Effectiveness of local authority overview and scrutiny committees Contents
Annex: summary of discussions at an informal workshop with councillors and officers
As part of the inquiry, the Committee hosted a workshop in October 2017 attended by over 45 council officers and councillors from across the country. Split into four groups, attendees discussed their experiences of overview and scrutiny, with each group considering three questions. The following provides an edited summary of the discussions held and is not intended to be verbatim minutes. Comments are not attributed to individuals or organisations, but seek to reflect the variety of statements made and opinions expressed. This summary and its content does not necessarily reflect the views of the Committee, or all of the attendees present at the workshop.
Q1) Do local authority scrutiny committees operate with political independence and in a non-partisan way
Officers:
- Scrutiny is only non-partisan on the surface: most of the discussion and debate takes place in group meetings, which officers and the public cannot see
- Scrutiny chairs often don’t want to challenge their Leaders, so do more external scrutiny or pick ‘safe’ topics that are less controversial
- The ways that committee chairs are appointed means that chairs more likely to ‘keep quiet’, use the role as a way to prepare for a Cabinet position, or see it as a consolation prize for not being in the Cabinet
- Personalities of chairs and the ability to work well with executive colleagues is key
- Officers in combined roles struggle to adequately support scrutiny: the roles of scrutiny officer and committee clerk are fundamentally different with different skill sets needed
- Clerking a committee changes how officers are treated, with the value placed on their expertise and guidance lessened so they are treated as little more than admin assistants
- Task and finish groups are less partisan and work effectively cross-party. However, witness sessions are usually held in private with only the reporting of findings being in public. External scrutiny is also less partisan, and so can achieve much more while enthusing councillors
- Third party organisations can sometimes be reluctant to be scrutinised by lay persons. It takes significant time to build positive relationships
- There should be debate at Full Council for topic selection for scrutiny committees
- Committees need more power to force changes on executives
- There is too much executive control over what is scrutinised
- In some local authorities, cabinet members and the Leader attend health scrutiny meetings when the NHS is being scrutinised and sometimes lead the questioning of witnesses
- Appointment of members to scrutiny committees is in the hand of controlling political groups, so there will never be full independence
Councillors:
- Focussing on the impact we want, like improved health and wellbeing, gets rid of the party-political aspect because we’ve agreed on what we want to achieve
- The better the quality of the opposition, the better the contribution it makes. Currently, we have a very weak opposition and I don’t think they understand the difference between scrutiny and opposition
- One problem is engagement of one’s own backbenchers to participate in scrutiny. It’s often the poor relation, and shouldn’t be
- Is aiming for political independence realistic and necessary? If you have people from both sides on committee, as long as they challenge effectively, that’s all that matters
- I want to know about value for money, so I ask awkward questions. Politics comes into it when members score points to get votes. It suits my nature to be challenging and ask probing questions. But you need knowledge of subject to do this. A lot of colleagues don’t have this
- The role of the Leader is key: they have to believe in good governance. Scrutiny’s success depends on the attitude of the Leader, who needs to recognise that good scrutiny reflects on the reputation of council. Too many Leaders seek to block scrutiny
- Scrutiny is improved in authorities where scrutiny reports go to Full Council and not the executive
- Officers have to be supportive of scrutiny. It’s not just about the Leader
- Some chairs can be fiercely independent regardless of which party has control. An effective chair of a scrutiny committee need to be apolitical and work collaboratively across party lines. A lot depends on the group of individuals on the committee
- A lack of political independence is often more pronounced in small shire district councils where there is often too much domination by strong leaders and executives
- There is a problem with committees lacking teeth - the executive will often not listen regardless of what scrutiny committees say
- Joint scrutiny often works well, sometimes with different chairs. Working groups also increase political independence
- Decisions on who will chair a committee is often whipped vote, and there is considerable remuneration which binds chairs’ approach
- The executive has control over scrutiny funding and budgets which is a big problem
Q2) Do officers and members working on scrutiny have sufficient resources, expertise and knowledge to deliver effective scrutiny?
Officers:
- Limited access to expertise is a bigger issue than resources: committees struggle to access expert advisors and find it hard to build relationships
- Scrutiny support is often combined with wider a corporate policy role, meaning officers often spend relatively little of their time actually working on scrutiny
- There is a tension in trying to scrutinise people with whom you might later seek to work with or for
- The reduced resources allocated to scrutiny has led to a corresponding reduction in scrutiny committees: local authorities cannot have committees that mirror each portfolio like in Parliament, leading to committees with extremely large remits
- Districts need to work better with upper tier authorities: on their own, districts are limited in what they can influence
- Scrutiny has fewer resources, but increasingly wide remits: it’s not possible to do everything justice
- Health scrutiny has a huge workload so committees often struggle to do much more that the statutory requirements
- Scrutiny has become much leaner, but this is not necessarily a bad thing: it is more focussed now so that it achieves more impact and demands greater attention
- Accessing outside experts is easier in London as they are always relatively nearby
- Questioning skills for members are key, and remain the biggest training need
- Getting input from external experts such as academics is possible at the start of an inquiry, but sustaining this engagement throughout an inquiry is difficult
- There should be a separate budget for scrutiny, commissioning research and recommending options
- In authorities that are reducing staff numbers for budgetary reasons, more resources for scrutiny is often unrealistic
- In many councils, there are enough resources, but they aren’t allocated appropriately: there needs to be a top-down reallocation of resources, with more priority given to the scrutiny team
- There is often a lot of resistance to scrutiny at the senior officer level. Many actively seek to keep scrutiny to a minimum, as they don’t want to be challenged in what they’re doing
- Information requested from senior officers is often sanitised or of limited usefulness. Officers need to realise they work for all councillors, not just the executive
Councillors:
- I’m not impressed by the quality of members. They need more training–it’s only then they have the knowledge to ask probing questions
- We have people on our Committee with no expertise
- The way round the resource problem is to get members to do more work themselves.
- It is incumbent on members who chair committees and task and finish groups to take on knowledge and expertise and motivate other members to do so too
- The clerks don’t prepare papers, someone from the relevant department (e.g. health and social care) does it
- We have found that scrutiny officers have taken on the role of being nothing more than glorified diary clerks. We need to motivate them to become more involved in the background and research. If you rely on reports from individual departments, they are too optimistic
- The key is understanding which questions to ask
- It’s about the officers understanding the key role of scrutiny and not seeing it as a nuisance
- Commercial confidentiality is a big issue which impedes scrutiny committees
- Investment in member development is insufficient, but also hampered by large turnover of committee members
- Individual committees often have too wide a remit to cover individual issues sufficiently
- There is a growing trend to merge scrutiny function with corporate policy team. This negatively impacts on scrutiny because of conflicts of interest among officers
- Too many scrutiny committees remain talking shops. There should be more emphasis on measuring how effective scrutiny is in influencing policy and decisions
- Scrutiny staff must be completely separated from the executive
- There has been a trend towards fewer members on scrutiny committees in recent years. This has negatively affected good scrutiny
- To give scrutiny more agency scrutiny reviews should be regularly produced which go to the full council for consideration
- More focus of scrutiny committees should be placed on upstream policy formation
Q3) If you could make a single change, what would you change about the way scrutiny in your authority operates?
Officers:
- The whole process should be more independent of departmental officers: chairs are reluctant to challenge or disagree with senior officers
- Having opposition chairs would get much better engagement and input from other members
- More members need to actually read their committee papers–however some officers make the papers intentionally long to dissuade members from doing so
- There is a capacity issue for ‘double-hatted’ councillors, and those who work in outside employment
- With meetings being held in the evenings, discussions can go on quite late: with many of the best councillors having demanding day jobs, it’s unrealistic to expect high performance
- Scrutiny committees should share expected questions with witnesses before meetings to ensure all information is available in advance: it shouldn’t be a closed-book exam as some officers can deflect questions by promising to look into an issue and write back later
- Scrutiny in general needs a higher profile, including the role of statutory scrutiny officer: people across the council should know who it is with their status being far closer to that of the monitoring officer
- Scrutiny has become too broad and complex over the years: it is not achievable to do everything asked of it. There needs to be a clear remit for scrutiny with up to date guidance from Government
- Scrutiny will only succeed if the Leader and Chief Executive think it is important–strong scrutiny chairs and strong scrutiny managers are required when they do not
- Ensuring legislation is enforced regarding undue interference from the Leader and cabinet
- Resident-led commissions help to improve scrutiny. Broadening the scrutiny process out to involve the public and prominent campaign groups, inviting them onto task groups, or to serve as chairs of commissions
- There should be an independent secretariat for scrutiny committees with separate ring-fenced budget, independent of the council, to create greater organisational autonomy
- Councils should be able to compel witnesses to attend from publicly funded bodies, such as housing associations
- Legislation relating to scrutiny powers should be simplified, putting them all into one place
- Removing conflicts of interests where scrutiny committees are supported by officers responsible for the policies that are being scrutinised
Councillors:
- Better selection of candidates to be councillors, as well as improving their calibre through training
- We need full time councillors: the part time nature of the role means variable quality
- It should be constitutionally established that scrutiny is on a level with cabinet
- Greater public involvement: if you want to be effective, what really changes a Leader’s mind is people and residents, and if you don’t get them to meetings, you won’t make changes
- Statutory Scrutiny Officers are too low down the food chain to influence people. This statutory post has to be a similar level and have access to the corporate management level
- We’ve also got to make use of modern technology. It’s about getting the message out through facebook and twitter
- One of the changes is taking meetings out in the community
- Political groups need to treat each other with fairness and respect
- Completely disconnect all aspects of scrutiny (formation, governance, resources) from the executive
- Increase connection with residents and public through co-opted members. More witnesses and public evidence sessions
- Clearer feedback loops to quantify scrutiny influence
- Council leadership should be assessed on how they take into account work of scrutiny committees, for example through annual report on scrutiny considered by full Council or annual evidence sessions with cabinet members
- Allocate chairs on the basis of political proportionality
- All scrutiny work should be considered by Full Council, rather than the cabinet