ANNUAL REVIEW APRIL 2019 TO MARCH 2020 SPONSORED BY BHIB COUNCILS INSURANCE 1 CONTENTS Foreword 3 Hampshire ALC Reports 4 Financial Summaries 16 District Association Reports 18 Awards 38 2 FOREWORD Rt. Hon. John Denham President of Hampshire Association of Local Councils Last year I wrote that making predictions was difficult. No one foresaw the national trauma of COVID-19 around the corner. The consequences, and maybe the virus itself, will be with us for a very long time. In the past months we have learned much that is good about ourselves and our communities. Almost everywhere we have drawn on a deep well of mutual aid and support. It has made the difference in so many people’s lives. But, although the virus is a threat to all and families everywhere have lost loved ones, it hasn’t just been ‘all in it together’. Poverty, wealth, race, employment, age and housing have helped determine who was most likely to fall ill and to suffer the most serious consequences. Most of these problems are not new; the funding of social care, for example, has been neglected for dec- ades. COVID-19 just held up a sharp mirror that reflected back the deep-seated challenges we must now sort out. If we can draw on our community strengths, we can tackle those issues. Central and local government must trust Parish and Town Councils and very local communities to play their role. At the time of writing the messages are mixed: on the one hand the promise of more devolution; on the other, a threat to tear up planning rules and make Councils more remote from local people. It would be a shame to lose what we have gained this year. 3 HAMPSHIRE ALC REPORTS 4 WELCOME FROM THE CHAIR Councillor Mike Evans— Chairman of Hampshire ALC Welcome to the HALC Annual Review. I am both honoured and proud to be Chairman of this Association and de facto the Board of Directors who are the governing body of the ALC and responsible for its strategic direction and good practice. The ALC has been on a continuous improvement curve since 2005 and we are recognised as a leading service provider, offering the most extensive level of knowledge in the local council sector, backed by value for money fees and charges. Income generation for the ALC is vital and in last year’s report I mentioned that there was a growing demand from outside of Hampshire for our services. Since April last year, we have been providing membership services and training to another County Association and more recently we have been approached by a second County Association who are also seeking our services. This is testament to the excellent, dedicated and hard- working HALC team, ably lead by our Chief Executive, Dawn Hamblet. Our Partnerships are crucial, particularly our joint working with Hampshire County Council, to provide full and ongoing support for the devolution and locality working agenda so that services are more efficient and responsive to the needs of local communities by providing best value and quality. However, the ongoing pressures on the County budget has led to a significant reduction in their financial support to the Association. Finally, I am grateful to my fellow Board Directors for their continuing work and support to ensure that the ALC is a solid and financially sustainable social business. 5 OUR CHIEF EXECUTIVE Chief Executive—Dawn Hamblet Writing content for the annual review normally gives a welcome opportunity to pause and reflect on the financial year that has just gone by. This year however, I am writing this in far from normal times. I am sure in common with many of our members, I have found that time to reflect has been scarce as we all navigate our way through the significantly challenging times we have lived through since March this year. It is no exaggeration to say that, in common with the whole country, the sector has experienced unprecedented challenges as we have tried to respond to the pandemic. This has required significant and rapid change, the like of which we have not seen for many decades. It has been inspiring to see the way Parish and Town Councils across Hampshire have responded to these challenging times and have worked to put support in place for their local communities. The ALC team and I would like to acknowledge the huge dedication Councils have shown in working effectively with their communities and with each other during this time. At the ALC we have experienced another busy year. Parish and Town Council elections were held in many parts of Hampshire in May 2019 and we subsequently provided a large number of training courses for new Councillors, particularly in the first quarter of the year, in addition to our normal training programme. We also continued to work on improving and updating our internal systems, including IT systems, following our business process review. This proved to be a very valuable activity when we needed to provide our services remotely at short notice due to the pandemic. 6 Chief Executive—Dawn Hamblet cont. Last year, Bishops Waltham Parish Council won the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Village of the Year and although we have had to defer the event this year, we are looking forward to visiting nominated Councils again next year when we restart the competition. In a similar vein, we will not be holding our annual awards at our AGM this year. This is due to the current climate and because I believe it would be wrong to single out any particular individual or Council, given the huge amount of work that has gone on at many Councils over the last six months. These will, however, also return next year. 7 Policy and Communications Policy Officer—Amy Taylor Amy covered the Policy and Communications role this year, in addition to taking on the Member Support Services, which you can read more about on the next page. Brexit continued to be the main focus of attention this year which meant that there were not many government consultations to be involved with. There was an independent review into local government audit undertaken by Sir Tony Redmond, whose remit was to assess the arrangements in place to support the transparency and quality of local authority financial reporting and external audit, including those introduced by the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014 (the Act). This was still in review at the end of this report’s period. The Non-Domestic Rating (Public Lavatories) Bill was created and this is being progressed. We have continued to provide Councils with regular newsletters and are looking forward to expand these with funding opportunities and local community points of interest, as well as updated guidance and advice. There have also been briefing notes distributed regularly on COVID-19 matters towards the end of this reporting year in March, when it started. If you would like to get in touch regarding our newsletter or website, please email [email protected] 8 Member Support Services Member Services Officer— Amy Taylor As you will all know, we sadly lost Vendy Treagust, our dedicated Member Support Officer in 2019 after a courageous battle with cancer. During Vendy’s illness, I covered her role to provide infor- mation, advice and guidance to member councils in response to procedural and operational queries. This also included co-ordination of the desk-top advice services provided by external specialists such as legal, financial/VAT and planning. I was also lucky enough to visit a number of your parishes by way of several bespoke training sessions that HALC ran during 2019 following elections. I have since changed my role from Policy Officer to Member Services Officer to allow the continuation of the advisory service and I am now working on producing guidance and advice notes to compliment our A-Z online directory of advice and expand the information available to our members. To give you a clear view of the volume of enquiries HALC handle on an annual basis, the table below, shows the statistics for the last three years*. (Ref No) Total number of Number of legal queries includ- % of legal queries included in to- Year queries ed in totals tals by type 2017 806 50 6% 2018 713 63 9% 2019 681 53 8% *2019 is based on the financial year, data for the years prior to this were recorded as calendar year. 9 Member Support Services The top four query types received this year covered: •Meetings and Procedures •Finance •Policy, Legislation and Regulations •People (e.g. general HR advice, and LCPD desk-top service) Of course, there are many other categories ranging from ‘elections and casual vacancies’ to ‘data and information management’ so the types of queries we receive are very wide-ranging and diverse. If you require specific advice or would like to submit a query, please email: [email protected] 10 11 Training and Development Office Manager- Sarah Rowland It’s been another busy year on the Learning and Development front. 2019 was an election year for many Parish and Town Councils and this saw a large increase in Councillor training courses, primarily our Knowledge and Core Skills Course which we ran 38 of (including bespoke courses). We are pleased to have delivered 38 Open Courses and 28 Bespoke Courses as well as the annual AGM in Hampshire. We have also been providing training courses to our colleagues in the Berkshire ALC. The planned annual conference was deferred due to the Covid-19 situation. We welcomed Di Morgan-Rawes to the team as our new training officer to complement our strong internal training expertise.