Luton Borough Council’s Constitution finally made more concise and user-friendly

A long process to overhaul Luton Borough Council’s Constitution and make it more concise and user-friendly is finally complete and the document approved for adoption.

Work to review a number of changes and modernise the principles and established precedents by which the local authority is governed was delayed by the pandemic.

But a report on its conclusion was presented to a full council meeting on Tuesday (Nov 15th) by Labour South councillor Javeria Hussain, who chairs the constitution committee.

“The constitution review team was set up with several objectives,” she told the council. “These were:

to bring the constitution up-to-date; wherever possible to express its content in plain English to make it easier to navigate; to reduce the size of the documentation; to improve the connections between the different parts of the constitution; and to make it easier to update the content in the future.

“I believe we’ve met those objectives,” said councillor Hussain. “The constitution committee is satisfied that those aims have been met.”

Committee members received a report last month informing them of the work done by the team reviewing the Constitution, explained a report to the council.

“It requested the committee to commend the revised Constitution for approval by the local authority.

“The committee was told that the development management committee expressed a contrary view to that proposed by the constitution review team on two matters, in which it has an interest within the document.”

One was “that the ability to call-in an application to the planning committee should remain available to all members of the council rather than being limited to ward members or those in wards adjacent to an application site”.

The other was “that while a valid reason should be given for the call-in at the time it’s made, that explanation shouldn’t be limited to a material planning consideration”.

Having discussed the proposals, the constitution committee decided “the call-in procedure should be made available to all members and a valid reason given which isn’t necessarily required to be on planning grounds”.

Councillors unanimously agreed the committee’s recommendation that the revised Constitution be approved and adopted by the council.