I was a speaker at this week's Standards Board for England's national conference on ethics. Set up under the Local Government Act 2000, the board has published an information leaflet, with handy pull-out complaints form, entitled 'Councillors behaving badly?' But does the behaviour of our public figures really merit the plethora of codes of conduct, ethical standards officers and tribunals, with penalties as severe as disqualification from office for up to five years? If judged by the number of complaints into alleged misconduct, (1,600 by November 2002), you'd think local government was a hotbed of scandal. But it is also true that many of these complaints (690) have been rejected as too trivial to merit further action. So what passes for corruption these days? Though no one will deny that local politics has not seen its fair share of dodgy dealing, the fact that you can now be cast as corrupt for failing to tell the monitoring officer about gifts or hospitality worth more than ￡25 or for a failure to 'to treat people with respect' might explain the high number of allegations.
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