Issue - meetings

Report of the Chair of O&S committee – Councillor Tim Harman

Councillor Harman, as Chair of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee, introduced the 2013-14 annual report.  As the newly appointed chair of the committee, he gave thanks to former Councillor Barbara Driver and Councillor Smith who had chaired the committee in the last 12 months. He also wished to give thanks to former Councillor Rob Garnham for his excellent work in supporting the Budget Scrutiny working group and similarly to Councillor Penny Hall for her contribution to the scrutiny task group on dog fouling.

In his view scrutiny was a powerful tool which should not be political. It was his intention to operate scrutiny in a fair and balanced way and be a critical friend to Cabinet. He would very much like to engage all members in the process and he encouraged members to consider new topics for scrutiny and complete the registration form with any ideas. He acknowledged that there was a need to match scrutiny workload with resources and this would be considered at the next committee meeting when planning their workload for the rest of the year.

The Leader commended the report and considered that scrutiny was a very useful function within the council.   He indicated that the Cabinet were very happy to work with scrutiny task groups to achieve better outcomes for the people of Cheltenham. He urged the O&S committee to consider what was the appropriate number of groups to be operating at any one time. Clearly there was a practical limit to avoid too many resources being drawn from other important projects in the Council's business plan. He thought the written Cabinet Briefing he provided for each meeting of the committee was helpful in highlighting items of interest to the committee which were not necessarily in the Forward Plan.

The chair of O&S responded that the regular update from Cabinet was welcomed by the committee. He acknowledged the point about limited resources and the importance of scrutiny task groups having well-defined terms of reference and not being open-ended.

The vice-chair of O&S, Councillor Colin Hay, was keen to point out that when the new arrangements were put in place, it was identified that not all scrutiny task groups needed the full support of Democratic Services. There could be some scrutiny task groups where members could do it for themselves including writing their final report.

Upon a vote it was unanimously

RESOLVED that the Annual Report of Overview and Scrutiny be noted.