Committee meeting packs

Audit committees, remuneration committees, finance and general purposes, nominations, senior management teams, school governor subcommittees, sports clubs, residents’ associations, parish councils. The subjects vary enormously. The papers barely do: an agenda, the last minutes, an action log, two or three reports, and something to decide.

What sets a committee pack apart from a board pack isn’t length. It’s authority.

Decide, recommend, or note

Every committee works under powers delegated by a parent body (a board, a council, the membership), usually written down in its terms of reference. Some items the committee can settle itself. Some it can only recommend upward. Some it’s just being told about.

Each paper should say which of these it is in its first line, and the agenda should group them. Get this wrong and it goes badly, quietly: the committee spends forty minutes reaching a decision it had no authority to make, the minutes record it, someone acts on it, and three months later the board finds out it never approved anything.

So the agenda usually falls into three blocks:

• Items for decision: within the committee’s delegated authority. If there’s any doubt, quote the paragraph of the terms of reference that grants it.
• Items for recommendation: the committee forms a view and the parent body decides. Include the resolution the parent body will be asked to pass, already drafted, so the committee agrees to actual wording.
• Items for noting: reports, updates, and minutes from anything that reports into this committee.

The usual order

• Agenda, which doubles as the contents page.
• Apologies, and declarations of interest relevant to today’s items.
• Minutes of the committee’s previous meeting.
• Matters arising and the action log.
• Terms of reference: once a year, and whenever the membership changes.
• Items for decision.
• Items for recommendation to the parent body.
• Reports for noting.
• Any other business, and the date of the next meeting.

Committee packs are often put together in the same week as the board pack that follows, by the same person. Keep the two looking the same. A director who reads the audit committee pack on Tuesday and the board pack on Thursday shouldn’t have to hunt for the page numbers twice.

Specific committees, briefly

Audit and risk

Internal and external audit reports, the risk register, the management letter and management’s responses. These papers get read closely by people looking for gaps, so page numbers and a proper contents page matter more than usual. If members can’t cite a page, time goes on working out who has which version.

Remuneration

The shortest packs and the most confidential: individual salary and bonus figures, sometimes with names attached. If you wouldn’t email a remuneration pack as loose attachments, check how an online merging tool handles files before you use one.

Management meetings

Weekly or fortnightly, and usually where the pack habit falls apart. Nobody assembles a document for a Monday morning meeting. Most teams settle on a monthly pack for the meeting that matters and a one-page agenda for the rest.

AGMs and general meetings

A different beast. The pack goes to members, not a committee, and it’s often the only document they see all year. The formal requirements (notice periods, proxy forms, the order of resolutions) come from the organisation’s own rules or articles. The assembly is the same, though: one numbered file with a contents page, because a member who can’t find the accounts will ask you where they are.

A checklist before you send it

• Every item says whether it’s for decision, recommendation or noting.
• Decisions sit within the terms of reference, with the paragraph cited if in doubt.
• Each recommendation includes the resolution the parent body will be asked to pass.
• The terms of reference are included once a year, and when the membership changes.
• The layout and numbering match the board pack the committee reports into.

Volume is the real problem

A board might meet a handful of times a year. Add a few committees, a management team and an AGM, and the same organisation can be producing many times that number of packs, often all by the same person. That’s when the manual routine (merge, number every page, write the contents from the merged numbers, add bookmarks) stops being a nuisance and starts eating real time every month.

The ten-step guide covers the manual version, with a rough time for each step. Board Pack Factory does the mechanical part for you: add the PDFs, put them in agenda order, and download one pack with a cover, a linked contents page, dividers, continuous page numbers and a bookmark for every paper. It runs in your browser, so committee papers are never uploaded. For a remuneration committee, that matters a lot.

See the example pack for exactly what you get, or grab the free template if you’re doing this one by hand.