 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
The Nolan Report Public bodies are expected to be publicly accountable and transparent in their business. In the wake of the sleaze scandals that engulfed the Tories in the mid nineties, the Nolan Committee was set up to examine standards in public life. Lord Nolan produced a report, part of which laid down the seven principles of public life – selflessness, leadership, objectivity, integrity, accountability, openness and honesty. Nolan said public bodies should have a publicly available register of board members’ interests - directorships, major shareholdings, financial interests - to avoid possible or perceived conflicts. In 1997 the Cabinet Office took these recommendations and included them in their Codes of Practice for Board Members of Public Bodies. It states that “the register should, as a minimum, list direct or indirect pecuniary interests which members of the public reasonably think could influence judgement. Public bodies should make registers of interests open to the public. Board members should be required to update them as changes occur.” So we thought we should check. The Register Jigsaw We embarked on a simple exercise. Randomly picking 50 public bodies, we asked for their registers of board members’ interests. Five of the bodies had disbanded, but with the remainder we cross-checked what was listed on the registers we were given, with the directorships each board member had listed at Companies House. In some cases simply getting a register proved impossible. Where we did, we found more holes than an Oxfam jigsaw. On average there were two to three people per body that had some kind of discrepancy between what was on their register and what they had listed at Companies House. Now two to three people per body is quite a lot, especially when you consider there's a thousand of the bodies out there. How could there be so many discrepancies? Well, we thought we'd better call a few of them up and ask them. After all, surely they couldn't be breaching the Seven holy Principles of Public Life?
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
