If implemented, elected members would be brought in line with council officers, who are Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checked every three years.

Although only at its proposal stage, the plans have already been met with some concern by some councillors about how the checks will be carried out.

The plan was introduced to the council's scrutiny committee meeting by monitoring officer and council solicitor, Helen Edwards, following recommendations by the standards committee.

She said: "At the moment the council has no policy at all, but we did carry out one on an ad-hoc basis. We wouldn't expect members to be having unsupervised access to children."

As it stands, the council carries out CRB checks on elected members in line with the minimum requirements of the bureau and in recent years, 29 councillors have been checked. The council says none of these checks "aroused a cause for concern".

However, original plans to universally check all councillors had been shelved because it was found to be against a number of acts, including the Human Rights Act 1998.

Instead, each elected position will be risk-assessed to determine the level of contact with children and vulnerable adults.

Mrs Edwards said: "Rather than create a new policy we would attach elected members to the existing one for officers.

"Risk assessment will take place towards the end of this year to see which ones will need to be CRB checked. We can then carry them out as required.

"What we are saying is that we are going to carry out risk assessments and we are working towards forming a criteria. But we will not be over zealous and we will take a sensible view on this."

The plans were agreed in principle by the committee, but scrutiny member Cllr Nick Sandford raised his initial concerns.

He said: "It's not sufficient to say that some councillors will have some contact with children and vulnerable adults."

The fact that the council has no power to disqualify a councillor for a positive result was also raised by Cllr Sandford at the meeting.

He added: "Even if the council finds a councillor has a previous conviction then there is nothing we can do about it."

The plans will now be drawn up into a draft policy, which will then go back to the council before it is put in place, which could be as soon as January.