Talking AI and the Future of Local Councils

James Corrigan on the Employment Rights Act (and a Stitch in Time)

Employment law is facing its biggest shake-up in a generation, and for lean council teams a single tribunal claim can be financially and operationally devastating. In this episode, HR and governance specialist James Corrigan joins John to unpack what the Employment Rights Act 2025 actually means for parish, town and community councils — and, crucially, what to do about it. James has spent more than two decades advising local authorities on HR and ACAS compliance, after a career that took him from court clerk to town-council chief executive — via three degrees earned while working, a spell as a competitive rugby player, and a former life on the trumpet. He explains how the Act is arriving in stages, why the qualifying period for unfair dismissal is dropping to six months, how the shift to taking “all reasonable steps” raises the bar on preventing harassment (including harassment of staff by councillors), and why AI tools are driving a surge in low-cost tribunal claims. Along the way he shares the practical playbook: cap probations at three months, get onboarding and one-to-ones right, check your policies before you act, and — his nan's advice, and the theme of the episode — remember that a stitch in time saves nine. Deal with problems early, and document everything. Topics covered include the phased rollout of the Act; day-one and six-month rights; statutory sick pay and menopause guidance; the preventative duty on sexual harassment and third-party harassment; unlimited damages and the risk of high-value claims; AI-generated claims; and the immediate actions every clerk and RFO should take. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources [https://resources.scribeaccounts.com/the-employment-rights-act-2025-what-it-means-for-local-councils].

From Submission to Sign-Off: Preparing for External Auditor Queries

Eleanor Greene is back — this time to walk you through the bit that comes after the AGAR submission: the external audit stage. In this episode, Eleanor covers what external auditors actually look for, why one in three councils received a qualified audit last year, and how to give yourself the best possible chance of a clean sign-off before the summer ends. Eleanor has been auditing parish and town council accounts since 1997 — nearly 400 audits across her career — and this season alone has audited 97 councils. She knows every query the four major firms (PKF, BDO, Mazars, Moors) send out, and she's seen every way a council can trip over its own paperwork. Her advice is frank, practical, and occasionally quite funny. Topics covered include: the four external audit firms, how they're appointed, and why they ask for different things; turnover thresholds, fee bands, and why a SIL receipt can create two years of high audit bills; what AGN02 actually says auditors can and can't ask for; the most common AGAR consistency errors; exercise of public rights — who actually turns up and what they're entitled to; writing variance explanations that get the auditor off your back the first time; what Assertion 10 compliance looks like at external audit stage; how to handle a query you don't understand without guessing; and John's quick bonus segment on setting up an email auto-reply that does actual work for you over August. John also asks Eleanor the Pay-it-Forward question left by Dr Gale Pettifer (Episode 12): if you could choose anyone, alive or dead, to be your mentor, who would you choose? Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources [https://resources.scribeaccounts.com/from-submission-to-sign-off-preparing-for-external-auditor-queries].

Ponies, Pigs, and Parish Councils: Life in the New Forest National Park

Most clerks deal with planning applications, precepts, and the occasional difficult councillor. Gale Pettifer deals with all of that — plus donkeys cracking open wheelie bins, cars floating down the village high street, and a 75-year-old content creator staging a sit-in on a footbridge that made national news. Life in the New Forest National Park is like no other posting in the sector, and Gale — Clerk & Proper Officer at Brockenhurst Parish Council, a practicing commoner, and a "girl from Kent who always dreamed of ponies" — tells it like it is. Brockenhurst is the largest parish council in the New Forest: around 3,500 residents that can double in summer with tourists, a precept of £107.82, a median resident age of 51, and a cross-rail link from London Waterloo to Manchester Piccadilly that brings both day-trippers and the occasional car onto the railway tracks by mistake. The parish sits inside the New Forest National Park — designated in 2005, shaped by commoners' livestock since William the Conqueror in 1079 — which means almost nothing is straightforward. Gas mains? Dug by hand because the route crossed SSSI-designated land. A new bus shelter? First, find land to swap with the verderers so the grazing footprint stays the same. A crumbling footbridge? Negotiate with Forestry England while Natural England checks the environmental impact on the surrounding SSSI. A water splash on the main road? Cars float in a surprisingly small depth of water, and the council is working with the Environment Agency, Hampshire County Council, and Forestry Commission on a flood resilience plan. The governing landscape around a New Forest council is unlike anything a standard Proper Practices guide covers: the New Forest National Park Authority handles planning; the Verderers — a statutory body dating back centuries — protect commoners' rights over the unenclosed forest; Forestry England acts for DEFRA as landowner; Natural England holds the conservation designations; the Environment Agency, New Forest District Council, and Hampshire County Council all have roles. Layer in Brockenhurst College, the Village Hall Trust, Friends of Brockenhurst, and Speed Watch, and a typical clerk's week involves more stakeholders than most. The animals are both the draw and the daily operational challenge. The ponies, cattle, donkeys, and pigs are semi-feral — not wild, not pets, free to roam anywhere across the unenclosed forest, with full right of way over traffic. They fertilise the heathland, keep the landscape open, and maintain biodiversity that earned the New Forest its designation. They also work out how to open wheelie bins (the district council's new food caddies lasted approximately one week before the donkeys cracked them), alert the parish office when they're lying down for a proper sleep (panicking visitors who think they've found a dead foal), and get encouraged into local shops by Brockenhurst College students roughly once a year — always a slow news week, always national coverage. Gale herself is a practicing commoner — she bought a property with rights of common, established her entitlement at the Verderers' Court, found a mentor among established commoners, and now has her own ponies roaming the forest. On weekend evenings she goes out to find them, identifies them by their markings and the way they walk, and checks on them the way a farmer checks on livestock — except hers are somewhere across 220 square miles of open heathland. "I think I went through the wardrobe and came out in Narnia," she says. She grew up on a council estate in Kent, cried herself to sleep as a child for want of a pony, worked at the Palace Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue at 18, and eventually found her way to the New Forest and a life she pinches herself over every day. The advice she'd give her 18-year-old self: learn about money. Not an accounting course — just the really boring stuff. Pensions. Savings. Starting early. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources [https://resources.scribeaccounts.com/ponies-pigs-and-parish-councils-life-in-the-new-forest-national-park].

Accounting Basics for Clerks & RFOs (and a Sideline in Playmobil)

Stepping into a role that involves public money can feel overwhelming — especially when local council finance comes with its own rules, "proper practices" and terminology that can read like a different language. This episode is the antidote: a friendly, jargon-free walk through the building blocks every Clerk and Responsible Financial Officer needs, pitched squarely at people who are new to the finance side of the role (or want to shore up the fundamentals). As Hannah puts it, you don't need to be a maths whiz — you need to understand the foundations and have the right systems in place. Hannah Driver is Head Accountant at Scribe, where she's spent eight years working day-to-day with parish and town councils of every size. Before Scribe she spent twelve years at Norse, a facilities-management company serving district and county-level councils, and she studied business management (with an accounting bent) at the UEA. Away from the numbers she's a keen fossil hunter — collecting ammonites and jet on the Yorkshire coast — and runs a long-standing Playmobil side hustle, buying, restoring and reselling sets. The heart of the episode is a whole-year overview of council finance. Hannah starts with what makes council accounting different and the role of the RFO, then clarifies the distinction that trips people up most: receipts and payments (cash accounting — what happened, when it happened) versus income and expenditure (which considers the period a transaction relates to, with debtor and creditor adjustments). If Box 7 and Box 8 on your AGAR match, you're almost certainly in receipts and payments; if they differ, you're in income and expenditure. Councils under £200,000 gross can use receipts and payments; go over for three consecutive years and you must move to income and expenditure (and restate the prior year when you switch). From there she makes the case that the cashbook is the single most important accounting record a council keeps — do it little and often, split out the VAT, keep a full audit trail of invoices, reconcile to the bank monthly, and structure it around your budget codes so budget-versus-actual reporting is easy. The VAT section covers both non-registered councils (reclaiming via Form 126 on the Government Gateway, whole calendar months, claims going back up to four years) and registered councils (VATable income like a car park, café or bar; the £1,000 output-tax trigger; Making Tax Digital; aligning VAT quarters to 31 March). Hannah rounds out the practical content with the asset register — the record behind Box 9 (Box 12 in Wales), why there's no depreciation in council accounting, the £1 proxy value for gifted or community assets, and using it to plan renewals — and reserves: a general reserve of roughly three to twelve months' expenditure, earmarked reserves for specific projects and asset renewals, and capital reserves (including the rule that asset-disposal proceeds over £10k must sit in a capital reserve). The golden rule: reserves must be justifiable, not just money sitting in the bank with no plan. The episode also includes a quick overview of the Scribe accounts software from Hannah's colleague India. In the outro, Hannah's one thing to take away is that almost everything flows from a good, accurate, up-to-date cashbook — get that foundation right and the rest falls into place — plus a gentle bit of advice from her younger self: don't overthink it, don't sweat the small stuff, and try to be happy. She also takes on the Pay-it-Forward question and leaves a cracking one of her own. This episode is brought to you by Scribe [https://scribeaccounts.com] and Civic.ly [https://www.civic.ly]. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources [https://resources.scribeaccounts.com/stepping-into-local-gov-finance-accounting-basics-for-clerks-and-rfos].

Talking AI and the Future of Local Councils

This one breaks the usual format. Instead of a single guest, we brought together a panel of people who know the sector — and the tech — to ask a deceptively simple question: if AI keeps developing at its current pace, what does the parish, town, or community council of 2036 actually look like? It grew out of a collection of short articles [https://www.ernllca.gov.uk/ai-and-local-councils/] that Tom Clay of ERNLLCA pulled together, each contributor giving their take on the impact AI might have over the next ten years. We turned the articles into a roundtable. The result is less a lecture and more a proper conversation — optimism, scepticism, a few jokes, and a lot of practical sense. On the panel: * Jonathan Owen (Chief Executive, NALC) on AI and the future of local democracy — freeing up time, improving engagement, and strengthening the sector's voice. * Danny Moody (Northamptonshire CALC) with the contrarian view: the clerk's role will change dramatically, residents now wield AI too, and beware the burnout trap of simply doing more tasks. * John Fagan (Scribe & Civic.ly) on a day in the life of budgeting for the precept — 2025's manual marathon versus a 2035 of finance agents and live dashboards. * Mark Tomkins (Aubergine) on AI as a tool, not a sci-fi overlord — more like a naughty teenager that needs guardrails, especially around websites, accessibility, and hallucinations. * Steve Walker (CloudyIT) on why, for some councils, 'tomorrow is today' — and how AI could hand clerks back their evenings. * Christian Vincent (WorkNest) on the employment angle: AI as a brilliant starter but a dangerous source of truth, and keeping the person in the process. * Tom Clay (ERNLLCA) rounding up — a small, conservative sector means patchy adoption, but automation is coming regardless; read what the AI makes for you before you trust it. We close with the questions John put to the panel — do you need to declare that AI wrote something, and how do you handle data and GDPR with tools hosted outside the UK — plus the usual Pod-on-the-Parish intro and outro with Tom, including this episode's Pay-it-Forward. Pod-on-the-Parish is brought to you by Scribe [https://scribeaccounts.com] and Civic.ly [https://www.civic.ly].