Agenda item

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
   – O&S should look to the Forward Plan and the corporate business plan for ideas. O&S would have the option to request a Cabinet Member to attend O&S to give more details about a particular item coming up on the forward plan.
3. The new form for setting up a member working group could be used to facilitate some discussion between Cabinet and O&S when a new working group was being contemplated
   - Cabinet supported this
4. More consideration to be given to the idea of an informative presentation and debate at each Council meeting on a key partnerships or group.
   -  Regarding the JMLGs for shared services, he suggested that an annual report was already made to the Senior Leadership Team by each group and these reports could be presented to members. He would have reservations about these reports being made to Council as this may set precedents for the other authorities in the partnership and create an excessive workload for officers.

5.      A written briefing from each Cabinet Member at each O&S meeting of up-and-coming issues for that portfolio
- Cabinet would prefer to provide a one to two page summary highlighting all their key issues and this could be provided one to two days in advance of the meeting and then O&S would have the opportunity to request a Cabinet Member to attend to answer more questions.

After further discussion on this last point, members felt that this summary should be issued with the agenda so the adequate notice could be given if members wanted to invite the Cabinet Member to answer additional questions. All members of Council should be made aware so that they could attend if they were interested in this particular issue. Members agreed that a single summary report from Cabinet would suffice. 

There was some discussion about the suggestion for receiving presentations from partnerships. The chair felt that O&S should focus initially on establishing the internal relationships with Cabinet before turning its attention to partnerships outside the council. It was also important for the O&S committee to maintain its management role so some reports may be better dealt with via a wider members’ seminar. The committee agreed that they supported the principle of more regular updates to members from working groups and other bodies and they would be happy for the chair and vice-chair of this committee sort out the detail.

Resolved that:

1.      The principle of a member working group initiation form set out in appendix 3 should be adopted and come to O&S for initial discussion and allocation of non-Exec members

2.      Cabinet Members will prepare a short briefing note for circulation with the agenda for each scrutiny meeting with the option for O&S to invite any Cabinet Member to come along and give more detail and answer questions at the meeting

The chair/vice-chair to have further discussions with Cabinet regarding how working groups and other member bodies reporting to the wider audience of members