The night before the deadline
Full council meets on the second Tuesday. Your standing orders and the law say how much notice the summons and agenda need, and the clerk works back from that date. On the Wednesday before, the clerk is still waiting for the finance report from the RFO, the play area update from a councillor, and a quote for the bus shelter repair that someone promised to forward. Two councillors have emailed asking for items to be added, one of them in a reply to a thread from last month.
At 9pm the clerk is copying text into a Word template, converting three attachments to PDF, renumbering items because one moved, and uploading everything to the website before printing a copy for the noticeboard. It works, most months. When the clerk is ill or on leave, nobody else knows how.
The real reason it runs late
The clerk is not slow. The process has no front door. Items and reports arrive by email, phone and conversations after the last meeting, and nothing stops them arriving late. The agenda pack is then a manual assembly job that has to be done in one sitting, after the last piece arrives.
- Requests for agenda items come in reply to old emails and are easy to miss.
- Reports arrive in different formats, some as Word files, some pasted into an email.
- Supporting documents such as quotes and plans have to be found and attached.
- Standing items such as the payments list and planning applications are rebuilt each month.
- Publishing means uploading to the website, printing for the noticeboard and emailing councillors, three separate jobs.
What the scramble costs
The obvious cost is the clerk's evening. The risk is in the detail. A report missed from the pack means an item deferred to next month. A late agenda means a question about whether the meeting was properly called, which is exactly what a clerk does not want to answer. And councillors who get papers late tend to read them late, so meetings run longer while people catch up.
What notice is required and what counts as properly published are matters for your standing orders and your advisers. What we deal with is getting the pack ready so those rules are easy to meet.
An agenda builder with one front door
We build a small web tool around the way your council's meetings already work.
- Each meeting is set up with its date, and the tool works out the cut-off for items and reports from the notice period you tell it to use.
- Councillors and officers submit agenda items and reports through a form, attaching any documents. Late submissions are marked late so the clerk can decide.
- Standing items such as apologies, declarations of interest, minutes of the last meeting, the payments list and planning applications are added automatically, pulled from where they live.
- The clerk drags items into order and adds wording. Numbering updates itself.
- When the clerk approves the agenda, the tool produces the summons and agenda as a PDF and a single pack with every report and appendix in order.
- The same step publishes to your website, emails councillors their pack, and produces a print version for the noticeboard.
| Part of the pack | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Agenda items | Submissions approved by the clerk |
| Reports | Uploaded by the author before the cut-off |
| Minutes of the last meeting | The approved draft from the minutes tool or your file |
| Payments list | Exported from your accounts package |
| Planning applications | Your planning tracker, if you use one |
Agenda week with the builder in use
A councillor who wants an item submits it through the form any time after the last meeting. The RFO uploads the finance report with the payments list attached. On cut-off day the clerk opens the draft agenda, which already has everything in it, adjusts the order, and approves it. The website is updated and the councillors have their pack in their inbox within a few minutes.
If the clerk is away, the deputy or the chair can see exactly where the pack is and what is missing.
Is this your agenda week?
- Agenda items arrive by email right up to the deadline.
- The pack is assembled by hand in Word the night before.
- The same standing items are rebuilt every month.
- Publishing is three separate jobs: website, noticeboard and email.
- Only the clerk knows how to put the pack together.