Agenda and minutes

Apologies for absence were received on behalf of Councillors Conway and P Hearn.

Councillor Adshead was absent.

Councillor Taylor highlighted a few changes to the previous minutes. He asked the committee if they were happy for the minutes to be agreed subject to the changes and they agreed they were. 

Actions carried forward:

1.    T Angel to contact A Stunell for a target date on when the Councillor’s Suite review will be completed.

2.    T Angel, A Stunell, ICT Officer and R Taylor to organise meeting to take E-Learning forward once the update has been completed.

John Worts, Information Security Team Leader, delivered a presentation to the group on Data Protection and the requirement for members to register with the ICO. The presentation advised how all councillors will need to be registered with the ICO under GDPR by May 2018.

A member development session has been arranged for Thursday 22 March 2018 to cover this matter in depth. 

The Chairman thanked J Worts for his time and presentation and said he looked forward to the training session.

Councillor Douris suggested that this training session should be advertised sooner rather than later to maximise the number of attendee’s.

The Chairman said this should be a compulsory training course and would work with J Worts and T Angel regarding the communication to members about this session.

Actions:

Ø  R Taylor, J Worts and T Angel to discuss ways to advertise this session to members.

T Angel explained that there had been three new transactions made in the last quarter; the LGA Finance Conference 2018 was attended by J Deane and Councillor Tindall, and the LGA Annual Conference was attended by S Marshall, Councillor Williams and Councillor Tindall. She advised there was one pending transaction for training that is scheduled for February 2018. She highlighted that she had taken on board comments from the previous meeting and added the courses on to that page that were run by officers and therefore were free of charge; However, officer time would still come at a cost to the Council in different ways so this should still be reported.

Councillor Douris reiterated that it was really important to spend our training budget otherwise we were at risk of having it reduced.

The Chairman highlighted that we’ve had lots of development sessions this year but we had been fortunate enough to have experienced officers carrying out that training which we haven’t had to pay for directly out of our budget.

Councillor Howard questioned if members had been asked what training sessions they would like to see on the development programme. T Angel confirmed all members had been emailed and that was how the programme had been populated so far.

The Chairman suggested emailing members again now we were mid-term to see if there were any other requests for training sessions. T Angel agreed to do this.

Councillor Hicks said that everyone needed more training sessions in their first couple of years so the expenditure was likely to fluctuate. He said it was good to see the council being careful with money.

Councillor Douris said it would be helpful to find out the value of officer training, for example how much time off in lieu they receive for working out of normal hours to train members.

The Chairman noted there had been two training sessions since the last meeting; Budget Process on 19 October and Emergency Planning on 1 November. He said they had been well attended compared to previous sessions and then welcomed any comments from the committee. There were no questions or comments.

The Chairman said he had attended an Overview and Scrutiny Committee and noted that the training figures weren’t included in the report. T Angel advised that it was a one-off and the figures would continue to be presented within the quarterly reports.

T Angel advised that she had chosen not to put the programme in the agenda as it wasn’t up to date but said she would circulate it to all members once it had been updated. She gave the following updates to the training programme for 2018:

25 January: a briefing on the future health plans for the Dacorum area.

28 February: Staying safe & managing challenging situations.

22 March: GDPR session with John Worts.

She welcomed any further requests or suggestions for items to add to the programme.

She advised that the Domestic Abuse session hadn’t progressed as the officer didn’t feel the course could be run in the evening as it had already been cut down to make it five hours long instead of a full day.

Councillor Douris suggested we could either look at running this session on a Saturday during the day so it didn’t interfere with member’s jobs, or find an outside representative to cover this course instead. T Angel said she would investigate both options.

Councillor Banks said she had attended a community trigger session presented by the Resident Services team and suggested this could be rolled out to all members as she felt it would be very beneficial.

Councillor Douris suggested we could ask the Citizens Advice Bureau and Credit Union to do training sessions and give examples of situations that members should be aware of.

Actions:

Ø  T Angel to circulate the updated training programme.

Ø  T Angel to investigate domestic abuse training options. 

Ø  T Angel to contact Julie Still’s team about the community trigger training session.

T Angel said she had added the item ‘Induction 2019’ to the work programme for the next meeting. She felt it was good to start getting organised as early as possible and asked members to give it some thought so that they can discuss ideas, improvements etc. at the next meeting. She also said members were welcome to email her with any ideas in the meantime.

Councillor Douris suggested discussing ‘sales pitch’ idea’s at the next meeting to encourage members to attend training sessions. He expressed concern that 13 out of 51 members attending training sessions was considered well attended.