Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire says she's being 'held up' from appointing top officials

Dame Andrea Jenkyns (Reform UK) said the Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority (GLCCA) was being delayed from implementing improvements without key positions filled with permanent staff members.

Members of the GLCCA approved the establishment of an appointments panel to permanently recruit four members of staff at an extraordinary meeting on Wednesday, November 12.

The panel will recruit a chief operating officer, deputy director, strategic finance and investment officer and a monitoring officer.

Ms Jenkyns said that the people in these roles are currently on “interim contracts” and the appointments panel will enable these officers to “apply for permanent positions”.

She said: “To me, we’ve got a constitution set out which pre-dates me and I think that we’re holding things up.

“We need officers. The fact of the matter is that we cannot go into delivery mode until we’ve got these permanent positions to recruit wider to have a delivery team.”

Ms Jenkyns went on to say that these positions were “already allocated when the authority was set up” and that employing them will not involve spending any more money than that accounted for.

Coun Sean Matthews (Reform UK), leader of Lincolnshire County Council, said: “This is a welcome development for the mayoralty. It’s necessary. It’s really important that it develops its own group of staff and stop using my staff as it were.

“I’m glad the mayor just mentioned the fact that this isn’t extra money. It’s really important that everybody knows that this is just the cumulation of where we have been and where we’re going.

“The mayoralty needs to have its own staff. It needs to be permanent and it needs to be developed and expanded as it goes.”

But Coun Ashley Baxter (Independent), leader of South Kesteven District Council, questioned whether the recruitment process would be politically neutral.

He went on to encourage the GLCCA to appoint someone from the district councils into the panel to ensure fairness.

Marc Jones, Lincolnshire Police and Crime Commissioner (Conservative), recommended that an independent person should be included in the appointment panel to avoid the perception of political interference.

He said: “Because you could in the future have a position where all four people are from the same political party and have similar views that could be seen to be politically motivated. That can undermine the officer being appointed.

“It doesn’t mean that anybody has done anything wrong but it can be perceived that way which is why an independent person from outside the political sphere can be really useful.”

Lisa Tremble, interim monitoring officer at the GLCCA, said: “The constitution has a provision that allows the combined authority to set up an appointments panel when it wishes to appoint its chief officers.

“What I’m saying is that the reality is that there should be robust scoring and robust criteria in any of the interview processes.

“So, if you do get to a point where two of the officers, or potential officers, get to the same scoring criteria, there is nothing stopping members of the panel, not from running a second recruitment process but a second round of assessments.

“It isn’t unusual, particularly at senior level and that’s open for them to consider if they can’t agree in the first round.”