Pod-on-the-Parish

John Fagan

Practical advice, real stories, and a bit of fun for everyone working in parish, town, and community councils across England and Wales.

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S3 · E6
Wednesday · 47 min
Forecasting, Budgeting & Setting the Precept (and Lashings of Ginger Beer)
It's that time of year again. Budgets need drafting, committees need consulting, and the precept request has to reach the district council before its deadline. Hannah Driver thinks this is the hardest part of the clerk's year: at year end the figures are what they are, but a budget asks you to think about what is coming and make judgements about it. In this episode she takes the whole process back to basics, from forecasting where this year will land, through building next year's budget line by line, to calculating the precept and keeping an eye on it all once it is set. Hannah is Head Accountant at Scribe, where she has spent over eight years working with hundreds of parish and town councils on their finances. She was last on the podcast in Episode 11, covering accounting basics. This session is pitched at new clerks, RFOs and councillors, and at anyone who would like a refresher before precept-setting season. What Hannah covers: Why the budget matters. Every council, whatever its size, has a statutory duty to prepare and approve a budget before setting the precept and before the financial year starts. Every councillor should understand it, not line by line, but enough to know that a healthy bank balance is not the same as money that is free to spend. Working back from the deadline. Find out when your district needs the precept request (often January, sometimes December), then plan back: a draft budget in October, committee input in November, full council in December. Incremental or zero-based? If your budget structure works, build on it, but review each line rather than adding a blanket percentage. If it no longer reflects what the council does, start from a blank sheet. Zero-based budgeting is also the right tool for one-off projects. Forecasting. Take your actuals to date, predict the remaining months line by line, and compare the expected year-end position against the budget. Be realistic, and keep the forecast updated through the year. Building the budget. Start with expenditure: fixed costs with an inflationary uplift, then the harder-to-predict reactive costs. Work in net figures, because VAT you will reclaim is not a real cost and should not sit in your income budget either. Reserves. A general reserve of between three and twelve months' net revenue expenditure, earmarked reserves to smooth out regular big costs such as elections and asset renewals, and project reserves for one-off plans. Why freezing the precept year after year can store up a much bigger rise later. Calculating and checking the precept. Expenditure, less other income, adjusted for reserves. Then check the figure per Band D equivalent property and per household per week, and what to do if it comes out very different from last year. Monitoring and looking ahead. A cash book coded to your budget lines, budget-versus-actual reports through the year, good notes on how each figure was reached, and a three-to-five-year projection to show the council where costs and precept are heading. John and Hannah also talk about Scribe's new budget worksheet, which takes your Scribe data into a spreadsheet for trying out different scenarios and then imports the agreed budget back in for next year. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S3 · E5
September 22 · 25 min
How to Read a Planning Application
A bundle of planning drawings arrives, and unless you have a design background it can feel like a wall of technical jargon and scale bars. Tom Sykes is an architect, and he thinks that is precisely backwards: the drawings are not the fluff around a planning application, they are the application. Everything else describes what the drawings will actually build. Tom was Head of Design for Transport for London and an Expert for the Design Council before founding Common Works, an architecture practice working with public sector clients and community groups. In this episode he takes councils through how to get inside a drawing, what quality looks like when you find it, and how to push back in language a planner has to take seriously. What Tom covers: The three documents that matter. Out of the enormous pile on the portal, the design and access statement, the planning statement and the proposed site plan are where to spend your time. And watch for the word "weight" in the planning statement, because it usually marks something being quietly balanced away. Print it out and draw on it. Getting in there with a pen is the fastest way to understand a layout. Shade where the afternoon shadows fall. Count how many thresholds you cross between the street and your living room. Try taking the bins out. Try being a child coming out to play. What good looks like. A worked example in Swindon where a redesign added a third more homes while reducing road and parking, told through a land audit you can run on any scheme, and seven steps that turn a copy-paste layout into somewhere people can live. What bad looks like. A scheme where no home overlooks the play area, front doors are blocked from the street by parked cars, and the long view down the main street ends in a garage. Plus a completed high street with no tenant in any frontage, seven years on, because nobody drew a door. Writing a response that lands. Headline, back it up, ask for what you want. Two worked examples, and why short and precise beats long and cross. Design is a reason to refuse. Bad design is one of only eleven grounds in the new NPPF that can lead to refusal, which gives a well-argued design comment real teeth. Tom's closing thought is worth the listen on its own: you do not have to like the look of any scheme he shows. Whether a place helps people form a community is a different question from whether you find it attractive, and that one is decided by the arrangement, not the styling. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S3 · E4
August 19 · 43 min
The Journey of a Locum Clerk
Lee Jakeman joined the RAF at 16, ran the administrative side of a military base, and worked contingency planning on 9/11 before deciding a parish council job advert looked “a bit like running a military base”. Fifteen years as a town clerk followed — Newport, Bridgnorth and Kidderminster — until he decided he no longer wanted to work “9 till 9, six days a week” and went locum. He's now a partner at LGRC Associates. This isn't a policy briefing. It's an honest account of arriving somewhere cold, including the mistakes Lee made on the way, and it's as useful to permanent clerks as to anyone thinking about interim work. What Lee covers: The first week — the trivial things that cause the biggest problems: where's the laptop password, who has the bank login, what's the code for the allotment padlock. Then the governance questions that can't wait: is the council quorate, is anyone approaching the six-month disqualification threshold, has the internal auditor been appointed. Lee once arrived to find 2 of 13 councillors in post, had to run a full set of elections, and couldn't do anything for three months — including get paid. The website as a health check — before he starts anywhere, Lee reads the latest minutes, the policies, last year's AGAR and the payments over £500. If they're all there, what sits beneath them is probably sound. If the AGAR is missing, he asks why. He also uses the live website rather than a crib sheet when quoting hall hire, because it's the fastest way to spot a policy that was changed and never published. Walking into the politics — councillors will tell you how poor the last clerk was, warn you about a difficult colleague, and share grievances years in the making. Listen professionally, take no sides. Then restore procedure: in almost every council Lee has joined, he's had to ask members to actually raise their hands for a vote, and to state the motion clearly enough to minute. FOI, kept simple — if someone asks for information you hold, provide it; don't worry about why they want it. FOI covers documents that exist, not opinions or reasoning. Acknowledge within five working days with a standard template, respond within 20. The best way to cut the burden is to publish the documents in the first place. Persistent correspondents — Lee calls a lot of it “intellectual sport”, and a quick reply is the reward they're after. His test: does the email actually contain a question? If it's a rant with no request, park it. Respond once, clearly, and don't be drawn into a debate. The skill is not letting a difficult minority crowd out the genuine majority. Documentation — “it's often the simple omission at the beginning that creates the crisis at the end.” A councillor verbally lets a community group use a piece of land. Nothing minuted, no terms, no insurance, no end date. Three years on a new clerk arrives, there's a structure on the land and no record of a decision. Money and trusted advice — read your standing orders and financial regulations properly, read the JPAG guidance cover to cover, use industry-standard accounts software rather than a bespoke spreadsheet. And not Facebook: you don't know who's answering or what their experience is. Ask your county association, the SLCC, or the software helpline. Sometimes you need to let things break — the counter-intuitive one. Clerks cut corners under pressure to keep the peace, which teaches councils that the rules don't really apply. Let poor practice surface; let the internal auditor say it out loud. Lee's analogy is the wedged-open fire door — rules exist for a reason. The legacy you're writing now — aimed squarely at permanent clerks. One day you'll leave. What will the next clerk find? Every file you save and process you document is a gift to your successor. Plus professional authority: don't let a council act because “the clerk said so” — name your source, whether that's Arnold-Baker, the JPAG guidance or the legislation itself. Writing reports that protect everyone — Lee's five-part structure (aim, background and legislative basis, discussion, summary, options and recommendation), always at least two options including doing nothing, and language that keeps you advisory: “my initial thoughts are…” rather than committing on the spot. John also puts the audience's questions to Lee: why do a job this challenging (“if you don't get up in the morning for a challenge, you might as well stay in bed”), how to land a first clerk role and what red flags to watch for at interview, and what locum work actually pays. Lee's line on experience is worth the price of admission on its own: “somebody who's got 20 years of experience might have 20 years of the same yearly experience.” Interested in locum or consultancy work through LGRC? Email info@lgrc.org.uk or express an interest via lgrc.uk. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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August 17 · 12 min
Bonus: The Proper Practices Rewrite — What Changes for 27/28
A short bonus episode. This is Claire Reed, Proper Practices Project Manager at NALC, speaking at the Digital AGAR webinar in July 2026 — lifted out of Episode 16 and published on its own while the consultation is open. If you've already heard Episode 16, you've heard this. The Proper Practices — the Governance & Accountability guidance that sits behind the AGAR — are being rewritten by CIPFA for Category 2 authorities, meaning those with income or expenditure of £15 million or less. Claire works on that rewrite alongside the Smaller Authorities Proper Practices Panel. The guide has been shortened, de-jargoned and given a glossary, guidance is signposted by authority type with a separate appendix for parish meetings, and the roles and responsibilities of clerks, RFOs, members and auditors are spelled out. She's explicit that this is not just about getting through the audit — it's about being able to run the council properly. Two changes are worth your attention. Assertion 6 becomes "governance", and with it a new requirement: internal and external audit reports must be reviewed in an open public meeting, published on your website, and backed by an action plan that somebody actually monitors. And there's a new CIPFA code of practice for internal audit — aimed, in Claire's words, squarely at the arrangement where somebody local has a quick glance over the accounts in exchange for a bottle of wine or an M&S voucher. On the accounts themselves: borrowing is separated out, staff costs stop being a standalone line — a privacy fix for councils with a single employee — debtors and creditors move onto the form itself, and reserves are split between earmarked and general, so residents can see why a council is holding the money it holds. The consultation runs through August and September. The new guidance is due in early 2027 and applies to the 27/28 financial year — so this is the point at which saying something still changes the outcome. Claire uses a mock-up built in the new digital AGAR portal, which Lance Allan of SAAA demos in full in Episode 16. More from NALC and SAAA. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S3 · E3
August 14 · 49 min
Inside the New Digital AGAR (and a Pool Party Before the Podcast)
The Annual Governance & Accountability Return is moving online. In this episode Lance Allan, User Acceptance & Training Project Manager at SAAA (Smaller Authorities' Audit Appointments), talks John through the new digital AGAR portal — trialled with 78 real submissions this year and available to every authority from spring for the 26/27 return. Claire Reed, Proper Practices Project Manager at NALC, then sets out the CIPFA rewrite of the Proper Practices and what it means for your accounts and governance from 27/28. Lance's section is the practical one. The portal won't be compulsory next year, but there's a cash incentive for using it. Your login is the email address your external auditor already holds — so tell people if it changes. The system opens in the autumn so you can have a practice run, and the 25/26 comparative figures you enter then are saved for you. He also explains why you'll want to do the accounting statements before the meeting and take a blank annual governance statement to it, and how the system produces a redacted, accessible copy of the signed AGAR for your website with the signatures stripped out. The most useful few minutes are about variances. You need an explanation once you're over 15%, and over £100,000 for larger councils — and, crucially, you do not need to explain every last pound. Lance is explicit that external auditors now know not to ask for that: an explanation covering £100,000 of a £100,828 variance is more than satisfactory. But he's equally clear about the other end of it — if you're sitting at 15.5%, don't scrabble around for a few pounds just to drop under the threshold. Explain the majority of it. Claire's half covers the rewrite. The guide has been shortened, de-jargoned and given a glossary; guidance is now signposted by authority type, with a separate appendix for parish meetings; and roles and responsibilities for clerks, RFOs, members and auditors are spelled out. Assertion 6 becomes "governance", bringing a new requirement that internal and external audit reports are reviewed in an open public meeting, published on the website, and backed by a monitored action plan. There's a new CIPFA code of practice for internal audit in Category 2 authorities — aimed squarely at the arrangement where someone local glances over the accounts for a bottle of wine or an M&S voucher. On the accounts themselves: borrowing is separated out, staff costs stop being a separate line (a privacy fix for one-employee councils), debtors and creditors move onto the form itself, and reserves are split between earmarked and general so residents can see why a council is holding money. Also in this one: Claire on going from sixteen years as a primary school teacher to local government (and knocking herself out demonstrating how to catch a ball), Lance on cycling 800 miles in nine days for the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, and whether software providers will be able to feed figures straight into the portal. A consultation on the full Proper Practices runs in August and September, with the new guidance published in early 2027 and applying to the 27/28 financial year. Useful links: SAAA and NALC. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S3 · E2
July 13 · 39 min
Martyn's Law, Without the Panic (and a Motorbike Trip with Dad)
Martyn's Law — the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 — has caused real anxiety across the sector, with some councils cancelling fireworks displays, steam rallies and community events out of fear they can't comply. In this episode, Alex Jay, Managing Director of Little Green Button, joins John to cut through the jargon and explain what the Act actually requires — and, for most councils, how modest that really is. Alex's background is in data and safety technology rather than counter-terrorism. Little Green Button is a UK safety-tech company whose digital panic alarms and lone-worker tools are used across healthcare, education and local government. He's refreshingly clear that no product makes you "Martyn's Law compliant", and that the honest answer for a lot of parish and town councils is that they fall out of scope altogether — but should still write down why. The conversation walks through the essentials: the Manchester Arena attack and Figen Murray's campaign that led to the law; the two-year implementation period and the spring enforcement date; the tiers (exempt under 200, standard 200–800, enhanced 800+) and what counts as a qualifying event; the difference between evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication procedures; and the common mistakes — panic-buying kit, assuming everything is in scope (or that nothing is), and contracting away accountability. Alex's practical playbook: list your premises and regular events, estimate realistic peak numbers, identify who actually has control, refresh your hiring agreements, keep procedures to simple one-pagers, brief staff and volunteers, and — above all — record your reasoning and review it annually. There's also a nice detour on whether AI tools can help you check your own scope (spoiler: yes, if you make it cite the Home Office or SIA rather than "Barry's blog"). Useful links: ProtectUK's Martyn's Law hub (including the in-scope flow charts), the Home Office / SIA guidance on the regulator's new role, and Little Green Button. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S3 · E1
July 10 · 41 min
James Corrigan on the Employment Rights Act (and a Stitch in Time)
Employment law is facing its biggest shake-up in a generation, and for lean council teams a single tribunal claim can be financially and operationally devastating. In this episode, HR and governance specialist James Corrigan joins John to unpack what the Employment Rights Act 2025 actually means for parish, town and community councils — and, crucially, what to do about it. James has spent more than two decades advising local authorities on HR and ACAS compliance, after a career that took him from court clerk to town-council chief executive — via three degrees earned while working, a spell as a competitive rugby player, and a former life on the trumpet. He explains how the Act is arriving in stages, why the qualifying period for unfair dismissal is dropping to six months, how the shift to taking “all reasonable steps” raises the bar on preventing harassment (including harassment of staff by councillors), and why AI tools are driving a surge in low-cost tribunal claims. Along the way he shares the practical playbook: cap probations at three months, get onboarding and one-to-ones right, check your policies before you act, and — his nan's advice, and the theme of the episode — remember that a stitch in time saves nine. Deal with problems early, and document everything. Topics covered include the phased rollout of the Act; day-one and six-month rights; statutory sick pay and menopause guidance; the preventative duty on sexual harassment and third-party harassment; unlimited damages and the risk of high-value claims; AI-generated claims; and the immediate actions every clerk and RFO should take. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S2 · E10
July 3 · 34 min
From Submission to Sign-Off: Preparing for External Auditor Queries
Eleanor Greene is back — this time to walk you through the bit that comes after the AGAR submission: the external audit stage. In this episode, Eleanor covers what external auditors actually look for, why one in three councils received a qualified audit last year, and how to give yourself the best possible chance of a clean sign-off before the summer ends. Eleanor has been auditing parish and town council accounts since 1997 — nearly 400 audits across her career — and this season alone has audited 97 councils. She knows every query the four major firms (PKF, BDO, Mazars, Moors) send out, and she's seen every way a council can trip over its own paperwork. Her advice is frank, practical, and occasionally quite funny. Topics covered include: the four external audit firms, how they're appointed, and why they ask for different things; turnover thresholds, fee bands, and why a SIL receipt can create two years of high audit bills; what AGN02 actually says auditors can and can't ask for; the most common AGAR consistency errors; exercise of public rights — who actually turns up and what they're entitled to; writing variance explanations that get the auditor off your back the first time; what Assertion 10 compliance looks like at external audit stage; how to handle a query you don't understand without guessing; and John's quick bonus segment on setting up an email auto-reply that does actual work for you over August. John also asks Eleanor the Pay-it-Forward question left by Dr Gale Pettifer (Episode 12): if you could choose anyone, alive or dead, to be your mentor, who would you choose? Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S2 · E9
June 30 · 28 min
Ponies, Pigs, and Parish Councils: Life in the New Forest National Park
Most clerks deal with planning applications, precepts, and the occasional difficult councillor. Gale Pettifer deals with all of that — plus donkeys cracking open wheelie bins, cars floating down the village high street, and a 75-year-old content creator staging a sit-in on a footbridge that made national news. Life in the New Forest National Park is like no other posting in the sector, and Gale — Clerk & Proper Officer at Brockenhurst Parish Council, a practicing commoner, and a "girl from Kent who always dreamed of ponies" — tells it like it is. Brockenhurst is the largest parish council in the New Forest: around 3,500 residents that can double in summer with tourists, a precept of £107.82, a median resident age of 51, and a cross-rail link from London Waterloo to Manchester Piccadilly that brings both day-trippers and the occasional car onto the railway tracks by mistake. The parish sits inside the New Forest National Park — designated in 2005, shaped by commoners' livestock since William the Conqueror in 1079 — which means almost nothing is straightforward. Gas mains? Dug by hand because the route crossed SSSI-designated land. A new bus shelter? First, find land to swap with the verderers so the grazing footprint stays the same. A crumbling footbridge? Negotiate with Forestry England while Natural England checks the environmental impact on the surrounding SSSI. A water splash on the main road? Cars float in a surprisingly small depth of water, and the council is working with the Environment Agency, Hampshire County Council, and Forestry Commission on a flood resilience plan. The governing landscape around a New Forest council is unlike anything a standard Proper Practices guide covers: the New Forest National Park Authority handles planning; the Verderers — a statutory body dating back centuries — protect commoners' rights over the unenclosed forest; Forestry England acts for DEFRA as landowner; Natural England holds the conservation designations; the Environment Agency, New Forest District Council, and Hampshire County Council all have roles. Layer in Brockenhurst College, the Village Hall Trust, Friends of Brockenhurst, and Speed Watch, and a typical clerk's week involves more stakeholders than most. The animals are both the draw and the daily operational challenge. The ponies, cattle, donkeys, and pigs are semi-feral — not wild, not pets, free to roam anywhere across the unenclosed forest, with full right of way over traffic. They fertilise the heathland, keep the landscape open, and maintain biodiversity that earned the New Forest its designation. They also work out how to open wheelie bins (the district council's new food caddies lasted approximately one week before the donkeys cracked them), alert the parish office when they're lying down for a proper sleep (panicking visitors who think they've found a dead foal), and get encouraged into local shops by Brockenhurst College students roughly once a year — always a slow news week, always national coverage. Gale herself is a practicing commoner — she bought a property with rights of common, established her entitlement at the Verderers' Court, found a mentor among established commoners, and now has her own ponies roaming the forest. On weekend evenings she goes out to find them, identifies them by their markings and the way they walk, and checks on them the way a farmer checks on livestock — except hers are somewhere across 220 square miles of open heathland. "I think I went through the wardrobe and came out in Narnia," she says. She grew up on a council estate in Kent, cried herself to sleep as a child for want of a pony, worked at the Palace Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue at 18, and eventually found her way to the New Forest and a life she pinches herself over every day. The advice she'd give her 18-year-old self: learn about money. Not an accounting course — just the really boring stuff. Pensions. Savings. Starting early. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S2 · E8
June 29 · 39 min
Accounting Basics for Clerks & RFOs (and a Sideline in Playmobil)
Stepping into a role that involves public money can feel overwhelming — especially when local council finance comes with its own rules, "proper practices" and terminology that can read like a different language. This episode is the antidote: a friendly, jargon-free walk through the building blocks every Clerk and Responsible Financial Officer needs, pitched squarely at people who are new to the finance side of the role (or want to shore up the fundamentals). As Hannah puts it, you don't need to be a maths whiz — you need to understand the foundations and have the right systems in place. Hannah Driver is Head Accountant at Scribe, where she's spent eight years working day-to-day with parish and town councils of every size. Before Scribe she spent twelve years at Norse, a facilities-management company serving district and county-level councils, and she studied business management (with an accounting bent) at the UEA. Away from the numbers she's a keen fossil hunter — collecting ammonites and jet on the Yorkshire coast — and runs a long-standing Playmobil side hustle, buying, restoring and reselling sets. The heart of the episode is a whole-year overview of council finance. Hannah starts with what makes council accounting different and the role of the RFO, then clarifies the distinction that trips people up most: receipts and payments (cash accounting — what happened, when it happened) versus income and expenditure (which considers the period a transaction relates to, with debtor and creditor adjustments). If Box 7 and Box 8 on your AGAR match, you're almost certainly in receipts and payments; if they differ, you're in income and expenditure. Councils under £200,000 gross can use receipts and payments; go over for three consecutive years and you must move to income and expenditure (and restate the prior year when you switch). From there she makes the case that the cashbook is the single most important accounting record a council keeps — do it little and often, split out the VAT, keep a full audit trail of invoices, reconcile to the bank monthly, and structure it around your budget codes so budget-versus-actual reporting is easy. The VAT section covers both non-registered councils (reclaiming via Form 126 on the Government Gateway, whole calendar months, claims going back up to four years) and registered councils (VATable income like a car park, café or bar; the £1,000 output-tax trigger; Making Tax Digital; aligning VAT quarters to 31 March). Hannah rounds out the practical content with the asset register — the record behind Box 9 (Box 12 in Wales), why there's no depreciation in council accounting, the £1 proxy value for gifted or community assets, and using it to plan renewals — and reserves: a general reserve of roughly three to twelve months' expenditure, earmarked reserves for specific projects and asset renewals, and capital reserves (including the rule that asset-disposal proceeds over £10k must sit in a capital reserve). The golden rule: reserves must be justifiable, not just money sitting in the bank with no plan. The episode also includes a quick overview of the Scribe accounts software from Hannah's colleague India. In the outro, Hannah's one thing to take away is that almost everything flows from a good, accurate, up-to-date cashbook — get that foundation right and the rest falls into place — plus a gentle bit of advice from her younger self: don't overthink it, don't sweat the small stuff, and try to be happy. She also takes on the Pay-it-Forward question and leaves a cracking one of her own. This episode is brought to you by Scribe and Civic.ly. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S2 · E7
June 26 · 56 min
Talking AI and the Future of Local Councils
This one breaks the usual format. Instead of a single guest, we brought together a panel of people who know the sector — and the tech — to ask a deceptively simple question: if AI keeps developing at its current pace, what does the parish, town, or community council of 2036 actually look like? It grew out of a collection of short articles that Tom Clay of ERNLLCA pulled together, each contributor giving their take on the impact AI might have over the next ten years. We turned the articles into a roundtable. The result is less a lecture and more a proper conversation — optimism, scepticism, a few jokes, and a lot of practical sense. On the panel: Jonathan Owen (Chief Executive, NALC) on AI and the future of local democracy — freeing up time, improving engagement, and strengthening the sector's voice. Danny Moody (Northamptonshire CALC) with the contrarian view: the clerk's role will change dramatically, residents now wield AI too, and beware the burnout trap of simply doing more tasks. John Fagan (Scribe & Civic.ly) on a day in the life of budgeting for the precept — 2025's manual marathon versus a 2035 of finance agents and live dashboards. Mark Tomkins (Aubergine) on AI as a tool, not a sci-fi overlord — more like a naughty teenager that needs guardrails, especially around websites, accessibility, and hallucinations. Steve Walker (CloudyIT) on why, for some councils, 'tomorrow is today' — and how AI could hand clerks back their evenings. Christian Vincent (WorkNest) on the employment angle: AI as a brilliant starter but a dangerous source of truth, and keeping the person in the process. Tom Clay (ERNLLCA) rounding up — a small, conservative sector means patchy adoption, but automation is coming regardless; read what the AI makes for you before you trust it. We close with the questions John put to the panel — do you need to declare that AI wrote something, and how do you handle data and GDPR with tools hosted outside the UK — plus the usual Pod-on-the-Parish intro and outro with Tom, including this episode's Pay-it-Forward. Pod-on-the-Parish is brought to you by Scribe and Civic.ly.
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S2 · E6
June 25 · 33 min
Jamie Charters on Investing Council Funds (and a Word Called Meraki)
Every pound in a parish or town council's reserves represents a future investment in the community — playground repairs, village hall upkeep, the project a clerk hasn't yet thought of. Most councils default to a "safety first" approach that quietly costs them money: with high-street banks paying 0.5–2.5% while the Bank of England base rate sits at 4%, even modest reserves can be underperforming significantly. Jamie Charters has spent 25 years at CCLA Investment Management — "all I've ever known, really" — and he joins the show to walk through what the alternatives look like, who they're for, and the misconceptions councils most often hold about them. Jamie is a Client Director on the public-sector side of CCLA — that's Churches, Charities, and Local Authorities, where "local authorities" stretches to cover the whole public sector: ports and harbours, national parks, crematoria, principal authorities, and over 800 town and parish councils on the firm's books. CCLA manages around £15 billion across 36,000 clients; the public-sector book sits at roughly £2.5 billion across more than 1,200 clients. The common misconception Jamie opens the episode with: CCLA only deals with the big councils. Not so. Everyone gets the same level of customer service, irrespective of size. The talk itself works through three funds, then settles in on one. The Cautious Multi-Asset Fund takes a 3–5 year view, caps equities at 50%, targets CPI+2% — minimum was £1m, restructured around 2024 down to £1,000; currently used by 33 clients, all principal authorities bar one parish. The Local Authorities' Property Fund is actively-managed UK commercial property, 5-year view, common landing spot for Section 106 money — but needs an opt-up to professional-client status and an IFA suitability report. The bulk of Jamie's time, and the bulk of CCLA's public-sector book, is the third: the Public Sector Deposit Fund (PSDF). The PSDF was born from the Icelandic banking crisis. The Local Government Association approached CCLA in the wake of it, asking whether the firm would launch a short-term money market fund for the sector. Fifteen years later, the fund holds just shy of £1.5 billion pooled across local-authority clients, placed with a watchlist of around 55 approved banks and building societies (30–40 in use at any one time). The risk framework is the headline: minimum A- credit rating per institution, no more than 10% with any one counterparty, daily monitoring for upgrades and downgrades, no exposure to Russian, Middle Eastern, Belarusian or Chinese banks, UK-domiciled and currency-risk-free. The fund itself carries an AAA Money Market Fund rating from Fitch — the highest possible — and its assets are safeguarded by a custodian bank so that, in the incredibly unlikely event CCLA itself were to fail, client money remains separate. The pitch, in Jamie's framing, is the trade-off most clerks haven't quite been told: cash offers certainty, security, and access. The PSDF is instant access — an instruction in before 11:30 am gets the funds back same-day, at no charge, with no transaction or statement fees. Nothing exotic in the portfolio: call terms, certificates of deposit. No equities, no derivatives, no asset-backed securities. The minimum for new clients is £25,000. The current yield is 3.7029% net of fees for new clients under £1m; existing clients (pre-September 2024) and anyone with over £1m get the slightly higher rate at roughly 3.80%. Jamie spends a thoughtful minute on what's not covered. The PSDF is not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme — but as he gently points out, many town and parish councils precept under the £500k threshold above which FSCS coverage falls away anyway. The risk is real, but not this risk: it's whether CCLA's diversification and credit-rating discipline holds. "If two of those banks were to fail," Jamie says, "we'd have a systemic economic crisis. A lot of us would be out of a job." The Bumblebee slide gets a moment — CCLA's client map, with the most northerly client being Moray Council near the Cairngorms and the most southerly road-accessible client being Penzance Town Council (with the Isles of Scilly even further south but off the mainland). Devolved nations all represented. Then the Jupiter Asset Management partnership, rubber-stamped in February 2026, with a 25-year covenant protecting CCLA's mission, brand and investment process. Investment and client-facing teams remain unchanged — "business as usual." On sustainability, Jamie covers the ESG framework that's built into the credit-approval process: institutions are evaluated on the quality of corporate governance, regulatory compliance, ranking in CCLA's Mental Health and Modern Slavery Benchmark, and the strength of their coal, oil and gas expansion policies (externally rated by Sustainalytics). A separate paper is available for any council that wants the detail in writing. The outro turns toward the personal. Eighteen-year-old Jamie was in Beckenham, south-east London, finishing a GNVQ, playing tennis and cricket, hanging out with mates. The advice he'd give him: work hard, take your professional qualifications, and — the bit that actually mattered — find a good mentor. For Jamie that was Mark Davis, who championed him for the job he ended up making a 25-year career out of. "Someone who backs you and believes in you," Jamie says. "You need that." Pay-it-forward: Tom Sykes left Jamie his question about taking one word from another language that does heavy lifting in that language and adding it to English. Jamie's answer is Meraki — Greek for "finding joy in effort" — which he'd stumbled across, of all places, on the side of a company that makes kitchen door handles. The word captures doing your work with soul and passion, getting satisfaction from the effort itself. Jamie's outgoing question for Episode 10: What is the skill or attribute you have developed that you have benefited the most from? Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S2 · E5
May 16 · 47 min
Tom Sykes on Procurement (and a Bit of Magic)
Procurement doesn't have to be dreadful — and Tom Sykes makes a compelling case that it's actually one of the most important relationship-building exercises a parish or town council ever runs. Tom is the architect and founder of Common Works, a former Head of Design for Transport for London's property team, and an Expert for the Design Council. He's worked both sides of the public-sector tendering table and arrives with one clear thesis: at the heart of every tender document is a relationship, and the procurement exercise itself is where that relationship starts. The episode opens with John's standard preamble — Tom's site visits, the physical foam-board model his team built of the Stroud Town Council retrofit (made by a graduate architect, scaled at 1 mm = 50 mm, used so you can imagine walking the corridor before it's built), and the small detail that Tom paid his way through architecture school doing close-up magic in London restaurants — £150 for a lunchtime residency. The one common mistake Tom flags upfront is proportionality: standing orders that demand three quotes for anything over £500 create huge overhead for clerks and waste suppliers' time on tiny pieces of work. Then Tom's talk. He walks through the fundamentals — the Procurement Act 2023 thresholds (£215k for services, just over £5m for construction), the real cost of running a tender on both sides (clerks underestimating their own time; a small practice like Tom's spending £4–8k preparing a bid for a £40–80k contract; bigger firms spending £10–12k per bid and expecting to win one in ten) — and the big upstream question: do you even need a tender at all? His three sourcing routes get the same honest treatment. Frameworks can be brilliant — the procurement process is mapped out for you, suppliers are pre-vetted — but the people who sell them are sometimes in morally grey territory; on a TfL project Tom worked on, two failed procurement exercises with the wrong panel ate four months. Contracts Finder is the weakest route because you have no idea who'll read your tender, and small practices self-select out assuming the big commercial firms will hoover it up. The curated short-list, Tom's preferred route, rewards the upfront work of meeting local suppliers and treating them as sounding boards. The middle of the talk is a working guide to the tender document itself — the layered brief (core values → project ambitions → outputs → appointments required → policy context), the biggest mistakes to avoid (too many docs, too long, inconsistent deliverables, ambiguous priorities), and a five-tier scoring scale (deliberately not out of 100, because percentages make outstanding feel unachievable). Then the punchiest moment of the episode: don't evaluate cost. Tom argues that scoring by lowest price wrecks everyone else's quality scores — "one mad bastard puts in a really low fee, and suddenly the bulk of bids are scoring in the 60s or 70s" — and that deviation from mean is the right mechanism. His rule of thumb: cost no more than 70% of the weighting on construction contracts, and as low as 5% on consultancy. The outro opens the episode back out. Tom takes a turn back to age 18 — putting on a two-week magic show at the Old Fire Station theatre in Oxford, six months of building props and street magic to drive ticket sales — and offers his younger self the opposite of Julie King's advice on the previous episode: take the world a bit more seriously. Pay-it-forward: Julie left Tom her question about what piece of legislation he'd change if he could, and Tom answers with the case for a land value capture mechanism on all public projects, using the Jubilee Line extension as the worked example — £3 billion build cost, roughly £13 billion of property-value uplift inside a kilometre of each new station, captured entirely by the people who happened to own land there in the first place. Tom's outgoing question for Jamie Charters (CCLA Investment Management, joining on Episode 9): if you could take one word from another language that does heavy lifting in that language and add it to English, what would that word be? Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S2 · E4
May 13 · 47 min
Unlock the Power of the Big Yellow Book
This one's different. The episode opens with a heads-up from John: don't listen to this in the car or walking the dog — it's a hands-on workshop, and you'll need the 14th edition of Arnold-Baker on Local Council Administration (the Big Yellow Book, the Local Council Bible, the CAB, whatever you call it) sitting open in front of you. Julie King, Partner at Norfolk Parish Training and Support, walks listeners through the book they've all got on the shelf but maybe never quite figured out how to navigate. Julie starts with what the book actually is — a brief history of Charles Arnold-Baker (MI6 officer turned barrister turned head of what's now NALC), Paul Claydon, and current author Roger Taylor. Then the structure: Part 1 (England & Wales) chapters 1–33, Part 2 (Wales only) chapters 34–36, Appendix 1 (Statutes), Appendix 2 (Statutory Instruments), the Index. Out come the post-it notes to mark up Chapter 1, the start of the 1972 Local Government Act on page 413, and Schedule 12 on page 505 — the bits everyone goes back to. Then four worked examples, the same pattern each time — Index → Chapter (legal interpretation) → Statute (the actual legislation). Quorum (7.9 → Schedule 12 paragraph 12: a third or three, whichever is greater, of total membership — not current sitting members). Register of interests (7.12 → Localism Act 2011, Section 29 — yes, it must go on your council website even if it's on the principal authority's site too). Churchyard grass cutting (25.2 / 33.3–5 → 1972 LGA Section 214 — parish councils are burial authorities for this purpose, so yes you can contribute). And the six-month rule for councillor absence (7.13 → Section 85 — and crucially, it's six months from the last meeting attended, not six missed meetings; if you meet quarterly, that's just one miss). Plus a Q&A pass on whether older editions are still usable (mostly yes; the Procurement Act is where you start to fall foul), how AOB on agendas works (you can list it; you just can't make decisions under it), and a closing reflection on why the proper officer role is impossible without this book. Julie leaves with the message she'd most like listeners to take away: make the Big Yellow Book your friend, not your foe. Pay-it-forward: Julie answers Beckie Whitehouse's "if kindness was a currency, how would you spend £10" question (sweets for everyone in her household sitting exams) and leaves a new question for Tom Sykes — joining the podcast next on procurement: what piece of legislation would you change, if you could, and why? Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S2 · E3
May 6 · 32 min
Surviving the Year-End Crunch
Beckie Whitehouse joins the podcast for a deliberately different kind of year-end episode — not the AGAR-and-bank-rec mechanics, but the bit nobody talks about: keeping your head, your boundaries, and your evenings while the auditor's calling, the inbox is on fire, and someone in the parish has a "quick question" about a swing set. Beckie is the founder of Cloudless Sky Coaching, but she's also a Parish Clerk of fourteen years, which is what makes her advice land — every story is from inside the role, not from a productivity guru's TED talk. She works through the musts, shoulds, and coulds (and why "should" comes loaded with too much guilt to be useful); time-blocking with realistic buffer for the day a swing breaks; the three-task rule for an inbox that won't stop; and setting boundaries with members of the public, councillors, and chairs without sounding rude — the "I'll come back to you" reply, what to do when the chair calls on a Sunday, and the conversation to have with HR if the extra hours are running away from you. Then mindset: brains as magnets, the gratitude reset, "today I choose to" rather than "today I have to", the stress cycle, the 60-second exhale, and the small movement habits that actually finish a stress response rather than parking it. It closes with one of the best reframes on the podcast so far — Beckie's 50p story, and the headline she'd like every clerk to take home: you don't have to do everything perfectly to get through year-end well. Plus pay-it-forward: Beckie's answer to Mark Tomkins's hobby question, and a new question for the next guest that John has already pre-warned needs a bit of thinking time. Recorded April 2026. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S2 · E2
April 15 · 57 min
Your Council Website as a Community Engagement Tool
Mark Tomkins is back on the podcast — this time for a follow-up to his Assertion 10 session. The question now: once the website is compliant, how do you actually use it? Mark strips away the jargon and lays out what works for turning your council's website from a legal tick-box into a genuine community engagement tool. He covers signposting and making the homepage do the heavy lifting (the six-button pattern for the questions you're asked most often); why Word and PDF "forms" create barriers rather than removing them; using Facebook well by going where people are and sending them back to your website for anything you want to measure; the case for turning Facebook comments off and the GDPR traps lurking in WhatsApp groups; and how navigation and "mega menus" can position the council as a genuine community hub — news, local groups, events, consultations, all in one place. At the back half, John reads listener questions on alternatives to SurveyMonkey, balancing multiple channels as Facebook loses the younger generation, and the great comments-on / comments-off debate. Plus Mark's pay-it-forward answer (fighter pilot, colour-blindness notwithstanding) and a hobby-themed question for the next guest. Recorded April 2026. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S2 · E1
March 26 · 27 min
Tweens and Teens Love Playgrounds — Designing Outdoor Spaces That Actually Work
In this episode, John talks to Millie Manton from KOMPAN UK about why tweens and teens are the forgotten age group when it comes to playground and outdoor space design — and what councils can do about it. Millie draws on research from KOMPAN's Play Institute to explain how young people aged 8–16 play differently, what motivates them to be active (ball games, climbing, areas away from the main playground, and active participation), and why only 23% of 11–17 year olds currently meet the WHO's minimum activity guidelines. She covers designing for teenage girls through the Make Space for Girls initiative, the role of creative seating, social swings, trim trails, and hangout spaces, and why teens want non-prescriptive, open-ended play rather than structured equipment. Plus: shark cage diving in South Africa, hot pod yoga on the road, and what Millie would tell her 18-year-old self about pasta and Nesquik at uni. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S1 · E3
March 12 · 24 min
Preparing for a Successful 25/26 Internal Audit
In this episode, John sits down with Eleanor Greene — Chief Accountant at Do the Numbers Ltd and Secretary to the Internal Audit Forum — for a straight conversation about internal audit best practice ahead of Year End. Eleanor covers a wide range of ground: remote vs face-to-face audits and when each makes sense, what the updated Practitioner's Guide means in practice, Assertion 10 and what councils actually need to do about emails, FOI, and council phones, common governance pitfalls she sees, how to read audit reports properly, auditor independence, website accessibility, and the ever-useful Daily Mail Test. This was recorded as a dedicated podcast conversation rather than a webinar conversion, so it's a more intimate, back-and-forth discussion. You'll also learn about Eleanor's unexpected passion for minerals and fossils — and yes, she really does own a dinosaur egg. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S1 · E2
February 26 · 36 min
Career Pathways: From Apprenticeships to CiLCA and Beyond
In this episode, John is joined by Nigel Hayes (RFO at Dorchester Town Council) and Keira Lake (Finance Apprentice) to talk about the value of apprenticeships in local government and the full career pathway available to council officers. Nigel explains why Dorchester went the apprenticeship route — closing the demographic gap in the 20–39 age group, succession planning, and risk mitigation — and walks through the funding available, including apprenticeship levy transfers, government incentive payments, and local grant schemes. Keira shares her experience starting as an 18-year-old apprentice, completing ILCA, FILCA, PIALC, and AAT Level 2, and offers practical tips for the End-Point Assessment. The conversation covers the full academic pathway from ILCA through CiLCA to the Community Governance degree with De Montfort University, making the case that apprenticeships are a strategic investment, not just a cost. Plus: does Keira ever sleep? Is Nigel worried she'll take his job? And why he's secretly a director at Dorchester Town FC. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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S1 · E1
January 29 · 54 min
Is Your Council Assertion 10 Ready?
In this episode, John talks to Mark Tomkins — Founding Director of Aubergine — about Assertion 10 of the Annual Governance Statement and what councils need to do to ensure compliance for AGAR 2025/26. Mark walks through the key updates in the 2025 edition of the Smaller Authorities Practitioners' Guide (SAPPP), covering domain name ownership and security, official email use for councillors and officers, website compliance expectations, and the IT and data policies every council should have in place. Along the way, there's a bit of banter about Star Wars art, tattoos, and the best advice you could give your 18-year-old self (spoiler: buy Bitcoin). Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources.
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