DECLARING the gift of a bottle of wine or whisky at Christmas, unless a costly vintage or single malt, will be a thing of the past for Blaenau Gwent councillors and staff.
At a meeting of Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council on Thursday, September 30, councillors discussed increasing the legal threshold of declaring gifts from £10 to £20.
The move was part of a raft of changes to the council’s constitution brought before councillors for discussion by Blaenau Gwent’s monitoring officer, Andrea Jones.
Ms Jones said: “Members will be aware there wasn’t an updated report last year due to the emergency (pandemic) response and effectively we’re on a catch up of two years’ worth of amendments.”
“We have a number of procedural and updating changes.”
One of changes would see the register of members interests and the officers code of conduct updated so that “material benefit” and gifts of £20 and above would need to be submitted rather than the current £10.
But Cllr Jonathan Millard believed that all gifts no matter how small should be registered, Cllr Millard said: “We’re talking about being an open and honest council, I’m not comfortable with moving the golf posts in this case and increasing it.”
Ms Jones explained that this change came about from a “benchmarking exercise” with other monitoring officers across Wales for what the level should be.
Ms Jones said: “This is the threshold where officers and councillors are obliged to legally record those gifts.
“What was clear is this (Blaenau Gwent) is one of the lowest in Wales and it’s been £10 for over 30 years.
“Most other councils have increased it to £25 or £30.
“The reason for this, is that it’s become quite common for members and officers to receive perhaps a bottle of wine or whisky at Christmas.
“Very often those levels are over £10, it was thought that £20 is a more realistic and reasonable level”.
She added that councillors could still disclose gifts received no matter the value if they wished to do so.
Cllr Millard said: “I appreciate inflation and prices have gone up, but I think we should congratulate ourselves for being more open and transparent than other councils.”
He put forward an amendment to set the rate at £0 for declaring gifts.
This saw a vote for and against all the proposals go ahead.
If this was lost, Cllr Millard’s proposal of £0 would go against the option of keeping the current level of £10.
But this didn’t happen, as the changes were agreed with 20 votes for and 12 against.
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