Issue - meetings

Review of the terms of reference for the O&S committee

The chair referred members to the functions of the overview and scrutiny committee which had been circulated with the agenda.  As chair, he intended this to be a business meeting which would not undertake scrutiny itself but act as a commissioning body for scrutiny task groups to undertake further review work.  This committee would review any suggested topics and if agreed set up high-level terms of reference for a scrutiny task group (STG) and set a timescale. The STG would have a free hand to carry out their work but the committee would request an update when the time set for the review had elapsed. When the STG reported back their recommendations, the committee would not go through their report in detail but would satisfy themselves that the terms of reference had been met. It was his intention that the majority of scrutiny reports would be sent to Council so as many members as possible could contribute to the debate and influence the outcomes.

He acknowledged that there would be exceptions to this such as call-in. The Chief Executive also reminded members that the chair had requested that the report on the Warden Hill elections should come to the July meeting of this committee. Some members did suggest that this topic would be better dealt with by a STG but the chair responded that an independent person had been set up to carry out the review and he didn't want to set up another group to scrutinise the work of the independent review.

Referring to the specific functions for the committee set out in the constitution, a member queried the wording of the function, "nominate members to Cabinet working groups when representatives of O&S are requested”. He suggested that it should refer to "non-executive members” as “O&S” could be interpreted as being restricted to members of this committee.  The Democratic Services Manager agreed to follow this up with One Legal.