Agenda item

A joint report of the Town Clerk and the Comptroller & City Solicitor relative to requests from Members for dispensations from the Standards Committee to allow them to speak and vote on housing and Council Tax issues where they have a beneficial interest in land within the area of the City of London Corporation.

The Committee is asked to approve the list of written requests for dispensations. The list reflects those written requests for dispensations which have been received since the Ward Elections in March 2013 and any Aldermanic elections since February 2013.

The Committee considered a joint report of the Town Clerk and Comptroller & City Solicitor relative to requests from Members for dispensations from the Standards Committee to allow them to speak and vote on housing and council tax issues where they have a beneficial interest in land within the area of the City of London Corporation.

Some comments were made in respect of the current information circulated to Members in respect of dispensations and the view expressed that greater clarification was required in respect of when a dispensation should be sought and a rationale for the request submitted to the Committee for consideration.  The current process for seeking and receiving dispensations did not afford any scrutiny of requests as little information as to why a dispensation was necessary was made available to the Committee.  Consequently, there was scope for dispensations to be sought unnecessarily and without any relevance to an individual’s situation and the Committee was unable to make informed judgements. 

In noting that there should be some consistency in managing requests for dispensations, the Committee agreed to grant the dispensations to those Members listed within the report, namely:  Randall Keith Anderson, Robert James Ingham Clark, Karina Dostalova, Chris Hayward, Ann Holmes, John Lumley, Alistair Moss, Graham Packham, Dhruv Patel, Judith Lindsay Pleasance, Patrick Thomas Streeter and Mark Wheatley.  Thereafter, the guidance to Members in respect of seeking and receiving dispensations should be reviewed and amended to ensure that a range of dispensations could be requested and sufficient information made available to the Committee to ensure that such dispensations were granted appropriately.  Following the discussion at Item 6 (minutes of the previous meeting), a sub-committee would be established to consider requests for dispensations.

RESOLVED – That:-

(i) the list of Members requesting a dispensation to allow them to speak and vote on housing and council tax issues where they have a beneficial interest in land within the area of the City of London Corporation, be approved; and

(ii) revised documentation in respect of dispensations be drafted and submitted to a future meeting of the Committee for approval and thereafter circulated to all Members of the Court of Common Council.