Creating a committee

Before you start

You will need:

• The committee's full title
• Its committee type (Full Council, Committee, Annual Town Meeting, or Working Group)
• The default venue for its meetings
• The introductory paragraph that appears at the top of every agenda for this committee

Steps

1. Go to Committees in the left-hand menu.

2. Click All Committees, then Create New Committee.

3. Complete the following fields:

   Field	Required	Notes
   Committee Full Title	Yes	The committee's full formal name, e.g. "Planning and Transport Committee"
   Committee Type	Yes	Select from Full Council, Committee, Annual Town Meeting, or Working Group
   Agenda Introduction Text	Yes	The introductory paragraph that appears at the top of every agenda. Supports placeholders — see below.
   Website Introduction Text	No	A description of the committee displayed on the public portal.
   Default Meeting Venue	Yes	The venue where this committee usually meets.
   Limit Papers to Committee Members	No	When ticked, confidential papers for this committee will only be visible to named committee members. Recommended for Personnel committees and similar.
   Colour	No	A colour used to identify this committee across the admin interface.

4. Click Save. You will be taken to the View Committee page.

Agenda introduction text placeholders

The Agenda Introduction Text field supports placeholders that are automatically replaced with the correct values when an agenda is generated:

A typical introduction might read:

Members of the Planning and Transport Committee are hereby summoned to attend a meeting to be held at {{venue}} on {{meeting_date}} at {{meeting_time}}. The summons and agenda were published on {{publication_date}}.

After saving

Once the committee is created, two further steps are recommended before creating any meetings for it:

Set up default meeting content — add the standard agenda items that should appear automatically for every meeting of this committee, such as Apologies for Absence and Declarations of Interest. See Setting default meeting content.

Add committee members — assign the councillors who sit on this committee. See Managing committee membership.