Exempt business and confidential items at parish council meetings

Most parish and town council business happens in public, and should. But some items can't be: a staffing matter, a tender before it's awarded, legal advice on a live dispute. This guide covers when a council can exclude the public, how to word the resolution properly, and what still has to appear on the agenda and in the minutes.

It's written for councils in England. Welsh councils follow different notice rules. It's general guidance, not legal advice - for a specific item, ask your county association or NALC.

Start here: parish councils don't use Schedule 12A

This is the mistake we see most often, and it's worth clearing up before anything else.

If a council has borrowed wording from its district or county council, it probably says something like "exempt information as defined in paragraph 1 of Part 1 of Schedule 12A to the Local Government Act 1972". That's the right wording - for district or county councils.

It doesn't apply to parish or town councils. Part VA of the Local Government Act 1972, and the Schedule 12A categories of "exempt information" that go with it, apply to principal councils: counties, districts, London boroughs. Parish and town councils sit outside it.

What governs parish and town council meetings instead is the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960. It's a much shorter piece of law, and it works differently: rather than a list of categories the item must fit into, it sets a single test and asks the council to state its reason.

So the vocabulary differs too. Principal councils have "exempt information". A parish or town council has business from which the public may be excluded - what most clerks call confidential items, or Part 2 of the agenda. If a council's standing orders currently cite Schedule 12A, that's worth raising at its next review.

The test: when a council can exclude the public

Section 1(1) of the 1960 Act starts from the default that meetings are open to the public. Section 1(2) then gives the council the power to close part or all of a meeting:

"Where a meeting is open to the public, a body may, by resolution exclude the public from the meeting (whether during the whole or part of the proceedings) whenever publicity would be prejudicial to the public interest by reason of the confidential nature of the business to be transacted or for other special reasons stated in the resolution and arising from the nature of that business or of the proceedings."

Three things follow from that wording, and each one catches councils out.

It's a resolution, not a decision by the chair or the clerk. The council votes to exclude the public, at the meeting, for that item.

The reason should be stated in the resolution. Where a council relies on the "other special reasons" ground, the statute requires those reasons to be "stated in the resolution". The sector's own guidance takes the view that a meeting needs to confirm the broad reason for exclusion rather than the precise legal basis. So a council is not obliged to draft like a lawyer - but a resolution that recites the words of the Act without saying what makes this item confidential is a weak record, and the cost of one clear clause is nothing.

The test is prejudice to the public interest, not embarrassment, not controversy, and not the fact that the discussion will be difficult. This is the distinction that matters most, and we come back to it below.

There's also a specific provision worth knowing. Section 1(3) lets the council treat the need to receive or consider advice or recommendations from outside the council - from a solicitor, say, or a consultant - as a special reason on its own, without having to argue about the content of that advice.

What justifies it in practice

Items that will usually satisfy the test:

• Staffing matters about a named individual - the clerk's appraisal, salary, a grievance or disciplinary process, a recruitment shortlist.
• Tenders and contracts before award. Publishing quotes while a procurement is live prejudices both the council's position and the bidders'.
• Legal advice on a live or threatened dispute, and instructions to solicitors.
• Land and property negotiations where publicity would weaken the council's negotiating position or reveal a third party's financial position.
• Information given in confidence by a third party, where disclosure would breach that confidence.

Items that will usually not:

• A decision that's likely to be unpopular locally.
• A discussion that might become heated, or where a councillor would rather not be seen taking a position.
• Routine finance - the schedule of payments, the budget, the precept.
• A completed matter, where the reason for confidentiality has expired. A tender is confidential before award; the award itself is a public decision.
• An entire meeting, as a matter of habit. The power is for specific business, and a standing "Part 2" that swallows several unrelated items each month is hard to defend.

If the harm publicity would cause cannot be articulated, the item probably belongs in the open part of the meeting.

Wording the resolution

Two different things get written down here, and they are not interchangeable.

The motion goes in the agenda pack and is what the chair moves. Section 1(2) requires a resolution, so it has to be moved, seconded and voted on - the chair cannot simply direct that the room be cleared. Use the statutory language, then add the reason:

That, under section 1(2) of the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960, the press and public be excluded from the meeting during item 12 (Staffing: review of the Clerk's terms and conditions), on the grounds that publicity would be prejudicial to the public interest by reason of the confidential nature of the business to be transacted, namely the terms and conditions of employment of a named individual.

And for advice from outside the council, relying on section 1(3):

That, under section 1(2) of the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960, the press and public be excluded from the meeting during item 9 (Boundary dispute: Glebe Field), on the grounds that the council needs to consider legal advice received from its solicitors, which section 1(3) of that Act allows the council to treat as a special reason why publicity would be prejudicial to the public interest.

The minute records the same operative words, once the vote has been taken, in the conventional form:

RESOLVED: that, under section 1(2) of the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960, the press and public be excluded from the meeting during item 12 (Staffing: review of the Clerk's terms and conditions), on the grounds that publicity would be prejudicial to the public interest by reason of the confidential nature of the business to be transacted, namely the terms and conditions of employment of a named individual.

Why the reason belongs in the motion and not only in the minute. Section 1(2) permits exclusion where publicity would be prejudicial to the public interest "by reason of the confidential nature of the business to be transacted or for other special reasons stated in the resolution". Those last words attach to the second ground - so where a council relies on a special reason, as the Glebe Field example does, the reason has to be in the resolution that is moved and passed, rather than supplied afterwards in the write-up. Under the first ground the statute does not expressly require it; stating it anyway is what evidences that the council applied the test at all.

Pass the resolution immediately before the item, not at the start of the meeting for business several items away. And record it as a resolution in its own right - a minute reading only "the public were excluded" does not show that any test was applied.

One practical point on recording: members of the public have a statutory right to film and report on open meetings under the Openness of Local Government Bodies Regulations 2014, which apply to parish councils. Once the public are excluded under section 1(2), section 1(3A) lets the council also stop remote reporting of that part of the meeting.

How a confidential item appears on the agenda

Excluding the public doesn't mean hiding that the business exists.

Schedule 12 to the Local Government Act 1972 requires that, three clear days before a parish council meeting, notice of the time and place is fixed in a conspicuous place in the parish, and a summons is sent to every member specifying the business proposed to be transacted. "Clear days" excludes the day the notice goes up and the day of the meeting.

So the item goes on the agenda. What changes is how much detail is published. In practice that means describing the item at a level that tells residents what is being decided, without disclosing the confidential substance.

Too vague:

12. Confidential item.

Too much:

12. Staffing - proposal to increase the Clerk's salary from SCP 24 to SCP 28 following the appraisal on 3 March, and to backdate it to 1 April.

About right:

12. Staffing: review of the Clerk's terms and conditions. The council will be asked to resolve to exclude the public for this item under section 1(2) of the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960.

Flagging the intended exclusion on the agenda is good practice rather than a statutory requirement, and it does two useful things: residents aren't surprised on the night, and the council has to decide its reason before the meeting rather than improvising one.

Where papers accompany the item, the confidential papers go to members only. Section 1(4)(b) of the 1960 Act, which deals with supplying the agenda to newspapers on request, expressly allows the council to exclude items the meeting is likely to sit in private for.

There is no such thing as a secret minute

Excluding the public from the room does not make the resulting minutes confidential. This catches out many councils, and it's the single most important thing on this page.

Under section 228(1) of the Local Government Act 1972:

"The minutes of proceedings of a parish council shall be open to the inspection of any local government elector for the area of the council and any such local government elector may make a copy of or extract from the minutes."

That applies to the minutes of business taken with the public excluded - the sector's own guidance says so plainly. Section 228(6) requires it at all reasonable hours and without payment, and under section 228(7) obstructing someone entitled to inspect, or refusing them a copy, is a summary offence carrying a fine.

So parish and town councils have no equivalent of the principal-council machinery that keeps exempt information out of publicly available minutes. If it's in the minutes, an elector for the parish can read it.

The sector's guidance treats this as extending to committee and sub-committee minutes too, relying on section 228(1) read with Schedule 12 paragraphs 41 and 44. The statutory text is arguably narrower - paragraph 44 extends paragraphs 39 to 43 to committees, not section 228 - but the argument is academic for a clerk: committee minutes sit in the council's publication scheme, which it is a statutory duty to publish in accordance with, and they are disclosable on a FOI request in any event. Our guide on who can see parish council minutes works through it. And since the Freedom of Information Act 2000 gave everyone a right of access, the elector's inspection right matters less in practice than it once did.

So what does a "confidential item" actually protect?

It protects the papers, not the minute.

The sector's own position is that resolutions made while the public were excluded must be recorded in the minutes, and that all minutes - including those taken without the public present - belong in the minute book and on the council's website, worded so as not to disclose or undermine the confidential information. There is no secret category in that model.

What stays out of public circulation is the supporting material: the confidential report, the tender evaluation, the legal advice, the staffing papers. Those are confidential supporting papers: furnished to members with the agenda, and protected from wider disclosure.

So the real protection comes from two places:

What you write. Minutes are a record of what the council decided, not a transcript. Resolving by reference does the whole job: "that the recommendation in the confidential report dated 6 April be approved" records the decision with complete clarity while revealing nothing about it.

What you attach. The resolution is public; the report behind it need not be.

In practice

• Record the exclusion resolution, with its broad reason, in the ordinary minutes.
• Record the decision. A minute that hides the fact that a decision was taken isn't a true record.
• Write it at the level of the decision: "RESOLVED: to accept the tender from Contractor B in the sum of £X", or by reference to a numbered option in a dated confidential report.
• Keep the confidential report itself as a members' paper, not an annex to the published agenda.
• Remember the data protection overlay: minutes should not routinely record an individual's name or other personal data unless it is necessary for the council's contractual obligations or statutory functions, or the person consents. A further reason to minute the decision rather than the discussion.
• Never mark a minute confidential to keep it from electors. That isn't what the power in the 1960 Act does - it governs who may sit in the room, not who may read the record.

Keeping the right version public

The practical failure mode isn't the law, it's the filing. Two Word documents - a members' version and a published version - edited separately, and eventually the wrong one goes on the website, or a confidential paragraph survives into the public pack. Once it's published, it's published; a correction doesn't unpublish it.

This is the problem CouncilPapers was built around. Confidential elements are marked once, as you write, and the public and members' papers are generated from the same source - so there's one document to maintain and no way to publish the wrong version by accident. See controlling what the public sees and committing an agenda, or book a demo and we'll show you with your own agenda.

When confidentiality ends

Confidentiality attaches to the business, not to the item forever. A tender is confidential while the procurement is live; after the award, the decision and usually the successful figure are public. Legal advice may stay privileged long after the dispute ends. A staffing matter about a named individual generally stays confidential.

It's worth reviewing old confidential items periodically and opening up what no longer needs protecting - both because the public interest points that way, and because a council with a large permanent stock of confidential minutes looks like one with something to hide.

Checklist before the meeting

1. Does the item genuinely satisfy the test in section 1(2) - would publicity cause harm to the public interest?
2. Can the reason be stated in one sentence, arising from the nature of the business?
3. Is the item on the agenda, described in general terms, with the intended exclusion flagged?
4. Is the confidential detail out of the public papers, and in the members' papers only?
5. Is the resolution drafted, ready to be moved immediately before the item?
6. Does the draft minute record the resolution and its reason, not just the outcome?
7. Is the confidential minute written at the level of the decision, rather than as a narrative of the discussion - remembering that any elector for the parish may inspect it?
8. Do the council's standing orders cite the 1960 Act rather than Schedule 12A?

Last reviewed 26 September 2026. General guidance for councils in England, not legal advice.