Who is your clerk? It’s Local Council Clerk Week: 10 – 14 July 2023
Do you know your Parish Council clerk? It’s Peter Barry.
This is the person who works with your councillors to make sure that the Parish Council provides the services you need in your local neighbourhood.
He runs the council meetings to which you are invited and is trained in a range of skilled disciplines to make sure the council runs properly and within the law.
He’s the one writing to your local MP, liaising with Wiltshire Council about changes to speed limits, potholes, applying for funding grants for local projects, researching complex planning issues, running the council’s finances, and coordinates defibrillators checks, maintenance and training.
He rolls up his sleeves to cut verges, organises volunteers to pick litter and fundraise for local projects.
He’s good in a crisis too, as seen when he helped to coordinate community efforts during the pandemic.
Clerks are professionals and serve around 10,000 local councils in England and Wales. These councils emerged in 1894 to give a democratic voice to local people and they’ve changed enormously in that time, particularly during the last 20 – 30 years. They are real place shapers and, today, many manage and maintain parks, sports facilities, skateparks and recreation grounds, play areas, allotments, community and youth centres, car parks, public toilets, cemeteries, street cleaning, run events and much more. Most of all clerks and councillors are advocates, the voice for their communities.
Whatever your local council is delivering for your community, your clerk will be at the heart of getting it done. They provide the services that we all notice the most in our neighbourhoods but, disappointingly, they’re ofen not properly recognised for just how much they do.
Clerks are celebrated in other countries and Local Council Clerk Week aims to help raise the profile of this important profession and explain the work clerks do on behalf of town, parish and community councils.
The residents of Broad Hinton, Winterbourne Bassett and Uffcott, thank you Peter.
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