Standing orders, financial regulations and a scheme of delegation are the rulebook a council runs by. They’re not glamorous, but they’re what makes decisions lawful and defensible — and out-of-date ones are a common finding at audit. Here’s what each does.
Standing orders
Standing orders are the written rules for how the council conducts its business — how meetings are called and run, how motions and voting work, how contracts are awarded, how the council recruits staff, and how it handles things like confidential business. Most councils adopt and adapt the NALC model standing orders.
Some standing orders are mandatory (they reflect the law — for example certain procurement thresholds), and these are usually marked in the model so you don’t accidentally edit them out. The rest are the council’s own choices about how it wants to operate.
Financial regulations
Financial regulations are the money rulebook that sits alongside standing orders: who can authorise spending, how payments are approved, how the budget and reserves are managed, how income is handled, and the controls that prevent fraud and error. They’re the practical expression of the controls your internal auditor will check.
Scheme of delegation
A council can’t meet for every decision, so it delegates certain functions — to a committee, or to the clerk as proper officer — within defined limits. A scheme of delegation sets out clearly what has been delegated to whom, and the limits (for example, a spending threshold below which the clerk can act without a full council resolution). Clear delegation speeds the council up without losing control.
Keep them current — and followed
Two failures are common: documents that haven’t been reviewed in years (and no longer match the law or how the council actually works), and documents that exist but aren’t followed in practice. Both show up at audit. Review them at least annually — a good habit is reviewing standing orders and financial regulations at the annual meeting.
How Town Desk helps
Town Desk won’t store your standing-orders document, but it helps you follow your financial regulations and scheme of delegation in practice: spend requests run through an approve / reject / paid workflow so money is authorised by the right person, and an append-only audit log records who did what — so the process isn’t just written down, it’s evidenced. Keep the rulebook current; let the system prove you followed it.
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General information for UK town & parish councils, not legal advice. See the current NALC model standing orders and model financial regulations for the authoritative templates.