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?

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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.

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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 and Civic.ly.

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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 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 and Civic.ly.

Every pound in a parish or town council's reserves represents a future investment in the community — playground repairs, village hall upkeep, the project a clerk hasn't yet thought of. Most councils default to a "safety first" approach that quietly costs them money: with high-street banks paying 0.5–2.5% while the Bank of England base rate sits at 4%, even modest reserves can be underperforming significantly. Jamie Charters has spent 25 years at CCLA Investment Management — "all I've ever known, really" — and he joins the show to walk through what the alternatives look like, who they're for, and the misconceptions councils most often hold about them.

Jamie is a Client Director on the public-sector side of CCLA — that's Churches, Charities, and Local Authorities, where "local authorities" stretches to cover the whole public sector: ports and harbours, national parks, crematoria, principal authorities, and over 800 town and parish councils on the firm's books. CCLA manages around £15 billion across 36,000 clients; the public-sector book sits at roughly £2.5 billion across more than 1,200 clients. The common misconception Jamie opens the episode with: CCLA only deals with the big councils. Not so. Everyone gets the same level of customer service, irrespective of size.

The talk itself works through three funds, then settles in on one. The Cautious Multi-Asset Fund takes a 3–5 year view, caps equities at 50%, targets CPI+2% — minimum was £1m, restructured around 2024 down to £1,000; currently used by 33 clients, all principal authorities bar one parish. The Local Authorities' Property Fund is actively-managed UK commercial property, 5-year view, common landing spot for Section 106 money — but needs an opt-up to professional-client status and an IFA suitability report. The bulk of Jamie's time, and the bulk of CCLA's public-sector book, is the third: the Public Sector Deposit Fund (PSDF).

The PSDF was born from the Icelandic banking crisis. The Local Government Association approached CCLA in the wake of it, asking whether the firm would launch a short-term money market fund for the sector. Fifteen years later, the fund holds just shy of £1.5 billion pooled across local-authority clients, placed with a watchlist of around 55 approved banks and building societies (30–40 in use at any one time). The risk framework is the headline: minimum A- credit rating per institution, no more than 10% with any one counterparty, daily monitoring for upgrades and downgrades, no exposure to Russian, Middle Eastern, Belarusian or Chinese banks, UK-domiciled and currency-risk-free. The fund itself carries an AAA Money Market Fund rating from Fitch — the highest possible — and its assets are safeguarded by a custodian bank so that, in the incredibly unlikely event CCLA itself were to fail, client money remains separate.

The pitch, in Jamie's framing, is the trade-off most clerks haven't quite been told: cash offers certainty, security, and access. The PSDF is instant access — an instruction in before 11:30 am gets the funds back same-day, at no charge, with no transaction or statement fees. Nothing exotic in the portfolio: call terms, certificates of deposit. No equities, no derivatives, no asset-backed securities. The minimum for new clients is £25,000. The current yield is 3.7029% net of fees for new clients under £1m; existing clients (pre-September 2024) and anyone with over £1m get the slightly higher rate at roughly 3.80%.

Jamie spends a thoughtful minute on what's not covered. The PSDF is not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme — but as he gently points out, many town and parish councils precept under the £500k threshold above which FSCS coverage falls away anyway. The risk is real, but not this risk: it's whether CCLA's diversification and credit-rating discipline holds. "If two of those banks were to fail," Jamie says, "we'd have a systemic economic crisis. A lot of us would be out of a job."

The Bumblebee slide gets a moment — CCLA's client map, with the most northerly client being Moray Council near the Cairngorms and the most southerly road-accessible client being Penzance Town Council (with the Isles of Scilly even further south but off the mainland). Devolved nations all represented. Then the Jupiter Asset Management partnership, rubber-stamped in February 2026, with a 25-year covenant protecting CCLA's mission, brand and investment process. Investment and client-facing teams remain unchanged — "business as usual."

On sustainability, Jamie covers the ESG framework that's built into the credit-approval process: institutions are evaluated on the quality of corporate governance, regulatory compliance, ranking in CCLA's Mental Health and Modern Slavery Benchmark, and the strength of their coal, oil and gas expansion policies (externally rated by Sustainalytics). A separate paper is available for any council that wants the detail in writing.

The outro turns toward the personal. Eighteen-year-old Jamie was in Beckenham, south-east London, finishing a GNVQ, playing tennis and cricket, hanging out with mates. The advice he'd give him: work hard, take your professional qualifications, and — the bit that actually mattered — find a good mentor. For Jamie that was Mark Davis, who championed him for the job he ended up making a 25-year career out of. "Someone who backs you and believes in you," Jamie says. "You need that."

Pay-it-forward: Tom Sykes left Jamie his question about taking one word from another language that does heavy lifting in that language and adding it to English. Jamie's answer is Meraki — Greek for "finding joy in effort" — which he'd stumbled across, of all places, on the side of a company that makes kitchen door handles. The word captures doing your work with soul and passion, getting satisfaction from the effort itself. Jamie's outgoing question for Episode 10: What is the skill or attribute you have developed that you have benefited the most from?

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Procurement doesn't have to be dreadful — and Tom Sykes makes a compelling case that it's actually one of the most important relationship-building exercises a parish or town council ever runs. Tom is the architect and founder of Common Works, a former Head of Design for Transport for London's property team, and an Expert for the Design Council. He's worked both sides of the public-sector tendering table and arrives with one clear thesis: at the heart of every tender document is a relationship, and the procurement exercise itself is where that relationship starts.

The episode opens with John's standard preamble — Tom's site visits, the physical foam-board model his team built of the Stroud Town Council retrofit (made by a graduate architect, scaled at 1 mm = 50 mm, used so you can imagine walking the corridor before it's built), and the small detail that Tom paid his way through architecture school doing close-up magic in London restaurants — £150 for a lunchtime residency. The one common mistake Tom flags upfront is proportionality: standing orders that demand three quotes for anything over £500 create huge overhead for clerks and waste suppliers' time on tiny pieces of work.

Then Tom's talk. He walks through the fundamentals — the Procurement Act 2023 thresholds (£215k for services, just over £5m for construction), the real cost of running a tender on both sides (clerks underestimating their own time; a small practice like Tom's spending £4–8k preparing a bid for a £40–80k contract; bigger firms spending £10–12k per bid and expecting to win one in ten) — and the big upstream question: do you even need a tender at all?

His three sourcing routes get the same honest treatment. Frameworks can be brilliant — the procurement process is mapped out for you, suppliers are pre-vetted — but the people who sell them are sometimes in morally grey territory; on a TfL project Tom worked on, two failed procurement exercises with the wrong panel ate four months. Contracts Finder is the weakest route because you have no idea who'll read your tender, and small practices self-select out assuming the big commercial firms will hoover it up. The curated short-list, Tom's preferred route, rewards the upfront work of meeting local suppliers and treating them as sounding boards.

The middle of the talk is a working guide to the tender document itself — the layered brief (core values → project ambitions → outputs → appointments required → policy context), the biggest mistakes to avoid (too many docs, too long, inconsistent deliverables, ambiguous priorities), and a five-tier scoring scale (deliberately not out of 100, because percentages make outstanding feel unachievable). Then the punchiest moment of the episode: don't evaluate cost. Tom argues that scoring by lowest price wrecks everyone else's quality scores — "one mad bastard puts in a really low fee, and suddenly the bulk of bids are scoring in the 60s or 70s" — and that deviation from mean is the right mechanism. His rule of thumb: cost no more than 70% of the weighting on construction contracts, and as low as 5% on consultancy.

The outro opens the episode back out. Tom takes a turn back to age 18 — putting on a two-week magic show at the Old Fire Station theatre in Oxford, six months of building props and street magic to drive ticket sales — and offers his younger self the opposite of Julie King's advice on the previous episode: take the world a bit more seriously.

Pay-it-forward: Julie left Tom her question about what piece of legislation he'd change if he could, and Tom answers with the case for a land value capture mechanism on all public projects, using the Jubilee Line extension as the worked example — £3 billion build cost, roughly £13 billion of property-value uplift inside a kilometre of each new station, captured entirely by the people who happened to own land there in the first place. Tom's outgoing question for Jamie Charters (CCLA Investment Management, joining on Episode 9): if you could take one word from another language that does heavy lifting in that language and add it to English, what would that word be?

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This one's different. The episode opens with a heads-up from John: don't listen to this in the car or walking the dog — it's a hands-on workshop, and you'll need the 14th edition of Arnold-Baker on Local Council Administration (the Big Yellow Book, the Local Council Bible, the CAB, whatever you call it) sitting open in front of you. Julie King, Partner at Norfolk Parish Training and Support, walks listeners through the book they've all got on the shelf but maybe never quite figured out how to navigate.

Julie starts with what the book actually is — a brief history of Charles Arnold-Baker (MI6 officer turned barrister turned head of what's now NALC), Paul Claydon, and current author Roger Taylor. Then the structure: Part 1 (England & Wales) chapters 1–33, Part 2 (Wales only) chapters 34–36, Appendix 1 (Statutes), Appendix 2 (Statutory Instruments), the Index. Out come the post-it notes to mark up Chapter 1, the start of the 1972 Local Government Act on page 413, and Schedule 12 on page 505 — the bits everyone goes back to.

Then four worked examples, the same pattern each time — Index → Chapter (legal interpretation) → Statute (the actual legislation). Quorum (7.9 → Schedule 12 paragraph 12: a third or three, whichever is greater, of total membership — not current sitting members). Register of interests (7.12 → Localism Act 2011, Section 29 — yes, it must go on your council website even if it's on the principal authority's site too). Churchyard grass cutting (25.2 / 33.3–5 → 1972 LGA Section 214 — parish councils are burial authorities for this purpose, so yes you can contribute). And the six-month rule for councillor absence (7.13 → Section 85 — and crucially, it's six months from the last meeting attended, not six missed meetings; if you meet quarterly, that's just one miss).

Plus a Q&A pass on whether older editions are still usable (mostly yes; the Procurement Act is where you start to fall foul), how AOB on agendas works (you can list it; you just can't make decisions under it), and a closing reflection on why the proper officer role is impossible without this book. Julie leaves with the message she'd most like listeners to take away: make the Big Yellow Book your friend, not your foe.

Pay-it-forward: Julie answers Beckie Whitehouse's "if kindness was a currency, how would you spend £10" question (sweets for everyone in her household sitting exams) and leaves a new question for Tom Sykes — joining the podcast next on procurement: what piece of legislation would you change, if you could, and why?

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Beckie Whitehouse joins the podcast for a deliberately different kind of year-end episode — not the AGAR-and-bank-rec mechanics, but the bit nobody talks about: keeping your head, your boundaries, and your evenings while the auditor's calling, the inbox is on fire, and someone in the parish has a "quick question" about a swing set. Beckie is the founder of Cloudless Sky Coaching, but she's also a Parish Clerk of fourteen years, which is what makes her advice land — every story is from inside the role, not from a productivity guru's TED talk.

She works through the musts, shoulds, and coulds (and why "should" comes loaded with too much guilt to be useful); time-blocking with realistic buffer for the day a swing breaks; the three-task rule for an inbox that won't stop; and setting boundaries with members of the public, councillors, and chairs without sounding rude — the "I'll come back to you" reply, what to do when the chair calls on a Sunday, and the conversation to have with HR if the extra hours are running away from you. Then mindset: brains as magnets, the gratitude reset, "today I choose to" rather than "today I have to", the stress cycle, the 60-second exhale, and the small movement habits that actually finish a stress response rather than parking it.

It closes with one of the best reframes on the podcast so far — Beckie's 50p story, and the headline she'd like every clerk to take home: you don't have to do everything perfectly to get through year-end well. Plus pay-it-forward: Beckie's answer to Mark Tomkins's hobby question, and a new question for the next guest that John has already pre-warned needs a bit of thinking time. Recorded April 2026.

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Mark Tomkins is back on the podcast — this time for a follow-up to his Assertion 10 session. The question now: once the website is compliant, how do you actually use it? Mark strips away the jargon and lays out what works for turning your council's website from a legal tick-box into a genuine community engagement tool.

He covers signposting and making the homepage do the heavy lifting (the six-button pattern for the questions you're asked most often); why Word and PDF "forms" create barriers rather than removing them; using Facebook well by going where people are and sending them back to your website for anything you want to measure; the case for turning Facebook comments off and the GDPR traps lurking in WhatsApp groups; and how navigation and "mega menus" can position the council as a genuine community hub — news, local groups, events, consultations, all in one place.

At the back half, John reads listener questions on alternatives to SurveyMonkey, balancing multiple channels as Facebook loses the younger generation, and the great comments-on / comments-off debate. Plus Mark's pay-it-forward answer (fighter pilot, colour-blindness notwithstanding) and a hobby-themed question for the next guest. Recorded April 2026.

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In this episode, John talks to Millie Manton from KOMPAN UK about why tweens and teens are the forgotten age group when it comes to playground and outdoor space design — and what councils can do about it.

Millie draws on research from KOMPAN's Play Institute to explain how young people aged 8–16 play differently, what motivates them to be active (ball games, climbing, areas away from the main playground, and active participation), and why only 23% of 11–17 year olds currently meet the WHO's minimum activity guidelines. She covers designing for teenage girls through the Make Space for Girls initiative, the role of creative seating, social swings, trim trails, and hangout spaces, and why teens want non-prescriptive, open-ended play rather than structured equipment.

Plus: shark cage diving in South Africa, hot pod yoga on the road, and what Millie would tell her 18-year-old self about pasta and Nesquik at uni.

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