Publication deadline settings

Where these settings live

Go to Council in the left-hand menu, then click Council Info, then Edit Council. Scroll to the Publication Deadline Settings section at the bottom of the form.

The settings

Bank Holiday Region

Select the region whose bank holidays apply to your council's area. CouncilPapers uses this when calculating clear working days before meetings. Options are England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

Minimum Clear Working Days Before a Meeting

The minimum number of clear working days that must pass between agenda publication and the meeting itself. The day of publication and the day of the meeting are both excluded from the count.

The statutory minimum is 3. A typical parish or town council publishing by the end of Wednesday for a Monday meeting should leave this at 3.

You can increase this if your council's standing orders require a longer notice period — for example, setting it to 5 would give councillors more advance notice and move the AMBER and RED indicators earlier.

Do not reduce this below 3 — doing so would mean CouncilPapers calculates deadlines that do not meet the statutory requirement.

What these settings affect

These settings control:

• The publication deadline date shown on the Meeting page
• The GREEN, AMBER, and RED status indicators on the Meetings list
• The calculation used in the Meeting Year Planner

See The publication deadline for a full explanation of how the deadline is calculated.