Halton Borough Council Publishes Governance Statement on Mayor’s Fund After Online Questions

Halton Borough Council published a statement on 6 July setting out how the Mayor’s Fund is governed, following questions raised online about its transparency. The statement confirms that a serving councillor and Executive Board member declared a trusteeship of one of the Mayor’s two chosen charities before the selection was announced.

What prompted the statement

The council said it was responding to questions raised online about the transparency and governance of the Mayor’s Fund and wanted to set out the full picture. It does not identify who raised the questions, where, or in what terms. That is a common feature of statements of this kind, and it means readers are being given the answer without the question.

What can be read from the content is that the concerns related to the selection of the Mayor’s charities for 2026/27 and the process behind it.

The Mayor’s Fund explained

The civic Mayor of Halton is the borough’s ceremonial head. The role carries no executive power over council budgets or services, which sit with the Leader and Executive Board. That distinction is worth holding on to, given the council also changed Leader in July (Cllr Angela Ball became Leader on 8 July).

By tradition, a Mayor uses their year in office to raise money for chosen local causes. The council makes the point that donations go to the Mayor’s Fund, which is held in the name of the office rather than the individual. Money raised is not the Mayor’s to spend personally, and the fund does not end with the Mayor’s term.

Cllr Pamela Wallace, installed for 2026/27, chose two charities:

• Halton Haven Hospice, which provides specialist end-of-life care for people with life-limiting or terminal conditions and support for their families.
• Fortuna Female Society, a volunteer-led charity based in Halton that creates spaces for women to connect and access support.

The timeline the council set out

The statement gives dates, which is the most useful part of it:

• September 2025 — the Mayor-elect met Fortuna Female Society to discuss the possibility of selecting it as a chosen charity.
• Before April 2026 — the council’s finance department carried out checks using the Charity Commission register to confirm charitable status, and looked for filed accounts.
• April 2026 — a meeting with both charities confirmed the selection and set out expectations on each side.
• May 2026 — the chosen charities were announced at full council.

On accounts, the council states that Fortuna Female Society, given how recently it had been registered, was not yet required to file. That reflects the actual rule: registered charities in England and Wales must submit their annual return and accounts to the Charity Commission within 10 months of their financial year end, so a newly registered charity can legitimately have nothing on the public record for well over a year. The absence of published accounts for a new charity is therefore not evidence of a problem, though it does mean a funder has less to inspect.

The declaration of interest

The passage most likely to have prompted the statement is this: Laura Bevan, who was an elected councillor and a member of the council’s Executive Board at the time, declared her position as a trustee of Fortuna Female Society. The council notes that it is not unusual for elected members to be closely associated with local charities, and that such an association does not in itself disqualify a charity from being chosen, provided interests are declared and governance is appropriate.

That is a fair statement of the law and of practice. Under the Localism Act 2011, councillors must register disclosable pecuniary interests and, under their council’s code of conduct, declare other relevant interests including unpaid trusteeships. A trusteeship of a local charity is common among active councillors and is not a conflict in itself. The test is whether the interest was declared and whether the member took part in a decision they should have stepped back from.

The council’s statement confirms the declaration was made. It does not say whether Cllr Bevan took any part in the selection discussion, or whether she withdrew from any meeting at which the choice was considered. It also uses the phrase “who was an elected councillor and member of the Council’s Executive Board at the time”, indicating she no longer holds one or both of those positions, without explaining when or why that changed. Both points are left open.

The criteria applied

The council says checks were made against the Mayor’s Fund terms of reference, which prohibit financial support to individuals, to political groups or organisations promoting political beliefs, and to projects with no community or charitable element.

Those are exclusion criteria rather than selection criteria. They rule out categories of recipient; they do not describe how a choice is made between the many eligible charities in the borough. On the evidence of the statement, that decision rests with the Mayor personally, informed by meetings arranged during the preparation for the mayoral year. Selection of mayoral charities is conventionally a matter of personal choice, and there is nothing irregular about that, but it is worth being clear that this is what the process is.

The financial controls described

The council lists four safeguards. Donations and receipts are recorded, monitored and managed under financial procedures. The Mayor authorises all expenditure. At the end of each mayoral term a full financial statement of income and expenditure is produced and made available for inspection by councillors and members of the public. Organisations receiving grants must report on how the money was used. The fund is also within scope of the council’s internal audit arrangements.

That is a reasonable framework. It is also, in one respect, a slow one. The full financial statement is produced at the end of the term, meaning the public record of a mayoral year’s fundraising and distribution appears roughly twelve months after the choices are made. There is no indication of in-year publication of totals raised or grants paid.

The statement also does not say where the fund’s accounts sit or how a member of the public requests the end-of-term statement. Anyone wanting the detail can ask the council directly, and if that produces nothing, the fund’s records are held by a public authority and are therefore within scope of a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

What is unresolved

Three questions remain open after the statement. Whether the declared trustee participated in any part of the selection process. What has changed in Laura Bevan’s council positions since the declaration was made. And how much the Mayor’s Fund has raised and distributed to date in the current mayoral year, which is not stated anywhere in the release.

None of these implies wrongdoing. All three are ordinary follow-up questions that a full statement could have closed off.

What to watch next

The end-of-term financial statement for 2026/27 is the document that matters. It should show income to the fund and grants made to Halton Haven Hospice and Fortuna Female Society, and the council has said it will be open to public inspection. Watch also for Fortuna Female Society’s first filed accounts appearing on the Charity Commission register, which will be due 10 months after its financial year end.

Any councillor wanting more detail can pursue it through the council’s Standards Committee or by written question at full council. Meeting papers and the register of members’ interests are published on the council’s website.

Further reading and sources

• Mayor’s Fund — Halton Borough Council newsroom, 6 July 2026
• Mayor of Halton — Halton Borough Council
• Charity Commission register of charities
• Charity Commission guidance on annual returns and filing deadlines
• Localism Act 2011 — councillor conduct and interests
• Freedom of Information Act 2000
• Halton Haven Hospice