Lisburn and Castlereagh Council rewrites its rules after former member Luke Poots banned from holding public office
A Northern Ireland council has rewritten its planning rules in the wake of former member Luke Poots being banned from being a councillor.
But the changes were treated with caution by some politicians, with one Ulster Unionist worrying they will force councillors to “police” each other.
Luke Poots, son of DUP MLA Edwin, was a Democratic Unionist councillor on Lisburn City and Castlereagh Council from 2014 to 2019.
In 2024, he was banned from being a councillor for four years by a standards watchdog, which found multiple code of conduct breaches by failing to properly declare conflicts of interest while he was a member of the council's planning committee.
A probe found that between between 2016 and 2018 there were 35 occasions when Mr Poots was present when his father spoke at the planning committee, arguing either for or against a planning application; on more than half of those occasions, the watchdog stated, Luke Poots did not declare a conflict of interest, and in all of them he participated in decision-making processes.
He denied wrongdoing, claiming the standards probe was a politically motivated attack on his family, while Edwin insisted there were no conflicts of interest in any form.
Tightening its rules, the council specifically stated they were being rewritten in the wake of a standards investigation into a former councillor.
Any councillors on the planning committee are now asked to declare an interest they have in planning applications at the start of every meeting, and have to leave the room while those items are being discussed.
If they don’t leave, other councillors and the chair of the meeting are obliged to challenge them.
And the council will also publish an annual report showing what interests were declared on the planning committee and by whom.
But Ulster Unionist councillor Nicholas Trimble was concerned that making councillors challenge each other was a step too far.
"It’s forcing members [of the council] to police other members,” he said at recent committee meeting. “Maybe that’s the point, but to me it’s up to individual members to keep themselves right.
An official replied that the council needs to take “collective ownership” of the process, which means bringing in the new rules.
But, he added, it’s “ultimately the responsibility of the individual” to declare their own interests under the code of conduct.
The rules changes were approved by the council last month.
Last year, Assistant Commissioner for Standards, Ian Gordon, ruled that Luke Poots had breached the local government code of conduct by failing to declare conflicts of interest.
Mr Poots repeatedly failed to appear before the standards watchdog; that, combined with “multiple breaches of the code over a long period of time”, led Mr Gordon to conclude that “a disqualification of four years was an appropriate sanction”.
In a subsequent statement, Mr Poots denied breaching the code of conduct and maintained he had “at all stages acted in the best interests of all constituents” while describing representing the people of Lisburn and Castlereagh as the greatest honour of his life.