Town Hall lessons for Parliament

After the furore over MPs’ expenses, a Teesside academic says the next Parliament could learn a thing or two about standards from local councils.

They should take a good look at how a closely related area of British public life - local government – restored its battered image after earlier scandals, says Dr Michael Macaulay, Reader in Governance and Public Ethics with Teesside University Business School.

And with refashioning procedures for ensuring members’ integrity high up the agenda for the next Parliament, his research is very timely.

One of Dr Macaulay’s research projects, funded by Standards for England, has been to examine examples of notable standards practice by local authorities.

Last year, at the height of the scandal over MPs’ expenses in late May, Dr Macaulay, Reader in Governance and Public Ethics and a member of the University’s Social Futures Institute, was among the invited speakers at a joint European-American conference in Amsterdam focusing on issues of ethics and integrity in public life.

He says: 'The institutions set up to deal with problems like this inevitably reflect the circumstances that led to their creation. The standards framework was set up in the wake of scandals in the late 1990s.'

Integrity and transparency He believes that the standards framework has been good for integrity and transparency in local government, particularly since Standards for England was transformed from a centralised all-purpose body into an overseer supervising the activities and investigations of local committees.

'Since it was decentralised there has been a much greater likelihood of complaints being investigated – and local knowledge is often extremely useful.'

There are occasional problems. 'Standards committees can become a target for local busybodies. One council in Yorkshire has a group of four consistent complainants who send up to 100 letters a day between them to the monitoring office.'

Overall, though, he believes there are serious lessons to be learnt which are applicable to Parliament, particularly with the recent creation of the Parliamentary Standards Authority.

'Any new body needs not only to understand what it is doing, but to share that understanding with parliamentarians and the public. There has to be a clear sense of values. Seven principles of public life were laid out as long ago as 1995, but I can’t think there are many people now who can remember what they are.' said Dr Macaulay.

That clarity also has to extend to precise practices, avoiding the grey areas that developed on an ad hoc basis in Parliament. 'You need a clear set of practices and a list of what is and is not allowed.'

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