10 March 2006
It was all over in a few seconds, but more than a year later the consequences are still being felt.
When London Mayor Ken Livingstone compared a Jewish Evening Standard journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard, and then refused to defuse the affair by apologising, he set in train a series of events that ended up at the High Court and may yet go further.
On February 24, following referral from the Standards Board for England and a £45,000 investigation, the independent Adjudication Panel ruled that the mayor's remarks had breached the Local Government Code of Conduct and he was to be suspended from office for four weeks.
Livingstone's pledge to fight the decision met with initial success last week when a High Court judge agreed to freeze the ruling and hear his appeal.
Livingstone has turned his not inconsiderable fire on the Standards Board and its practices, saying a panel of adjudicators accountable to no one should not have the right to overturn the wishes of millions of Londoners.
The board itself has pointed out that it would have been preferable for Livingstone to be judged by his peers on the London Assembly. But that body ruled itself out when it expressed a view on the mayor's conduct, making it inappropriate for its standards committee to hear the case. The Standards Board was left with no option but to refer it to the Adjudication Panel.
The affair has focused the beam of criticism once more on the troubled Standards Board.
The councillors' regulatory body has had something of an unhappy history since it was founded in 2001.
Its main task is to ensure standards of ethical conduct are maintained across local authorities and investigate complaints against individual members, either by referring them to local standards committees or on to adjudication panels, appointed by the lord chancellor.
But it has struggled to cope with the number of complaints it has to deal with and its national judgements on often trivial cases have given it a reputation for pettiness.
The Liberal Democrats last year voted overwhelmingly to abolish the board. Conference delegates queued up to condemn the body as 'perverted' and 'discredited' – even the 'work of the devil'.
Sarah Teather, the party's then local government spokeswoman, has compared the board to a 'court martial in a banana republic'.
'There is no recourse to appeal except through judicial review and the High Court… It's time we abolished it and started again,' she said.
The board has also attracted some stinging criticism from the influential Committee on Standards in Public Life, itself currently embroiled in the row surrounding the conduct of Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell.
Last year, the committee urged the board to transform radically the way it operates and to delegate rulings on more trivial 'tit-for-tat' matters to under-used local standards committees.
Committee chair Sir Alistair Graham said: 'Such a change would enable the Standards Board to undertake a strategic regulatory role – providing independent scrutiny and oversight of the national framework; supporting and enabling local standards committees to operate the framework effectively, and only investigating those complaints that pose a high risk to the reputation of local democracy.'
The government has accepted the majority of the committee's recommendations and agreed to make the necessary legislative changes as soon as parliamentary time allows.
Few would dispute the need for some form of external check on councillors' conduct. Even the LibDems are advocating the creation of a revised body, rather than leaving regulation entirely to the ballot box.
The Standards Board's chief executive David Prince defends the organisation by pointing to the high number of complaints it has to examine.
'We consistently receive around 300 complaints each month, mainly from members of the public, who are concerned that the behaviour of councillors or other members has fallen short of what they expect,' Prince told Public Finance.
He also welcomes the changes advocated by the Committee on Standards in Public Life and says the board looks forward to taking on a more strategic role.
'We want local government to take ownership of the need to raise standards and also the mechanism to deal with complaints about members' behaviour,' he said.
PFmar2006
