CouncilPapers.

Starting point: the meeting has happened

Minutes are written after a meeting has taken place. In CouncilPapers, minutes are written against the agenda items of that meeting — each item can have minute text, a record of any decision made, and notes before or after the item.

Before minutes can be progressed, the agenda for that meeting must already have been committed. The minute-writing process works from that committed agenda as its foundation.

Step 1 — Writing and committing

The clerk writes the minutes in CouncilPapers and, when ready, Commits them. Committing minutes does two things:

• It locks the minute text — it cannot be edited directly after this point
• It makes the draft minutes visible to councillors and the public immediately

Draft minutes carry a watermark identifying them as draft. They are the full minute text — not a summary — and are accessible on the council's public portal as well as in the Councillor App.

If the minutes need to be corrected after committing, they can be Un-committed and Edited. A record is retained that they were uncommitted and by who.

Step 2 — Approval and Adoption

Once committed, minutes must go through two separate steps before they are considered fully published: Approval and Adoption. These are independent of each other and can happen in either order.

Approval

Minutes must be approved at the next (or a subsequent) meeting of the same committee that held the original meeting. Approval confirms that the minutes are an accurate record of what took place.

For example: the Planning Committee meets in January. Its minutes must be approved at a future Planning Committee meeting — typically the next one.

Adoption

Minutes must also be adopted by the council's adopting committee — typically the Full Council. Adoption is the formal acceptance of the minutes into the council's official record.

The adopting committee is configured for each council during setup. Every council must have one.

Full Council minutes

Where the Full Council is both the committee that held the meeting and the adopting committee, it handles both Approval and Adoption together in a single agenda item. One confirmation covers both steps simultaneously.

Step 3 — Setting up Approval and Adoption on a future agenda

CouncilPapers does not progress minutes automatically. The clerk must explicitly set up the Approval or Adoption as an item on a future agenda.

When building any agenda, the Add Content dropdown beneath any item offers three options depending on context:

• Setup Approval and Adoption of Prior Minutes (As Full Council) — for Full Council meetings where both steps will be handled together
• Setup Adoption of Prior Minutes (of other committees as Full Council) — for Full Council meetings adopting the minutes of other committees
• Setup Approval of Prior Minutes (as [committee name]) — for a committee approving its own prior minutes

Selecting any of these opens a page listing all minutes that match that option and have not yet been approved or adopted accordingly. The clerk selects the relevant minutes using the checkboxes provided, and CouncilPapers automatically creates an agenda item with the correct wording and links to the original minutes.

Step 4 — Recording the outcome in the minutes

When the clerk comes to minute the meeting at which Approval or Adoption took place, CouncilPapers recognises that the agenda item is linked to prior minutes. A checkbox appears in the minutes form allowing the clerk to confirm that the original minutes were approved or adopted at this meeting.

Ticking this checkbox marks the original minutes accordingly. Once both Approval and Adoption have been confirmed, the draft watermark is removed and the minutes are considered fully published.

Summary of states

A note on timing

There is no fixed deadline in CouncilPapers for when minutes must be approved or adopted — this is a matter for the council's own standing orders. However, the convention is that minutes are approved or adopted at the next available meeting of the relevant committee. CouncilPapers will show minutes as pending approval or adoption until both steps are complete. The Council's Health Page will identify meetings that have missed having their Minutes published, approved or adopted.