LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Council standing order requiring motions to be proposed and seconded council failing to take advice and carefully consider implications before making standing order standing order...Council standing order requiring motions to be proposed and seconded council failing to take advice and carefully consider implications before making standing order standing order quashedR (Armstrong-Braun) v Flintshire County Council: CA (Schiemann and Sedley LJJ and Blackburne J): 20 February 2001The applicant sought judicial review to quash a standing order made by the council requiring any motion set down on a meeting agenda to be proposed and seconded and notified to the council 10 days before the meeting.

Harrison J refused the application.

The applicant appealed.

Robert McCracken and Adam Solomon (Hill Dickinson, Chester) for the applicant.

Clive Lewis (Andrew Loveridge, Flintshire County Council) for the council.Held, allowing the appeal and quashing the standing order, that even if the passing of a standing order having the effect of preventing an individual councillor from putting a motion on the agenda for discussion at a meeting of the council would be within the purpose and objects of the Local Government Act 1972 (which it was not necessary to decide), careful consideration by the council in the light of advice concerning its full implications for local democracy was required before such a standing order was made; that the effect of the standing order might be that matters which should be discussed were excluded and the constituents of a single non-party councillor were disenfranchised; and that, since the council had not given the proper consideration to the consequences of the standing order, it would be quashed.