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01 May 2015 / Nicholas Dobson
Issue: 7650 / Categories: Features , Local government , Public
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An officer and an…employee?

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Although all local authority employees are officers, are all authority officers necessarily employees, asks Nicholas Dobson

All local authority employees are officers. But do all officers have to be employees? The issue is important not least since statute requires relevant authorities (per s 21(1)(a)-(k) of the Local Government and Housing Act 1989) to designate “one of their officers” as “monitoring officer”. This position has personal responsibility for specified functions designed to secure the authority’s corporate legal propriety.

But nowadays there are many permutations and combinations of local government legal practice. One chief legal officer in a local authority can often be responsible for the legal propriety and well-being of two or more councils. How does this fit into the statutory scheme of things? Fortunately a May 2010 decision of HH Judge Grenfell in the High Court in Leeds brought some clarity to a rather cloudy statutory picture, albeit that the matter concerned a chief finance officer rather than a monitoring officer.

The case was Pinfold North Ltd v. Humberside Fire Authority [2010]

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