Rutland County Councillors used publicly funded email addresses for political purposes.
Investigation from Marie Rosenthal Interim Monitoring Officer at Rutland County Council
I have now investigated this matter of using a council email address as a contact point to canvass new members of the Lib Dem party. This is a misuse of council resources .
The members concerned have apologised for the error and have stopped using that leaflet .
In future they will use personal emails or a group email.
In their defence, the advice to councillors in the past has been vague as to which email address they should use from time to time.
Council email addresses are to be used only for ward work and other related council business.
I am updating the Member Code of Conduct to provide clear guidance on the issue.
I wonder why the code had not been previously updated?
A few years ago a conduct complaint against a Conservative Councillor was upheld.
He had also misused his .gov email address.
