The long awaited response by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUCH), to the thoughtful set of recommendations made by the Committee on Standards in Public Life in 2019, has been published.  To say it is a ‘damp squib' does no justice to squibs!

Whilst many would argue that the former regime, which included the Standards Board for England and the Adjudication Panel, with the power to suspend or even debar elected members had gone too far; what replaced it in the Localism Act 2011, has been largely ineffective. The review by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, a decade on from abolition of the Standards Board, made some serious recommendations to address these gaps in a number of creative ways.