData Protection Bill.

Member councils are reminded that a briefing session, co-hosted by SPCA and the County Council, will be held in Stafford on 21st November to review the implications of the May 2018 implementation of GDPR. Further details are available from Richard Ellison via

Jonathan Owen, NALC CEO, writes

Conservative Party Conference 2017

Our chairman Cllr Sue Baxter was in Manchester at the Conservative Party Conference earlier this month where she was supported by our head of policy and development Justin Griggs in an extensive engagement programme to promote the sector, raise our profile with conservative politicians and stakeholders and discuss policy with the government, politicians and councillors away from Westminster.

Meetings with prominent politicians included Tim Bowles, metro mayor of West of England, James Palmer, metro mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, an advisor to Andy Street the metro mayor of the West Midlands, Alison Hernandez, police and crime commissioner for Devon and Cornwall and David Lloyd, police and crime commissioner for Hertfordshire. And following their recent meeting about parish finance Sue held a further meeting with local government minister Marcus Jones MP to discuss a range of policy issues such as parish poll reform, localism and sustainable communities legislation, plans for a public service ombudsman, guidance on community governance reviews and the impact of General Data Protection Regulations. At an event hosted by the Local Government Association (LGA) Sue also spoke to secretary of state for communities and local government Sajid Javid MP, LGA chairman Lord Porter and the new chairman of the LGA Conservative Group Cllr David Simmonds.

Sue and Justin participated in a number of fringe events, promoting the important and growing role of parishes in delivering public services, taking on and running libraries, planning for housing through neighbourhood planning as well as tackling isolation and improving health and well being, with the highlight being Sue’s speech at an event hosted by Respublica and Hastoe Housing Association in which she spoke about the Rural Coalition’s rural statement and encouraged more parishes to get involved in neighbourhood planning.

You may be interested to watch the conference speech by Sajid Javid MP, which for the second year running had housing as his top priority with announcements including making it mandatory for every landlord to be part of an ombudsman scheme, requiring all letting agents to be regulated in order to practice, creating new incentives for landlords who offer longer term tenancies and consulting with the judiciary on the case for a new housing court.

Meeting with Association of Local Council Clerks

Together with our chairman Cllr Sue Browse I met with Sam Shippen and Lis Moore from the new trade union the Association of Local Council Clerks (ALCC) on 19thSeptember. It was a helpful discussion covering a range of issues and we subsequently agreed the following statement: "NALC and ALCC have had two constructive meetings following the establishment of the trade union when SLCC divested its union role, a move NALC supported. As representative bodies for employers and clerks respectively we are committed to having a continuing regular dialogue on issues relating to terms and conditions for clerks in the sector including national agreements, contracts, pay and other conditions.”

Legal User Group

The Legal User Group met on 27th September and reviewed progress with its improvement plan, noting that the legal team had dealt with some 900 queries this year and had an ongoing programme to review legal topic notes and other advice. There was a lengthy discussion on the implications of the new General Data Protection Regulations and the briefings that the legal team had already produced; it was clear that this is likely to be an increasingly important area where further advice and training would be necessary. The Group also noted that a Legal Topic Note on the General Power of Competence was being developed and work on reviewing the standing orders underway.

Disqualification Criteria – Consultation

The Department for Communities and Local Government has launched a consultation on updating disqualification criteria for local authority members to which you may wish to respond. It proposes that anyone given an Anti-social Behaviour Injunction, a Criminal Behaviour Order or added to the sex offenders’ register, would not be able to hold elected office. These criteria would be added to the current list of disqualifications set out in section 80 of the Local Government Act 1972.The consultation document is at:-

SPCA Bulletin 17/41 (12th October)