Local Code of Governance

7.1 The Council is run for the public good and must ensure openness in its activities. Clear trusted channels of communication and consultation should be used to engage effectively with all groups of stakeholders such as individual citizens and service users, as well as institutional stakeholders.

7.2 The Council demonstrates this by:

• Ensuring an open culture through demonstrating, documenting and communicating the Council’s commitment to openness.
• Monitoring the Council’s ethical standard and performance.
• Underpinning personal behaviour with ethical values that run through all aspects of the Council’s culture and operation.
• Ensuring that external providers of services on behalf of the Council are required to act with integrity and high ethical standards.
• Ensuring that members and staff adhere to relevant laws and regulations.
• Making decisions that are open about actions, plans, resource use, outputs and outcomes.
• Providing clear reasoning and evidence for decisions.
• Using consultation and engagement mechanisms to determine the most appropriate and effective courses of action.
• Actively engaging with institutional stakeholders.
• Developing formal and informal partnerships.
• Ensuring that partnerships are based on trust, a shared commitment to change and challenge.
• Establishing a clear policy on the types of issues that the Council will consult upon and with whom.
• Ensuring that communication methods are effective.
• Encouraging, collecting and evaluating the views of all service users and implementing effective feedback mechanisms.
• Taking account of the interests of future generations.

7.3 This value is specifically upheld in the following examples:

• The Member Code of Conduct;

• The Officer Code of Conduct;

• The Business Plan;

• The Procurement Strategy; and

• The Information Request Policy