shire-reeve→sheriff→Section 151 Officer, Councillors
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This edition of Reeve incorporates East Sussex County Council's governing documents directly into its knowledge base: the Scheme of Delegations to Officers, the Cabinet and committee responsibility tables, the Procurement and Contract Standing Orders, and the Financial Procedure Rules — alongside the statutory framework that applies to all authorities.
When asked a threshold, approval, or delegation question, it answers at both levels: the statutory position, and the Council's own requirements where these go further.
Every response derived from the constitution carries a full citation — part, table, and rule — anchored to the consolidated constitution pack of 11 August 2026. Each answer therefore arrives with its own audit trail: officers can trace any statement back to the governing provision and verify it at source.
The service is deliberately conservative in scope. It does not speculate on matters outside its documented knowledge base — including current postholders or committee memberships, which change throughout the year — and instead directs users to the Council's own democratic services pages, where that information is authoritatively maintained.
Ask Reeve an ESCC procedure question →Every division, every winning candidate, every vote count — researched directly from East Sussex County Council's own results pages and cross-checked against its member directory. This is the kind of primary-source detail Reeve's knowledge base is built from.
| Division | Councillor | Party | Votes | Cast | Turnout |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Devonshire | Stephen Holt | Lib Dem | 1,520 | 3,453 | 35.29% |
| Hampden Park | Colin Swansborough | Lib Dem | 1,275 | 2,860 | 37.48% |
| Langney | Alan Shuttleworth | Lib Dem | 1,396 | 2,802 | 36.59% |
| Meads | Jack Morrell | Lib Dem | 1,553 | 4,529 | 53.14% |
| Old Town | Peter Diplock | Lib Dem | 2,461 | 4,259 | 51.74% |
| Ratton | Colin Belsey | Conservative | 1,174 | 3,628 | 50.07% |
| St Anthony's | Hugh Parker | Lib Dem | 1,472 | 3,579 | 42.73% |
| Sovereign | Roy Peché | Reform UK | 1,617 | 4,252 | 45.89% |
| Upperton | Kathy Ballard | Lib Dem | 1,820 | 3,774 | 44.11% |
| Division | Councillor | Party | Votes | Cast |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ashdown and Conquest | Aidan Fisher | Reform UK | 1,246 | 3,464 |
| Baird and Ore | Jo Walker | Green | 1,429 | 3,253 |
| Braybrooke and Castle | Becca Horn | Green | 2,577 | 4,311 |
| Central St Leonards and Gensing | Amanda Jobson | Green | 2,556 | 4,328 |
| Hollington and Wishing Tree | Mark Estcourt | Reform UK | 1,055 | 2,731 |
| Maze Hill and West St Leonards | Karen Simnett | Green | 1,218 | 3,523 |
| Old Hastings and Tressell | Julia Hilton | Green | 2,017 | 3,731 |
| St Helens and Silverhill | Shaun Dowling | Green | 1,152 | 3,938 |
| Division | Councillor | Party | Votes | Cast | Turnout |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chailey | Charlotte Keenan | Green | 1,802 | 4,743 | 53.13% |
| Lewes | Wendy Maples | Green | 2,600 | 5,255 | 63.76% |
| Newhaven and Bishopstone | Lesley Boniface | Lib Dem | 2,059 | 4,046 | 51.29% |
| Ouse Valley West and Downs | Sarah Osborne | Lib Dem | 2,134 | 4,046 | 51.29% |
| Peacehaven | Tracy Pedro | Reform UK | 1,322 | 3,746 | 41.44% |
| Ringmer and Lewes Bridge | Johnny Denis | Green | 2,263 | 5,386 | 58.25% |
| Seaford North | Jane Reeves | Lib Dem | 1,629 | 4,899 | 55.85% |
| Seaford South | Carolyn Lambert | Lib Dem | 2,439 | 4,441 | 50.91% |
| Telscombe | Stephen Chapman | Reform UK | 1,312 | 3,979 | 45.10% |
| Division | Councillor | Party | Votes | Cast | Turnout |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Battle and Crowhurst | Kathryn Field | Lib Dem | 1,736 | 3,823 | 48.55% |
| Bexhill East | Martin Kenward | Reform UK | 1,267 | 3,562 | 41.59% |
| Bexhill North | Donald Walmsley | Reform UK | 1,056 | 3,422 | 40.95% |
| Bexhill South | Victoria Carson | Reform UK | 1,333 | 4,267 | 43.76% |
| Bexhill West | Pete Morley | Reform UK | 1,647 | 5,002 | 52.55% |
| Brede Valley and Marsham | Daniel Lach | Reform UK | 1,483 | 4,147 | 50.56% |
| Northern Rother | Paul Redstone | Conservative | 1,216 | 3,769 | 50.56% |
| Rother North West | Mark Ashdown | Reform UK | 1,196 | 3,824 | 50.82% |
| Rye and Eastern Rother | Daniel Bradley | Reform UK | 1,186 | 4,031 | 51.01% |
| Division | Councillor | Party | Votes | Cast | Turnout |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arlington, East Hoathly & Hellingly | William Boone | Reform UK | 1,784 | 4,742 | 46.40% |
| Crowborough North and Jarvis Brook | Catherine Fielding | Reform UK | 1,804 | 4,776 | 51.59% |
| Crowborough South and St Johns | Sarah Jury | Reform UK | 1,742 | 4,800 | 55.06% |
| Forest Row and Groombridge | Georgia Taylor | Green | 1,863 | 4,408 | 54.28% |
| Hailsham Market | Neil Cleaver | Reform UK | 1,455 | 3,386 | 38.20% |
| Hailsham New Town | Paul Soane | Reform UK | 1,192 | 3,524 | 40.16% |
| Heathfield and Mayfield | Andy Woolley | Reform UK | 1,480 | 4,605 | 50.97% |
| Maresfield and Buxted | Christina Coleman | Green | 1,754 | 5,271 | 56.84% |
| Pevensey and Stone Cross | Roger Lincoln | Reform UK | 1,490 | 3,585 | 45.45% |
| Polegate and Watermill | Mickey Caira | Reform UK | 1,466 | 4,138 | 43.05% |
| Uckfield North | Kelvin Williams | Lib Dem | 1,113 | 3,531 | 48.55% |
| Uckfield South with Framfield | Peter Griffiths | Reform UK | 1,322 | 4,038 | 50.91% |
| Wealden East | Stephen Potts | Reform UK | 1,925 | 5,143 | 51.79% |
| Wealden North East | Michael Lunn | Conservative | 1,457 | 4,189 | 51.17% |
| Willingdon and South Downs | Stephen Shing | Independent | 1,618 | 4,516 | 51.90% |
Sources: eastsussex.gov.uk/your-council/local-elections/elections/east-sussex-county-council-elections-may-2026 and its five district results sub-pages; democracy.eastsussex.gov.uk member directory. Compiled 18 September 2026 — a point-in-time record of the election result, not a live feed.
Drawn directly from the actual business case submitted to government on 26 September 2025 — not the summary website. This is the proposal to replace East Sussex County Council and its five district and borough councils with a single new unitary authority.
One East Sussex does not get its own mayor — it runs on a Leader and Cabinet, like any council. The only mayor in this picture is a new, separate Sussex & Brighton Mayoral Strategic Authority, directly elected, sitting above both unitary councils for strategic matters only. Day-to-day services stay with the councils.
Sussex & Brighton Mayoral Strategic Authority (MSA)
│ Directly-elected mayor — strategic matters only:
│ transport, economic growth, skills, climate change
│ Day-to-day council services stay below, not here
│
├── East Sussex — "One East Sussex" (new unitary, from 1 Apr 2028)
│ │ Leader & Cabinet — no mayor of its own
│ │ ~530,000 residents · 100 councillors proposed
│ │
│ └── replaces (six councils → one):
│ East Sussex County Council, Eastbourne, Hastings,
│ Lewes, Rother, Wealden
│
├── Brighton & Hove City Council (existing unitary, expanded)
│ │ Leader & Cabinet + a separate ceremonial civic Mayor
│ │ ~308,000 residents after the boundary transfer
│ │
│ └── gains from Lewes District:
│ East Saltdean, Peacehaven, Telscombe
│
└── West Sussex County Council
└── status not detailed in the One East Sussex business case
Source: "One East Sussex: Building the Future," business case submitted 26 September 2025 by East Sussex County Council, Eastbourne, Hastings, Lewes and Rother. Read the full report →
Your induction consists of one day and one binder, questions remain and learning important procedure takes time. Reeve offers a reassuring perspective to councillors and employees alike by quietly unlocking nuances and answers to questions that they might be reluctant to ask, demystifying procedure and actual statutory mechanisms behind the conundrums at hand.
A backbench member, a cabinet member and a committee chair have different powers, not different levels of the same power. Reeve grounds every answer in the actual mechanism — scrutiny committees, the power to call in a decision before it takes effect, full council votes, delegated authority — a full breakdown.
Disclosable pecuniary interests, predetermination and bias are the single most common source of real, reported standards complaints against new councillors — usually made in good faith omission, not misconduct.
Section 151 Officers, procurement officers and elected councillors carry genuinely different statutory duties.
This duty belongs to the S151 officer alone, under s.114 LGFA 1988, and gives the sole duty to report unlawful spending. The duties of a chief finance officer under subsections (2) and (3) are to be performed by the officer personally.
Personal liability under the Bribery Act, the Fraud Act, ECCTA 2023 and the Crime and Policing Act 2026 — Reeve drills the red flags and the actual Procurement Act 2023 thresholds.
Cabinet member or not, the powers genuinely differ. Reeve grounds every answer in the specific mechanism.
Reeve doesn't search for matching fragments at query time. The entire knowledge base is present in the model's context on every request, held in an Anthropic-cached prompt. There is no vector index, no similarity search, and nothing that can be quietly left out for scoring just below a relevance cutoff — because nothing is scored. The model still generates the answer, but it is constrained to reason from that complete, human-verified corpus, not from its own general training data.
Content lives as discrete records against a manifest — no live web access, no scraping, no third-party fetch at query time. Every record the model can reference already exists before the question is asked.
New records are drafted, then checked by a human against the primary source — legislation.gov.uk's enacted text, not secondary commentary — before they're added to the manifest. Nothing enters the knowledge base unverified.
The full knowledge base is loaded into context on every request. The response is generated, but constrained to reason over that complete grounding material, not the model's own general knowledge.
Each manifest entry is stamped with its statutory citation and last-verified date. When the law changes, the affected record is corrected and re-dated, with the change tracked, not silently overwritten.
The machine is never allowed to sign. It generates the answer, but a human-verified, dated corpus — loaded in full, not a retrieved fragment of it — decides what it's allowed to generate from.
The Crime and Policing Act 2026 came into force on 29 June 2026, replacing ECCTA's old section 196. Unlike Failure to Prevent Fraud under section 199 — where a genuine, tested compliance framework is a real defence — section 250 offers none at all. If a Section 151 officer or a head of procurement, acting within their actual or apparent authority, commits an offence, the council is automatically guilty of that offence too. No policy document stands between that finding and the council's liability — only the conduct itself, documented and independently evidenced at the time, is the defence.
Ask Reeve about section 250 →What you're personally on the hook for, under which specific provision and what a defensible paper trail actually looks like versus one that only looks adequate.
Actual procurement, treasury and governance-failure scenarios drawn from real council cases — complexity builds progressively, you reason it through before the answer is revealed.
Structured enough to deliver to a whole team, not just consumed solo — a named scenario, a discussion question, a clear right answer, built so the session itself is evidence of real training.
A real deterministic calculator checking a broker's loan or option quote against direct central-government borrowing — Reeve narrates the result, never guesses the maths.
No account required — try Reeve on your own statutory question.
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