Parish Council Minutes

The following pages are links to relevant sets of minutes from each year.

Copies of paper minutes prior to the current year are mainly held at the Bedford archives and available for inspection, complete with signatures.

Draft minutes of Maulden Parish Council meetings can be seen here. Draft minutes are published within four weeks of a meeting being held and will be deleted once the approved minutes of that meeting are uploaded.

Minutes Archive.

Minutes covering current and previous years are below. (Click on the relevant year folder. Please note, a system quirk means they don’t always appear in date order, so scroll down to find the date you want.)

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• Residents are not normally named in minutes as attendees or in terms of representations made unless necessary for the performance of a council’s statutory duties, functions, and contracts. Naming residents creates the potential for Data Protection issues and, as residents are not formally part of a council meeting, doing so serves no purpose.
• Minutes are normally a record of decisions made and little else. They should be short and concise. There would not normally be a verbatim record of what any individual councillor or attendee had said. It is rarely necessary to record full details of a debate (examples of when it would be material to do so would be in evidencing that appropriate advice had been considered, or risks assessed in relation to decisions).
• The pages must be numbered and, after they have been approved, signed by the Chairperson or chair of the meeting. Minutes are only legal evidence after they have been signed.
• Decisions made in council meetings are immediate and do not need the minutes to be approved before they are enacted.
• Minutes of the Annual Council Meeting (some use the colloquial term “AGM”) are approved at the next meeting of the parish council, NOT a year later at the next Annual Council Meeting.
• Minutes of the Annual Parish Meeting are not approved by a parish council, they are approved at the next Parish Meeting, which is usually an annual event, though can be more frequent if further Meetings are called.
• Council meetings do not need to approve minutes of committees or sub-committees, they simply receive them. The committee or sub-committee approves its own minutes.