Blog: 4 November 2022 - Helen Edwards, LLG President

This week I had the pleasure of attending the SLCC annual conference, celebrating their 50th anniversary and held on the exact day of the anniversary of their inaugural meeting. There were people at the conference who had been at that inaugural meeting, and one is still a busy local council clerk 50 years later. This made me think about the enduring value of professional organisations such as SLCC and indeed our own LLG. Many of the clerks attending that conference are the only employee of the council they work for, and it was acknowledged that it can be a lonely and difficult job. They clearly found great support and comfort in what many described as their SLCC “family”. I met some inspirational people and am grateful to SLCC for the invitation to join them.  

Seeing the support that local council clerks found in their network, I realised there were similarities with the Monitoring Officer role. We are certainly not the only employee of our councils, and have the support of other colleagues, but there is something special about being able to share experiences with other Monitoring Officers in different councils (which can help put your own woes into perspective!), and there is no better place to do that than at LLG’s Governance Conference, taking place next week in Birmingham. Of course, the conference is not just for Monitoring Officers, and everyone involved in, or interested in local authority governance will benefit from attending.  

If you haven’t yet booked your place, there is still time. Bookings to join in person close on Monday, but if that’s not possible, there is still the opportunity to book for remote attendance until next Thursday. Even joining remotely, you will still get great content, but you will miss the “group therapy” of interacting with colleagues, chats over coffee or breakfast, and the chance to share stories over a drink in the bar. For me, those informal chats are as important as the formal sessions and are a great opportunity to rekindle old friendships and make new ones.  

November is clearly conference season, because the week after our LLG conference I will be attending the ADSO conference. I am really looking forward to catching up with ADSO colleagues who work closely with LLG on many of our campaigns and to taking the time to immerse myself in the issues faced by democratic services and seeing how other councils are tackling these. Many of you who are Monitoring Officers will, like me, be responsible for democratic services in your own authority, and as they are responsible for the decision-making functions, they can get caught up in tensions when the authority is forced to make difficult choices. This seems more and more inevitable in future as authorities try to deal with the challenges of insufficient funding, and ever-increasing demand for their services. 

I cannot pretend that attendance at any conference will give us all the answers but taking the time out to discuss issues and share ideas with colleagues gives us a fighting chance of finding some solutions, and I look forward to doing that with those of you who are able to join us in Birmingham next week.  

Best wishes

Helen Edwards

LLG President