Paperless Councils

Bring your Council into the digital age. The benefits of holding paperless meetings are:

• Save valuable time and resources
• Improved access to meeting papers, anytime, anywhere
• Improve security
• Reduce your carbon footprint
• Helps with GDPR compliance

The UKLC meeting management module helps you coordinate the publication of agendas, minutes and meeting papers. The information is published on your website in an easily accessible manner.

Members of the public and Councillors can then easily view and download the papers from any device.

Anyone can download publicly available meeting papers. This saves the council time and money when coordinating these meetings as you no longer need to print and distribute lots of paper.

You can manage private or restricted papers securely making them only visible to those members of the meeting that should have access to the information. This also saves the council time and money, but has the added benefit of ensuring that only the people who should see the papers have access to them.

The meetings calendar shows public meetings to everyone. Private meetings are only visible in the calendar for Councillors or other authorised attendees. The meeting papers can be accessed directly from the calendar making it simple to locate the required papers for any particular meeting.

Several of our customers are already enjoying the benefits of paperless meetings.

Liz Page, Clerk to Belper Town Council said: "The document management system (DMS) allows us to store all documents in one place and to tag them making it very easy to manage versions and to search for and locate documents of interest. Each document can be public or private and linked to calendar entries, this makes it possible for Councillors to be completely paperless with rapid links to agendas, minutes and papers all from within a single entry in the council meetings calendar. It also means that the public can see the Agenda and all supporting papers and reports from the calendar entry. Making what we do very transparent".

"We have successfully used the UKLC meeting management module to achieve our ambition of running a 'paperless' council. Each Councillor is issued with a tablet device".

Liz went on to say that "Councillors can only access their documents and Councillor emails from their tablets keeping everything all in one place. This makes it easy for the council to manage emails for GDPR with nothing being stored on personal devices.

Liz has since moved on to Geldards LLP where she wrote a comprehensive article titled 'The safety of data on councillors' personal devices' The article was published in the Local Government News and covers loads of practical information that councils can adopt.

All councils have legal obligations to protect the security of data that identifies a living person (personal data). Failure to comply with these obligations could result in the council being subject to fines or other enforcement action by the Information Commissioner and the reputational damage that ensues from such enforcement actions.

Kath Gruber, Clerk to Duffield Parish Council said: "Before we went paperless we had to print out the meeting papers and deliver them to our Councillors, that consumed a lot of our resource which can now be used to work on more strategic matters."

"We free issue our Councillors with tablet devices. There are a few practical points to consider. Do Councillors know how to operate their devices? We have provided training to Councillors so that they can use them effectively. We use the document management system to keep the papers in a shared drive that Councillors access and these are projected onto a screen at the meetings so it's not a problem if someone forgets their device. This also means the public can see the papers being discussed at meetings. As well as making significant financial savings to taxpayers through reducing the quantities of paper used, saving time, we have reduced our carbon footprint and brought the Parish Council into the digital age."