A set of parish council minutes has three readers: the councillors checking them next month, the resident who wants to know what happened about the playground, and, years later, someone trying to work out why the council owns a strip of land. Good minutes serve all three. They are short, they are about decisions, and they never try to capture the argument.
What must be in them
- The name of the council, the type of meeting, the date, the time it started and ended, and where it was held.
- Who was present: councillors by name, the clerk, any county or district councillor, and how many members of the public. Not the public’s names, unless they asked to be recorded.
- Apologies, and whether the council accepted them. Six months of unapproved absence disqualifies a councillor, so the minute matters.
- Declarations of interest, by councillor and item, and whether they left the room.
- For every agenda item, what was decided. If a vote was taken, that it was taken and the result if a councillor asked for it to be recorded. If your standing orders require the proposer and seconder, those too.
- The numbers that matter: the amount of a payment approved, the quote accepted, the precept set. Not the ones that don’t.
- Actions: who will do what, so the next agenda can pick them up.
What should be left out
Debate. Minutes are not a transcript and a council that minutes who said what, and in what tone, is storing up trouble. “Members discussed the proposal” is enough. If a councillor wants their dissent on record, the minute can say that Cllr X asked for it to be recorded that they voted against; it doesn’t need the speech.
Personal information. A resident’s complaint about their neighbour’s hedge is minuted as “a resident raised a boundary matter, which the clerk will take up with the district council”. Anything that would identify a member of staff, a tenant or an applicant in a way the council had no right to publish belongs in the confidential part of the meeting, and the minute of that part is kept separately.
Numbering
Give every minute a unique number that doesn’t restart each meeting. Most councils use the year and a running number: 26/84, 26/85 and so on through the municipal year. It makes a decision citable (“minute 26/91 of 14 October 2026”) and it stops two meetings each having an item 7.
Draft to approved
Write the minutes within a few days while it’s fresh, and publish the draft within a month, marked as a draft, because the Transparency Code says so and because residents want to know. At the next meeting the council approves them as a correct record, with any corrections of fact, and the chair of that meeting signs the paper copy. The signed copy goes in the minute book, which is permanent. The website copy is updated to say “approved”.
Corrections are for accuracy: a name misspelled, a figure wrong, a resolution misstated. They are not for councillors who, on reflection, wish they had decided something else. That takes a new agenda item and a new decision.
Recordings
Anyone can record a public council meeting; the Openness of Local Government Bodies Regulations 2014 say so, and the council’s standing orders should say how. A recording doesn’t replace the minutes, and the clerk isn’t obliged to keep one the council made beyond the point the minutes are approved. If the council does keep recordings, it needs a retention period and a reason.
Publishing them
The format most councils use is a Word document saved as a PDF and uploaded. The format most residents use to read them is a phone, and a PDF saved from Word has no structure a screen reader can follow, which is why meeting papers are where most council websites fail the accessibility regulations. The minutes don’t need to be written any differently. They need to be published as a web page, with the PDF alongside for anyone who wants to print it. That is a website problem, not a minute-writing one, and it’s solvable.
The old minute books
Minutes are permanent records. The bound books belong in the council’s safe keeping, and the county record office will usually take the older volumes on deposit, catalogue them and keep them in better conditions than a cupboard in the village hall. Scanning before deposit means the council keeps a copy. If the council’s previous websites hold twenty years of minutes as PDFs, keep them: they are the only version most people will ever look for.