Issue - meetings

A discussion paper

The chair referred members to the discussion paper that had been circulated with the agenda and the update of the meeting between the chair and the vice-chair of O&S with representatives from Cabinet.  In this meeting, Councillor Smith had been keen for members of the Cabinet to produce a written summary for this meeting and he had suggested that members had the opportunity to table questions to Cabinet Members at every Cabinet meeting. In her view, Councillor Sudbury, thought that this committee would provide a better forum for questioning Cabinet Members.

Councillor Whyborn, as a Cabinet Member, was invited to give his comments. In his opinion the introduction of the new scrutiny arrangements had made it much more difficult for scrutiny to summon the Cabinet Member and for members to have the opportunity to question and have a dialogue with the Cabinet Member. He did not support producing a written report but he would be very happy to come along every 6-8 weeks and update members on any areas they wished.

Councillor Hay suggested that the inherent difficulty in having the updates at this meeting was that very few other members attended as observers. Other councils had opportunities for Cabinet Members to have open sessions with other members where they could ask questions. Possibly this could be done in the hour before this meeting or Cabinet and every member could be invited to attend.

Council Driver suggested setting up a task group to look at what other councils were doing. The Democratic Services Manager advised that a lot of research had been done in formulating the new scrutiny arrangements and this had included an extensive look at other councils’ arrangements. She highlighted an e-mail she had received that morning regarding Surrey County Council where they had experienced a similar problem with defining the differences between working groups. Their advice was that the matter was best resolved by establishing good relationships and establishing terms of reference at the start of any working group. Councillor Hall advised that the matter had been raised at the Gloucestershire Scrutiny network and the advice had been that it was for each council to establish protocols which worked for them and there was no simple solution.

Councillor Hibbert supported Cabinet Members attending scrutiny task groups but was nervous about all the Cabinet Members attending this committee due to the time it would take up. She favoured bullet pointed highlights in a briefing note.

Councillor Walklett as the Cabinet Member responsible to scrutiny referred to the five requests from the informal meeting and gave Cabinet’s response:  

1. Cabinet Members give more thought to which issues they could potentially give to a scrutiny task group to develop
   – the Cabinet would be happy to support that and the Events scrutiny task group was a good example where scrutiny had developed new policy
2. O&S track the forward plan as part of their work planning and also refer to the corporate objectives to inform them of up-and-coming actions
   –  ...  view the full minutes text for item 10