Old Habits Die Hard? Overview and scrutiny in English local … · 2018. 8. 9. · Chapter 7: Old...

Old Habits Die Hard?Overview and scrutiny inEnglish local authorities

by Mark Sandford and Lucinda Maer

February 2004

ISBN: 1 903903 27 0

First Published February 2004

Copyright © The Constitution Unit

Published by The Constitution UnitSchool of Public Policy, UCL29–30 Tavistock SquareLondonWC1H 9QU

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This report is sold subject to the condition that is shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, hired out or otherwisecirculated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is publishedand without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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ContentsForeword 5

Executive Summary 7

Introduction 9

Chapter 1: Methodology 11

Chapter 2: Overview and Scrutiny Structures 15

Chapter 3: The practices of overview and scrutiny committees 23

Chapter 4: Expertise and support 33

Chapter 5: Evidence 39

Chapter 6: Outputs 45

Chapter 7: Old habits die hard? 49

Recommendations 53

Appendix 1 55

Appendix 2: Typology of scrutiny in the devolved institutions 57

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ForewordThis briefing forms part of the Constitution Unit’s research into the scrutiny process. The Unit iscurrently engaged on a two-year project examining the process of ‘scrutiny’ at all levels of governmentin the UK: national, devolved, regional and local. The aim of the work is twofold. First, we aim to showwhat work is being carried out under the name of ‘scrutiny’. Scrutiny can hold very different meaningsaccording to the actors, policy context, and tier of government under discussion. The majority ofacademic work and guidance produced so far on scrutiny processes has been aspirational, statingwhat ideal practice should be and what basic mistakes should be avoided: far less has examined theactual behaviour of the political authorities which have to make sense of the ‘scrutiny role’.

Second, our research is analytical, drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of the differentinterpretations put on scrutiny by different authorities, and demonstrating why particular practicesmay be more effective than others. We do not have a concrete definition of ‘effective scrutiny’, buthope that our work may lead towards one.

The Unit’s research has been carried out on procedures which are, at the most, two and a half yearsold. Some of them have already gone through one reform, due to authorities’ discontent at theprevious structure. Some authorities have been pressing ahead and exploring the reach of thescrutiny role, whilst others have been unable to do so due to lack of political will and resources. Theresearch provides a snapshot of what has been, and can be, achieved, as well as pointers for futuredevelopment.

The research would not have been possible without the enormous amount of help given by our pointsof contact (most of whom, though not all, are scrutiny officers) from the nine case study authoritieswith whom we worked. We would therefore like to thank Rob Andrew, Geoff Bonner, Steve Dugdale,Eleanor Hoggart, Patrick Kilgallon, Ian McKenzie, Mike Thomas, Paul Wickenden, and Tim Young, fortheir assistance in explaining to us how their authorities work and for helping with obtaining paperworkand arranging interviews with members and other officers. We also owe thanks to all of the officers(both local authority and external), elected members, and others who gave up their time to answerapparently arcane questions about the process of conducting enquiries and committee meetings.Thanks are also due to Jo Dungey at the Local Government Information Unit for assistance at theoutset and for comments on a draft of this report. Lastly, we would like to thank colleagues at theConstitution Unit for their assistance with the work, particularly Saskia Gretton, who spent severalvoluntary days gathering basic information about our case studies, and Robert Hazell, Matthew Butt,and Meredith Cook. Responsibility for the contents rests, of course, with us alone.

Mark SandfordLucinda Maer

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Executive Summary• There is a wide variety in the structures set up by local authorities to conduct the overview and

scrutiny function. The majority of authorities had set up committees whose subject remits arerecognisably similar to the old committee system, but some had deviated from this norm. Wecould not demonstrate an obvious link between structures and effectiveness.

• The existence of a scrutiny co-ordinating body is a vital guard against issues falling betweencommittee remits, against overlap between committees, and between issues getting lost in thedivision, practised by some authorities, between ‘overview’ and ‘scrutiny’.

• Some local authorities which we studied did not allocate committee chairs in proportion toseats held. For all parties to buy in to the process, it is useful for chairs to be spread amongstparties. Overview and scrutiny chairships do not represent power in the manner that old-stylecommittee chairships do, and majority parties should not be afraid of permitting oppositionchairs of some committees.

• Many authorities conduct general business through overview and scrutiny committees, andappoint time-limited panels to carry out subject-specific enquiries leading to reports (the mainactivity of the committee role at Westminster and the devolved assemblies). Panels arenormally smaller than their ‘parent committees’, and any non-executive member can beappointed, allowing those with expertise or an interest to take a lead role.

• In some authorities the status of panels was not clear, as they were not provided for in theconstitution. Where informal panels exist, this creates issues of freedom of information andpotentially the lack of an audit trail. Informal, non-minuted meetings should be avoided wherepossible.

• Timetabling of business, and committee enquiries, takes place in some detail: often eachseparate part of an enquiry is allocated a set length at the outset.

• In many councils policy development constitutes the main role of overview and scrutiny. Whereholding to account, or questioning cabinet members, takes place, it is often linked to Best Value,the CPA, or performance indicators. However, increasingly, councils are developing regularreporting sessions where committees can question cabinet and senior officers on recentprogress.

• Scrutiny officers did not number more than ten in any of the authorities studied. In some casesthey shared this role with other duties within the chief executive’s office. Where no scrutinyofficers at all existed the overview and scrutiny role was noticeably underdeveloped, lacking achampion within the authority to make sense of the role.

• There was no evidence of a hard divide between overview and scrutiny and the rest of thecouncil, as is the case in the larger governments at Westminster and devolved level. Scrutinyofficers enjoyed close relationships with senior departmental officers and cabinet members, onwhom they normally rely for information on policy and state of play. It was common for scrutinycommittees to allow relevant departments to comment on their terms of reference, to giveevidence to them, and to read through draft reports. This state of affairs was felt to be a naturalpart of working corporately as a council.

• Despite the above point, we did find examples of executive officers carrying out policy reviewswhilst a scrutiny panel on the same subject was under way, which does not seem an effectiveuse of time.

• A significant proportion of members interviewed, though not the majority, remain disaffectedwith the new overview and scrutiny committees. Some of these saw the new committeesmerely as weak versions of the old committees, and were dismissive of their role. There hadbeen a considerable turnover of councillors in the case study authorities, which may lead to thewaning of this problem.

• Many members had trouble adapting to a culture of asking questions, under overview andscrutiny, in place of one of making statements, under the old system. Preceding a question witha long political position statement is not an effective means of obtaining information, nor isasking four or five questions at once.

• Unlike Westminster and the devolved assemblies, it was rare for scrutiny officers to providemembers with pre-written questions.

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• The call-in power has been used quite infrequently, only about once per year in some councils.It tends to be regarded as a ‘nuclear option’, and as an indication that council procedures havefailed to resolve disagreement adequately. Nevertheless, the existence of the power of call-ininforms the rest of the running of the council.

• On some occasions call-ins were referred in the first instance to committees with a ruling partymajority, which could decide not to proceed with the call-in. This appears to be against the spiritof the 2000 Act.

• The use of research, and expert advice, was more common in the larger councils whereresources permit officers to spend more time servicing overview and scrutiny.

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This briefing examines the practice and progressof scrutiny in nine local authorities in England.Even by the standards of the new fashion forscrutiny, local authorities are newcomers. Theoverview and scrutiny role was introduced forlocal authorities in England and Wales in theLocal Government Act 2000 (this Act did notextend to Scotland and Northern Ireland). Thisresearch only covers local authorities in England:in Wales certain reforms, such as the healthscrutiny power and the ComprehensivePerformance Assessment, have not beenadopted.

The 2000 Act required all local authorities toadopt one of three new political managementsystems which distinguished the executive of theauthority from the ‘scrutiny’ part (or, inWestminster parlance, the back-benchers).These were: a directly-elected mayor andcabinet; a directly-elected mayor and councilmanager; and a leader and cabinet. Anamendment to the Act provided for a fourth optionof a ‘streamlined committee system’ forauthorities of a population under 85,000.1

The same Act introduced the Best Value system,replacing compulsory competitive tendering.Best Value requires councils to routinely examineservice provision to ensure that it is of the highestpossible quality. There are affinities between thisrequirement and the work of overview andscrutiny. Some authorities use the samecommittees to carry out Best Value and overviewand scrutiny, whilst in others the processes aredistinct. The field is further complicated by theintroduction of the Comprehensive PerformanceAssessment (CPA) by the Government in 2001.This general assessment of authorityperformance takes place through a wide range ofindicators, and this has led to some overview andscrutiny committees spending considerable timeexamining performance indicators andquestioning executive members on that basis.The challenge for local authorities has been toensure that these performance assessments donot swallow up overview and scrutiny.

1 It was initially expected that large numbers of local authorities would adopt a mayoral structure, which had tobe approved by a local referendum. In the event, just 11 elected mayors exist at the time of writing, of whichone (Stoke-on-Trent) is the mayor-council manager option. 59 local authorities operate the ‘fourth option’ (as itis commonly known), leaving 316 operating the leader and cabinet system.

The 2000 Act also introduced a new ethical codefor council lors, and a new concept of a‘community leadership role’ for councils. It alsorequired that each council have a writtenconstitution, which should specify the functioningof the overview and scrutiny structures (normallythey also specify number, membership, andpowers/rights of committees). Constitutionsmust also define the working of the ‘call-in’function (explained below). Authorities wererequired to submit their new structures forapproval, and have them up and running, by July2002.

Many councils have interpreted the ‘communityleadership role’ to encompass scrutinising otherexternal agencies. The character and practice ofthis ‘external scrutiny’ has quickly become animportant sub-set of the general debate aboutoverview and scrutiny—the Greater LondonAuthority and English Regional Chambers facesimilar issues of how to make external scrutinyeffective. Section 21 (2) (e) of the 2000 Actexplicitly permits external scrutiny by localauthorities, and the Government’s guidancereiterates this role (paras 3.36–3.67).

The Health and Social Care Act 2001 introduceda ‘health scrutiny’ role for local authorities. Thisintended replacing the Community HealthCouncils (CHCs) with a role for local authoritiesin scrutinising the work of local health trusts andother health issues. Authorities were alsopermitted to set up joint committees (with oneanother) for this purpose. The precise nature ofthe scrutiny role was similarly ill-defined in thisAct. The Government left open the question ofhow scrutiny could influence the decision-making of a body outside the local authority(although where a scrutiny committee isdissatisfied with the response to its report on a‘substantial variation’ of service by a health bodyit can refer the matter to the Secretary of State).

There was little indication at the time of the 2000Act on what the scrutiny role should consist of,as the Government’s interest was focused on theexecutive function. Subsequent detailed

Introduction

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guidance, however, indicated that ‘scrutiny’should include policy development work as wellas holding the executive councillors to account—hence the invention of the phrase ‘overview andscrutiny’ to describe the new structures.Guidance also suggested that overview andscrutiny might range over topics outside thecouncil’s remit, linking in with the communityleadership role; and that party politics should beabsent from scrutiny committee work. Councilswere allowed considerable latitude to structurethe scrutiny process as they saw fit, and aconsiderable variety of structures has been put inplace.

It is important to note the fundamental practicaldifference between the old and new systems.Under the old system, committees tookdecisions on behalf of the council. Councillorsare and were accustomed, therefore, tocommittee meetings consisting of politicaldebate, followed by a decision-making vote.Under the new system, most policy-relateddecision-making rests with the cabinetmembers: the decisions which remain with thefull council include passing the annual budgetand the quasi-judicial functions such as planningand licensing. Scrutiny committees have nodecision-making power, and therefore cannot beexpected to work as if they were a weak versionof the old system. Overview and scrutiny is aqualitatively different system, and it thereforeneed to be approached and used in a qualitativelydifferent way.

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There are 386 local authorities in England and 22in Wales which are covered by the provisions forscrutiny committees in the Local GovernmentAct 2000. Faced with the multiplicity of practice,we opted to carry out our research through asmall number of case study authorities. Wewrote to some 100 authorities inviting them totake part in the study, and were able to selectnine. These nine represented a broad range oftype of authority, polit ical managementarrangements, and political control. Basic detailsof the nine authorities are set out in Table 1below.2

We obtained background information, scrutinyreports, internal guidance documents, meetingagendas, and minutes, plus copies of enquiryreports, from the nine case study authorities, inJune and July 2003, and interviewed membersand officers from the authorities between Juneand September. Semi-structured interviewswere conducted with between eight andseventeen individuals from each authority,making a total of some 60 interviews. Aquestionnaire was also distributed to around 12–15 councillors in each authority, in order to obtainbasic information and opinions from a broaderrange of members. Lastly, in Preston, Kent,Cornwall and North Tyneside, the researchersattended meetings of overview and scrutinycommittees.

As the case study authorities all used widelydiffering names for their different committeesand groups, instead of referring to thecommittees by their proper titles we are using thefollowing nomenclature for the remainder of thisreport (see Table 1 for a list of the names used bycouncils for different committees):

• ‘Overview and scrutiny committees’refers to committees which have bothpolicy development and scrutiny roles;

• ‘Overview committees’ refers tocommittees which have only a policydevelopment role;

• ‘Scrutiny committees’ refers tocommittees which have only a scrutiny,and not a policy development, role;

• ‘Panels’ refers to task and finish groups orworking parties, set up to undertake anenquiry into a specific issue and thendisbanded.

We realise, of course, that in reality there is not aclear divide between ‘overview’ and ‘scrutiny’,and that it is potentially misleading to talk as ifthey are discrete processes. Nevertheless, theyare treated as separate or distinct by many of theauthorities we studied, and there are differencesbetween the role of policy development and therole of holding to account. We have thereforeused the distinction, for clarity, as if it were a clearone, throughout the report.

The report is approximately set out in thechronological order of a typical scrutiny/policyenquiry. This has been done in order to conformto the template established by our previouspublication of this research project, Scrutinyunder Devolution: Committees in the ScottishParliament, National Assembly for Wales, andNorthern Ireland Assembly. At times we havedeviated from this template because of thedifferences between issues in local authoritiesand devolved bodies. We also found that someissues were more important in local authoritiesthan at devolved level (for instance, committeestructure) and we have therefore devoted morespace to exploring those issues in the presentreport than in the previous one.

Chapter 1: Methodology

2 In our previous briefing, Scrutiny under Devolution, we used six enquiry reports as case studies for thepractice of scrutiny. It was not possible to use individual reports as case studies when researching the localauthorities, partly because the number of local authorities studied would have made this unworkable in thetime available and partly because some of our case studies had not produced any reports.

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15

The conduct of scrutiny by local councillors wasan innovation in the manner in which localgovernment business is conducted. Thelegislation and the government guidance leavesthe detail of the design of appropriate structuresup to the individual councils. This means that theappropriate structure of overview and scrutinycommittees is a more central issue for localauthorities than it is for the devolved institutionsor for Parliament. The structures will bedetermined by the local authority’s vision of whatthe role of overview and scrutiny constitutes.

In these authorities, where there is no clearunderstanding of the purpose and possibilities ofscrutiny, or the structure makes no provision forcertain council activities or links poorly betweencommittees, overview and scrutiny suffers.Structures can do much to engage the maximumnumber of councillors in the overview andscrutiny process, and to make the processrelevant and clear to those involved with it.

Authorities must make two vital decisions whencreating a structure:

• whether ‘overview and scrutiny’ are twoseparate or opposed activities, or whetherthey are two sides of the same coin;

• how to divide up committee portfolios.

Overview or Scrutiny?The name of ‘overview and scrutiny’ does notentirely capture the processes set out inGovernment guidance and literature. We set outbelow (see page 23–24) the range of activitiesthat overview and scrutiny committees can carryout. But there is a fundamental distinctionbetween policy development (helping or advisingthe executive) and holding to account(interrogating or critiquing the executive).Authorities must decide whether to run these tworoles through the same committee, or whetherthey are sufficiently opposite to one another torequire separate committee structures.3 Nopreference is shown in the governmentguidance.

“Local authorities should also considerwhether policy development and review inrelation to a particular function or policyarea should be carried out by the samecommittee which scrutinises decisions inthat policy area or whether separatecommittees are needed for policydevelopment depending on localcircumstances. The Secretary of Statebelieves that this is a matter for localchoice.”

Committee portfoliosThere are three basic options for the content ofcommittee portfolios:

• matching executive member portfolios;• matching the authority’s service

directorates;• cross-cutting committees which match

neither portfolios or directorates.

The government guidance suggests the cross-cutting model:

“Overview and scrutiny committees shouldtake a cross-cutting rather than narrowservice-based view of the conduct of thelocal authority’s business.”4

This was also the most common model in ourcase study authorities. Limited time and numberof members preclude local authorities frommatching a committee to each cabinet portfolioas in Westminster and the devolved assemblies.Most local authority cabinets contain 7–9members. None of the authorities studied herehad more than 6 scrutiny committees. Normallythese committees would cover one or twocabinet portfolios in their entirety, possiblyincluding small parts of one or two others, andoften including issues which were not clearlywithin the competence of the council (such ashealth or community safety). The exception tothe pattern of rough mirroring was Ealing (seeBox 1).

Chapter 2: Overview and Scrutiny Structures

3 The same committees carry out both roles in the devolved institutions, though in many cases there are sometensions between the two roles.

4 Local Government Act 2000: Guidance to English Local Authorities, s3.21.

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Other considerations

Once these decisions have been made, theymust be followed with other structuralconsiderations. Should there be a co-ordinatingbody or a formal panel of chairs? Shouldcommittees set up sub-committees or workinggroups to carry out some of the overview andscrutiny functions?

Our case study authorities had all faced theseissues differently. However, three basic types ofstructure could be identified:

1 A Co-ordinating Overview and ScrutinyCommittee (which may have responsibilityfor call-in), with a number of committees,sub-committees or panels reporting to it.Panels may report either to the co-ordinating committee or to sub-committees.

2 A number of committees, not reporting to aco-ordinating body. In authorities withthese structures, a panel of chairs usuallyacts as a mechanism to stop overlap. Thisresembles Parliamentary SelectCommittees. As shown below, someauthorities are moving from this structureto establish panels of chairs

3 One scrutiny committee and multipleoverview committees: some councils haveinterpreted overview and scrutiny as twoseparate pursuits and have differentcommittees for each.

In some authorities, health scrutiny committeeshad been set up which did not fall neatly into theabove typology. Mostly they resembled overviewcommittees, but sometimes they would be titled‘scrutiny’ committees whilst other overviewcommittees included ‘policy’ or ‘review’ in theirtitles.

In the majority of these authorities, policyenquiries were carried out and reports written bysingle-issue, time-limited panels, often referredto as ‘working groups’ or ‘task groups’. A chairand members would be selected by the parentcommittee, though normally there is norequirement that these members mustthemselves sit on the parent committee. Theywould then liaise directly with scrutiny officers,allowing the parent committee to concentrate onwider overview and scrutiny of the council.Sometimes these groups were not formallyconstituted, and they might not be politicallyproportional; in some authorities, but not others,they are mentioned in the constitution. Normally

Box 1: London Borough of EalingEaling has set up four thematic scrutiny committees:

Council deals with issues of internal management of the authority;

Individual deals with services provided for individual residents of the borough (e.g. education,housing, social services);

Borough deals with the services provided for all people living and working in the borough (e.g.highways, waste and cleaning, parks, planning and regulation);

Community deals with community-related services (e.g. health, sports and leisure, libraries andculture).

The purpose of this unusual structure is to make the scrutiny process more transparent to thepublic. Respondents stated that most councillors and members of the public understood thesystem when the fit between committee title and theme was explained. There is a rough fitbetween the traditional directorate structure of the authority and the committees.

The largest problem with the system is the unequal balance of work between committees. TheCouncil Scrutiny Committee finds itself doing relatively small amounts of work on quite obscureissues (such as a scrutiny of the council’s post room), whilst the Borough Scrutiny Committeeexamines health, education and social services (each of which could deserve a committee in itsown right).

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Type 1

��

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London Borough of Camden has a single Overview and Scrutiny Committee which co-ordinates the work of a range of time-limited panels. The OSC is chaired by a member of themajority party. Panels are chaired by members of any political party (so far in roughproportionality). (Type 1)

Durham County Council has a single Overview and Scrutiny Committee containing all back-bench members which co-ordinates the work of the six sub-committees, which are broadlythematic, and the time-limited working groups. (Type 1)

North Tyneside Borough Council has a single overview and scrutiny committee and five sub-committees which are broadly thematic. (Type 1)

these groups would disband when their reportwas produced.

Co-ordinating bodiesCouncillors we interviewed from almost all theauthorities identified the need for communicationbetween the committees. Whatever structureand set of committee portfolios exists, there willalways be the potential for cross-over andconfusion. We found some examples ofmembers who were entirely unaware ofdevelopments in other committees on their owncouncil.

Some sort of co-ordinating body is thereforeextremely helpful. It permits regularcommunication between the committee chairs,and thus helps prevent overlap and enableschairs (and members) to know what othercommittees are doing. It may also be used as aforum to decide on call-ins, or to make the finaldecision on whether to undertake a given enquiryor not.

“it is intended that the areas of work shouldbe wide ranging and cut across theorganisational structure of the Council. As aresult there may at times be overlap betweenthe interests of two or more Committees. Insuch a case the chairmen of the committees

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Type 2

��

��

��

London Borough of Ealing has four scrutiny committees which do cross-cutting work (Type 2),but it is developing a co-ordinating committee, hence moving to Type 1.

Cornwall County Council has five Policy Development and Scrutiny Committees (type 2), but isdeveloping a Co-ordination Board, hence moving to Type 1.

West Oxfordshire District Council has three overview and scrutiny committees and no co-ordinating panel. It also runs review groups. (Type 2)

Type 3

��

Preston City Council has four Review Boards and one Scrutiny committee. The overviewcommittees are broadly thematic. (Type 3)

Kent County Council has one Cabinet Scrutiny Committee and three Policy and Overviewcommittees, and an NHS Overview and Scrutiny Committee. (Type 3)

East Cambridgeshire District Council has four policy committees and one overview andscrutiny committee. (Type 3)

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should agree how the situation should bemanaged.”

North Tyneside reviewed its scrutiny structures,partly with the issues of overlap andcommunications between committees in mind.They had previously run a system of four selectcommittees, carrying out overview and scrutiny.The new system, with an overarching committeeand sub-committees, was created “basically tohave some sort of umbrella system for thesecommittees to follow a structure. Where beforethey were autonomous select committees thatcould pick their own themes, there were notnecessarily the same themes that were going onin the authority.”

Camden avoids the problem of co-ordinationbetween standing committees by having onesingle Overview and Scrutiny Commission,which sets up panels to undertake specificenquiries. This also reduces the likelihood ofmatters falling between committee remits, as thesingle committee is responsible for all overviewand scrutiny. This structure also avoids anycomplex procedures of joint committees when across-cutting enquiry is carried out.

West Oxfordshire lacks a panel of chairs or anoverarching committee. This has createddissatisfaction within the committees. Onemember stated that “the chairs should betweenthemselves sit down and have regular meetingswhere they decide who looks at what. Let’s faceit, [the scrutiny committees are] finance,economic and environment: you could haveeverything through all three—homelessness forexample.”

Kent’s lack of a co-ordinating committee leads toa different problem: opposition memberscomplained that there was no opportunity toscrutinise the council’s corporate functions. Thesingle Cabinet Scrutiny Committee does nothave sufficient time or authority to investigatecouncil performance in detail, whilst Policy andOverview Committees are not permitted to do soat all. It may be particularly easy for matters to fallbetween stools in this way where there areseparate overview and scrutiny committees,without a co-ordinating panel to allocate workbetween them. As the divide between overviewand scrutiny is not an absolutely clear matter, it is

helpful for an arbiter to prevent a situation whereneither ‘side’ of overview and scrutiny takes onany given matter.

In Ealing, meanwhile, control over call-ins hasbeen transferred from individual chairs (some ofwhom are not from the governing party) to thenew co-ordinating committee, leading someopposition members to claim that the opportunityto call in decisions has been reduced.

Party balance in committees andamongst chairs

The Local Government Act 2000 does not specifythat committees must be chaired by members ofa range of parties. It is a feature of House ofCommons select committees, and committeesin the devolved institutions, that chairs aredivided proportionately according to partyrepresentation.5

In many local authorities, the ruling groupprovides either all or most of the overview andscrutiny chairs. From a Westminster or devolvedassembly perspective this appears odd, evenwhen panel chairs are frequently drawn fromminority parties. Interviews indicated that manyminority parties were unhappy about the situationwhere it exists. Amongst majority-ruleauthorities, the equal spread of chairships(Ealing) and the proportional spread ofchairships In the London Borough of Camdenwere the exception.

“It is natural that Overview and Scrutiny islooked after by [the ruling party]. It mightwell be that people say ‘well, you have to bepolitically balanced etc’ but equally so theOverview and Scrutiny could easily startcalling in every decision.”

The history of party polit ics within localgovernment accounts for much of the reasoningbehind this. In the previous structure of localgovernment, it was standard practice for partieswhich held a majority on the council to not onlyhold all committee chairships, but to agree aposition on agenda items prior to the committeemeetings, and use their majority to vote itthrough. In East Cambridgeshire, where the useof the fourth option means that much procedure

5 In Westminster, this is a convention, not required by Standing Orders.

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has been retained from the old system, theLiberal Democrats did exactly this until they losttheir overall majority in May 2003.

In Kent County Council the Cabinet ScrutinyCommittee is chaired by the leader of the LabourParty group (the principal opposition). Itsproportionality reflects that of the council.However, the three Policy and OverviewCommittees are all chaired by members of theruling group. One stated that “it would be difficultto make the process work with a foreign chair”.

Government guidance states that:

“Where there is a majority group, localauthorities might consider it appropriate tohave all or some of these committees chairedby members outside the majority group or bychurch or parent governmentrepresentatives.”6

We found that in authorities where the rulingparty took all of the chairs, most oppositionrespondents suggested that scrutiny would workbetter if the chairs were split between parties.Where chairs are shared, there is no sign thatthe system is being abused as a consequence.Minority party chairing can permit a minority partymember to take a leading, even pivotal role, in thedevelopment of specific policies, or to direct theattention of the committee to certain issues. Itwould be hard in practice for the minority chair touse an overview and scrutiny committee toconduct a guerrilla war for the opposition:minority party chairs cannot, after all, prevent adetermined party from using its numericalmajority.

Committee sizeThose working within local authorities haverealised that different sized committees areparticularly good at doing different things. Theyuse large overview and scrutiny committees toreceive officer reports, scrutinise the cabinet andmanage enquiries, and use panels to carry outdetailed policy research.

Durham County Council ’s Overview andScrutiny Committee contains all 50 non-executive members of the council and up to six

co-optees. It looks at performance indicators andbest value plans and passes work down to thesub-committees. It also receives all reportsproduced by sub-committees and workinggroups. There is also a panel of chairs whichmeets regularly. Not only does this ensure co-ordination of scrutiny, allowing the council as awhole to pursue the most relevant scrutinythemes, but it also allows ‘‘buy-in’’ of the scrutinyprocess by all non-executive members of thecouncil. As one councillor stated: “I think thingsneed to be reported back so that everyone is onboard.” To a large extent councillors thought thatthis had worked. However, the ability of theOverview and Scrutiny Committee to be effectivewas questioned by some: “My impression is thatthe steering is all effectively done by thechairmen of the committees”. However, theexistence of both co-ordinating bodies meansthat there is hardly any duplication of workbetween committees, and that cross-cuttingissues can be spotted and allocated to workinggroups.

East Cambridgeshire District Council’s fourthoption structure has one Overview and ScrutinyCommittee which consists of every member ofthe council except for the four chairs of the policycommittees (34 members in total). The thinkingbehind this replicates the thinking in Durham:every member who is not a policy chair (theclosest approximation to a cabinet memberunder this system) has the right to be involved inoverview and scrutiny. However, the fullcommittee only meets once a year.

Most authorities do not operate committees aslarge as this. Durham is a special case. It usesthis big committee to give overview and scrutinypower within the authority, which is particularlyimportant there because of the very large Labourmajority. Large committees can be difficult tomanage and find it hard to do detailed work. InScrutiny under Devolution we found thatattendance and attention within smallercommittees was far better.7 This also applieswithin local government. With smallercommittees, there is less tendency to makepolitical points during evidence sessions as thereis less of an audience. Questioning can be morefocused if there are fewer members wanting tohave their say.

6 ODPM, Local Government Act 2000: Guidance to the English Local Authorities, para 3.30.7 See Sandford and Maer, Scrutiny Under Devolution, p.9.

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Generally permanent committees at localgovernment have around 12–15 members.Panels rarely have more than eight members,and sometimes have as few as two. Panels aremore often used for policy development workrather than for scrutiny, although this is a pointwhere overview and scrutiny overlap—it ispossible for authorities (such as Camden) toinvestigate past executive decisions as part of apanel process. Time-limited panels which existsolely for scrutiny are rare, being found in someauthorities (such as Kent) to examine parts of thecouncil budget in some detail. The use of panelscan be compared to the reporter system used bythe Scottish Parliament whereby one or twocommittee members are tasked withresearching either background issues to a widerenquiry or investigating a focused topic.

“If you are really investigating a part of apolicy I think you need a fairly smallcompact group—maybe half a dozen oreight, and you can really get into the detail.In terms of the investigative side, smallgroups are ideal.”

“I think [the large number of members] is abit unwieldy, because when you getcommittees of 4, 5 or even smaller,invariably you get quite a good workingatmosphere where everyone’s digging in,nobody’s looking over their shoulder sayingthat’s not the party line.”

“A lot of good work happens throughworking parties. From my point of view thatis where the best work is done on thecouncil.”

It is standard practice in Ealing, Camden,Durham and North Tyneside for an invitation to besent to all members asking for those interested inworking on a specific issue to put their nameforward to be on the working group.

“Our experience of the select committeesuggested that there were risks of thembeing too much like ‘traditional’ committeesand that, depending on the subject matter ofparticular studies some members were nottaking an active role. The new model of‘study groups’ means that they will includein their membership only those memberswho want to be there because of the subjectmatter.”

Some councils have found that permanentworking groups on issues such as the budgethave been useful. Durham has a permanentpanel looking at the budget. This has allowedcontinuous detailed scrutiny of this vital work ofthe council.

“we were very concerned last year that thestage they were getting involved wastowards the back end of the year whenthings had happened. Really what wewanted to do was get involved in the budgetfrom the beginning of the next cycle. Theywanted to hear about the problems as theywere emerging.”

Respondents were unanimous that panels werean advantage of overview and scrutiny over thecommittee system. Even respondents who wereseverely critical of overview and scrutiny (eitherin their authority or generally) praised panels fortaking evidence from members of the public andservice users and developing detailed knowledgeof an issue. One witness in Cornwall said to apanel, “I’ve been waiting seventeen years to tellyou what I think”.

Recommendations• Authorit ies should establish a co-

ordinating body to prevent unnecessaryduplication of tasks and to prevent issuesfalling between committee remits. Thiscould take the form either of a panel ofchairs or a single co-ordinating overviewand scrutiny committee.

• The use of time-limited panels should beencouraged in those authorities wherethey are not used. They are largely aneffective way of realising the 2000 Act’saim of moving the scrutiny process awayfrom party politics.

• As smaller committees generally workmore effectively than larger ones, for mostpurposes numbers should be kept low ifpossible. This might also enable morecommittees to be established, reducingthe workloads of councillors on theexisting committees (though this hasstaffing implications).

• Committee chairs, and vice-chairs, shouldbe held by members of all political partiesin rough proportion to the number of seatsthe party holds on the Council. Wherethere is a ruling party, this will help to offset

22

any defensiveness of the cabinet againstoverview and scrutiny.

• It is not clear whether overview andscrutiny are best carried out by onecommittee or divided between two classesof committee. If the latter, however, it isimportant that information is sharedbetween the two types of committee. Itshould also be possible to ask searchingquestions in an overview committee, andprobe alternatives in a scrutiny committee:the two activities are not so distinct as torequire total separation.

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Functions of committees“The single biggest problem that we have asan overview and scrutiny committee isknowing what we are supposed to do.”

There is a range of types of work that scrutinycan carry out, which are comparable acrosslevels of government. In Table 2 we haveattempted to classify the types of work carriedout. We are not suggesting that this classificationis a final and binding set of definitions. Thepurpose of it is to demonstrate that there are

distinctions in the type of work that overview andscrutiny committees do; to demonstrate theaffinities between these types and the types ofwork carried out in the devolved institutions; andto suggest the need for balance between types ofwork.

It is open to local authorities to carry out all ofthese functions, and, amongst our case studies,practice of each of these functions was inevidence. The notable difference betweenauthorities was in the balance between the typesof work carried out as overview and scrutiny.

Chapter 3: The practices of overview andscrutiny committees

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Often we found that either best value, monitoring,policy enquiries or holding to accountpredominated, sometimes due to patterns ofwork becoming set early in the overview andscrutiny process. Committees can contribute tothe running of the council from a number ofangles if they exercise the full range of theirpowers.

There is less tendency in local authorities toregard a weighty report as the zenith of thescrutiny process. Informal enquiries andmeetings, allowing a few members to developexpertise and to feed in to full council and officerson given subjects, were more common in localauthorities than at other levels of government—as were public meetings and visits to localservice providers and users.

In less well developed overview and scrutinystructures, we found a lot of confusion about thepurpose of overview and scrutiny. Often wefound committees were behaving as though theywere still in the previous system of localgovernment, receiving officer reports and notingtheir recommendations. In these authorities, bothquestionnaire and interview data indicated thatcouncillors wanted to go back to the old system:

“[Overview and scrutiny] has been analmost unmitigated disaster, and a gift formajority parties to take complete control ofall aspects of the council’s functions with noeffective oversight at all.”

The committees within some authorities haveconcentrated entirely on looking at pastdecisions of the cabinet. Although this may beconsidered to be scrutiny in the traditional sense,overview and scrutiny is more than this.Government guidance makes it clear that notonly should decisions of the cabinet bescrutinised, but that cabinet members should beheld to account, and committees should assist inthe development of policies and strategies takinginto account the views of ‘hard to reach groups’,(i.e. not just council officers).

In contrast, other authorities have concentratedalmost entirely on policy development, neglectingto ask the hard questions of officers andexecutive members. Elsewhere, the scrutinyprocess has been dominated by Best Value and

assessment of service performance againsttargets. Although this is an important (andmandatory) part of performance management, itis not the only contribution that overview andscrutiny can make.

Setting the agenda and the forwardwork-plan

In most of the case study authorities, membershad an input into the committees’ work plans. Forinstance, in Cornwall each committee sets itselfa work-plan annually following the approval of thecouncil budget. This is led by the chair and thevice-chair, but respondents indicated that allmembers have an opportunity to participate inthis, and the committee will collectively prioritisebetween different suggestions. In Durham, agreat emphasis is placed on the role of thecouncillors themselves in deciding the work ofthe committees:

“The whole process has to be member led.We are there to support and assist, andoccasionally give advice about a directionmembers might want to go in or a particulartheme they might want to draw out.”

Putting the members in control of theircommittee’s work is vital to engage thecouncillors in the work of the committee. It alsogives them a feeling of control over the system.We found that in councils where members hadsome control over their work-plan, they were lesslikely to be disaffected by the new structures.

The Local Government Act 2000 clearly gives allmembers of committees an equal right to putitems on their committee’s agendas:

“Executive arrangements by a local authoritymust include provision which enables:

(a) any member of an overview and scrutinycommittee of the authority to ensure that anymatter which is relevant to the functions of thecommittee is included in the agenda for, and isdiscussed at, a meeting of the committee, and

(b) any member of a sub-committee of such acommittee to ensure that any matter which isrelevant to the functions of the sub-committee

8 Local Government Act Section II, 8a.

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is included in the agenda for, and is discussedat, a meeting of the sub-committee.”8

However, in some authorities, oppositionmembers felt that their agenda items oftentended to fall to the bottom of the agenda: oneopposition member remarked, “I don’t think theytry [to push items down the agenda], I think it kindof happens on a knee-jerk basis.” Another said “intheory you should be able to put forward ideas,but there’s no way an idea put forward by aConservative [opposition] councillor will get in”.Although formally the agenda might be agreed bythe chair, vice-chair and officers, all membersshould feel that they have an input into this. Insome authorities, many of the respondentsseemed unsure about how items appeared onthe meeting’s agendas.

“In the first year I think that it was almostentirely officer set. But I think the officerswere probably tearing out their hair tryingto get any member to say that we want suchand such a thing on the agenda. [In the]second year there was much more attempt todo that and it takes the form of at thebeginning of the year that members areinvited to put something forward to you onthe work programme.”

“[Setting of the agenda] is officer led.Mainly officers decide what goes on theagenda. Generally speaking, as far as Iknow, members don’t actually offer to lookat this or that, they just don’t do it.”

“The agenda is drawn up by the officers inconsultation with myself. Before eachmeeting, I have a one and a half hoursession with the environment heads ofservice in which we discuss the agenda. Weput items on the agenda for that meeting andfor future meetings.”

West Oxfordshire District Council has noscrutiny officers and relies heavily on the headsof service for agenda items is a result of this. Butthis is obviously problematic when it is theseheads of service which the committee should bescrutinising. Issues surrounding this arediscussed below.

In the London Borough of Ealing, not only domembers have a chance to put an item on theagenda, but residents do also. They have a‘scrutiny referral form’ on their website whichmembers of the public can fill in. “Committeeswill consider requests from any stakeholder,group or business to examine issues putforward.” However, this is very rarely used by thepublic in practice. In West Oxfordshire there isroom on every committee agenda for membersof the public to raise issues. Those interviewedcould only think of one occasion where amember of the public took this up (this memberof the public was elected to the council at the nextelection).

In most authorities there was no evidence ofdirect attempts by cabinet members to eitherinfluence or direct the agenda of scrutinycommittees. Where minority party memberswere unhappy with agenda-setting, thisappeared mostly to be due to the internalcompasses of the majority party members ratherthan overt interference. One exception to thiswas in Kent, where the three policy committeesare overtly used as a means of policy advice tothe Cabinet as opposed to having a moreindependent existence. One of the overviewcommittee chairs in Kent suggested that his rolewas:

“to develop policy, which in my view islistening to my opposite numbers from the[other party] groups, but listening harder tothe cabinet members and whatever theywant to have looked at in terms of policy,and also very much the directorate…they’revery good at suggesting things.”

This leads to curious situations such as this:

“I was dealing with a local issue that wasvery heavy, and I wrote to [the chair] saying‘Can we put this item on the agenda?’, and Igot a letter back saying ‘We don’t want it onthe agenda, we’re very busy, we might lookat it in the future’. But it wasn’t sent by [thechair], it was sent by the cabinet member.”9

9 This approach makes some sense if the policy committees are regarded as extensions of the Cabinet—ananalogy might be with the Cabinet sub-committees at Westminster, as opposed to the departmental selectcommittees. However, it is not clear that either the legislation or the guidance anticipated overview andscrutiny committees being used in this way.

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Concentrating on the decisionmaking process

In some authorities, overview and scrutiny is apassive rather than pro-active process. Thepurpose of scrutiny is regarded as being to lookat every executive decision (monitoring). Here‘overview’ is squeezed out by ‘scrutiny’. Thereare three problems with this approach:

• Members are concentrating on a decisionmaking process over which they have nopower;

• Their agendas are lists of officer reportswhich they note. No positive action results,and no recommendations are made;

• They do not have any time to do any othertypes of work.

This has a detrimental effect on the morale ofnon-executive members. In one local authoritywhere the committees did little to no pro-activework the number of respondents who believedthat overview and scrutiny was “a waste of time”and that they should “abolish the cabinet andreturn to the committee system” was very high.The councillors interviewed stated that:

“If everything is going right there shouldn’treally be any problems for overview andscrutiny anyway…if the decisions arecorrect by cabinet and we are implementingpolicy as laid down by council, well,overview and scrutiny can go home andhave a cup of tea.”

“The problems arise inevitably in the newsystem because you have the cabinetmaking the decisions, a lot of the othermembers feel detached. They don’t feelinvolved in the decision making processwhich they used to feel. Now you have thecabinet meeting every week or every otherweek. They make decisions and if they arenot called in they go through. That is it.”

It is true that committees have no power tooverturn a decision of the cabinet, and that thecommittee cannot compel the cabinet to followits recommendations. However, the committeesdo have the power to produce evidence basedreports which can feed into, and be critical of,council decisions. Not every decision of thecabinet needs to be considered by the overviewand scrutiny committees—this is to confuse

scrutiny with audit and performanceassessment. This is a particularly importantpoint as overview and scrutiny can slow downdecision-making, when one of the aims of the2000 Act was to speed it up. Overview andscrutiny therefore ought to be carried outjudiciously.

Key decisions should be identified in thecabinet’s work plan, and should appear on theagenda of the relevant committee before ratherthan after the decision is made. In Kent there wasan example of a school closure that was delayeduntil late October, leading to pupils transferringmid-term, due to repeated reviews of thedecision both through the scrutiny process andother tribunals. A respondent elsewhere statedthat the process of the new system meant that“we make decisions four times where we used tomake them once”. In this council, a policy may bedrawn up by an overview committee, be passedto the Cabinet, possibly referred back to theoverview committee for refinement and thenapproved by the full council. This can lead tosignificant delays.

There is always more that could be done thancan be done: committees should focus on areaswhere they can have the greatest effect. Forinstance, on certain subjects, the council may beunder-performing, policy may need renewing, orthere may be a strength of public feeling. The aimis to avoid resources and time being thinlyspread and to make positive suggestions to thecabinet.

In Preston City Council, the single scrutinycommittee focuses on decisions which havebeen made by the cabinet.

“It was felt that scrutiny [rather thanoverview] should take place after adecision has been taken, not scrutinisingprior to when the decision was taken.”

Where four policy committees exist, as inPreston, a scrutiny committee will more naturallyconcentrate on cabinet decisions, leaving thepolicy committees to feed into decision-makingbefore the event. By contrast, this distinction wasnot welcomed in Cornwall, where the overviewand scrutiny committees did not considerthemselves bound to the decision-makingprocess:

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“We were all concerned that [scrutiny]would be after the event. There has beensome of that, but not as much as we feared,because we’ve learnt to spot those issueswhere there will be a member interest. Oftenwe go to the executive with arecommendation that it should go toscrutiny, or to a panel. In effect, as officerswe are managing it in a slightly differentway.”

Policy development and review“A key element of the work of an overviewand scrutiny committee is to be able toreview and make recommendations either tothe executive or to the full council and assistin development of future policies andstrategies.”10

“Scrutiny’s been very much about policyreview, advice, development on majorservice areas, like rural issues, policyreview of residents’ parking, as opposed tochallenging the line which the Executive hastaken. I think that was the council’spreference.”

Conversely to the previous section, any of thecase study authorities concentrated far more onpolicy development than scrutiny. This appearedto be motivated by two main factors: allowingmembers to investigate and makerecommendations about specific issues (theclosest thing available to decision-making); andthe desire to avoid politicised debate. Although aparty political disagreement rarely leads to apolicy review, policy reviews are not mereciphers for the cabinet. Some have producedsurprising recommendations, which have beenadopted. Often, these committees which handleboth policy and scrutiny concentrate more onpolicy. In Cornwall, for instance, the PolicyDevelopment and Scrutiny Committees inCornwall rarely call in the cabinet member orsenior officers to ask critical questions aboutperceived failings. By contrast, it was quitecommon for panels in Camden to hold cabinetmembers and senior officers to account,particularly if serious problems were beinginvestigated.

Other councils, including Preston and Camden,have established a range of mechanismsthrough which holding to account takes place.For instance, performance indicators and BestValue reports are frequently used asopportunities to hold individual portfolio holders toaccount. Some councils have establishedannual, or bi-annual, reports to the full council bythe leader (or the mayor, in North Tyneside),which may be open to the public. There is alsosome opportunity, though it is more limited, tohold executive members to account in fullcouncil.

Panels

Most councils’ policy development work takesplace through panels. Overview and scrutinycommittees themselves identify subjects for in-depth enquiry, establish and manage the panel,and the overview and scrutiny chair will take thelead in reporting to cabinet on the panel findings.This allows a small group of interested membersto do in depth work into an issue. These groupstake evidence and produce reports in a mannerrecognisable from other tiers of government.They normally consist of between 5 and 8members. Where panels were specified in thecouncil constitution, they are polit icallyproportional: in some cases, ‘informal membergroups’, which need not have been proportional,carried out similar roles.

The work of the panels in almost all authoritieswas almost unanimously praised byrespondents. This is one feature of the newsystem which did not take place at all under theold one, and was welcomed by manyrespondents as “essential”. It is important toemphasise the freshness of this approach: formost authorities, overview and scrutiny hasprovided the first formal meeting wheremembers of the public can speak to councillors.

Whilst many authorities specify the role of panelsin their constitution, in some, panels are a moreinformal part of the process. This creates issuesof accessibility of the information available to thepanel, and details of its proceedings.

“The problem with public participation isthe way the papers are produced. They areall on green paper. They are all confidential.

10 s3.54.

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This does not encourage publicparticipation.”

Public accountability and access to informationare blurred for informal panels, which is less thansatisfactory if their conclusions lead to significantpolicy changes. Without this form ofaccountability it is not possible to trace thediscussions and reasoning which led to aparticular decision being recommended by apanel. Part of the justification for the changes ofthe 2000 Act was to improve the transparency ofdecision-making: this is not helped by holdingpanels the proceedings of which can never beaccessed by the electorate. In order for panels tobe successful, the method of appointment tothem, and their functions, should be clearlydefined in the constitution or by a protocoldocument. In West Oxfordshire there existed agreat deal of confusion over the operation ofpanels (‘working groups’).

“I think the overview and scrutinycommittees are in theory the parents of someof the…I forget whether it is either the bestvalue review groups or the working groupbut in effect other than having a reportoften back to the overview and scrutinycommittee it seems not to matter or beconsidered very important to what theoverarching structure is. It is a very loosesystem of accountability.”

“We are still waiting for an exact definitionof the difference between a sub-committeeand a working party.”

Panel meetings in Cornwall were mostly notopen to the public: respondents defended this onthe grounds that witnesses would speak morefreely and members could brainstorm morefreely without fearing that anything they saidwould be used in evidence against them (thisfear related as much to the media as tomembers of the public).

In West Oxfordshire, the ability for panels to beopen to all members is further limited by the factthat they hold all-day meetings. This prohibitsthose in full-time employment from participating(and this is obviously true for potential witnessesand public participants as well). Other councilsmanage to have panel meetings in the earlyevening. This would allow for greaterparticipation in the overview and scrutinyprocess.

“I think there is an understandablereluctance on the members part to do a lot ofinvestigative work themselves. For a lot ofus, there are quite a few pressures. In manyways I would love to do some sort ofinvestigative things but with a job, quitehonestly, I haven’t got time.”

“I think certainly from the non-majoritypoint of view you think, ‘right, I’ll do all thiswork’, but at the end of the day if themajority isn’t going to listen to it, and theyhave the chairs, if anything you suggest haspolicy implications or financial implicationsthey are not going to be happy with it, youwill have put all this work in and it will havebeen for nothing.”

Although it is understandable that somemembers cannot take on review work becauseof pressures on their time, members should feelthat the work is worthwhile. This implies asubstantial shift in the culture of the council.

In Kent and Preston, where policy and scrutinycommittees were distinct, i t was almostunknown for the scrutiny committee tocommission panels (which they are entitled to doin the 2000 Act). The purpose of the scrutinycommittee was perceived as being to check onthe work of the executive, rather than to permitany in-depth development of alternatives. In Kentin particular this appeared to be perceived aspotentially politically divisive. In fourth-option EastCambridgeshire, scrutiny sub-committeesexisted, but policy committees did not establishpanels—enquiries were considered to be part ofscrutiny, not policy-making.

Choosing issues to investigateIn most councils, issues to investigate would besuggested by members of the relevantcommittee in the first instance. These would thenhave to be approved by the committee, and achair is then selected for the task and finishpanel. Often the departmental officers will beconsulted on the issue, and may contribute torefining the terms of reference. Many officersadmitted that they had requested postponementof suggested panels, or refinement of terms ofreference, on the grounds that they would nothave time to deal with the panel. Although thisseems a perverse feature of a scrutiny process,the small size of local authorities often meansthat departmental officers are the only available

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source of expertise both about policy debatesand about council practice. It is thereforeimportant that they are signed up to theprocess—even if grudgingly—and are willing tomake time and resources available to assist anoverview and scrutiny committee. The necessityof this joint working could give officers theopportunity to scupper a useful scrutiny processif they were so inclined.

In Durham County Council, the scrutiny officerssee the issues for improvement raised by theComprehensive Performance Assessment aspriority areas. Concentrating on areas which areknown to be lacking puts increased pressure oncouncil officers and the executive to raise theirgame.

“In many ways the best thing that happenedwas the CPA. We try to concentrate on thoseissues that CPA concluded neededimprovement.”

“Some projects have come about because ofmember concerns and constituency issueswhich is right and proper, and that is whatmembers are encouraged to do, to go outand build a bridge between communitiesand the council.”

There was a tendency by some councils toinvestigate issues of public concern over whichthe local authority had no control. An example ofthis is the six-term school year. Althoughchoosing external topics is a response to theGovernment’s aspiration for communityleadership through external scrutiny, we had theimpression on occasion that these topics wereinvestigated at the expense of focused enquiriesinto council performance. Both external andinternal scrutiny are important elements of thescrutiny process.

The character of external scrutiny is inevitablydifferent from scrutiny of a local authority itself:as an external institution is under no obligation tolisten to recommendations (or co-operate withthe enquiry), committees will inevitably be lessfree to criticise, and will work more in a spirit ofpartnership, than they might do when speaking tocouncil officers. This has been a feature of thehealth scrutiny committees set up in county andunitary authorities: in some cases they have

spent up to 12 months building relationships withthe local health community through seminars,plans, and meetings, before moving on to actualpolicy development.

One member suggested that the focus onexternal issues, in his local authority, waspolitical:

“It’s part of the whole propaganda schemeof the administration of this council. It’s gotnothing to do with scrutiny requirements. Ifyou say we should look at primary schoolunder-performance, they don’t really wantto know about that. But they would like tolook at financing of local education, anduse that as a vehicle for criticising theGovernment for getting certain thingswrong.”

In some local authorities we found examples of‘executive pre-emption’, a notable problem in thedevolved bodies.11 Some scrutiny respondentsstated that they had found out, either in themiddle or at the end of an enquiry, that directoratestaff had been conducting their own research ortrials in the same policy area:

“Several weeks ago I went to (aneighbouring town), [to investigate a newpolicy being tested there]. Well, some of theofficers from here had already been to (thesame town). It might not have been thecabinet. It might have just been the housingofficer [who organised it]. But I feel thatthey are just giving us jobs to keep ushappy.”

“The panel did not know that the housingdepartment were in tandem creating theirnew repairs system without the panelknowing—I do not know if the cabinetknew. I know that our recommendations arebeing discussed by the executive but Isuspect the recommendations may conflictwith those contained in the HousingDepartment Repairs scheme—and thesenine months may have been for nothing.”

ScopingOne of the most important parts of the scrutinyprocess is planning enquiries or scrutiny

11 See Sandford and Maer (2003), op. cit., p. 14–15

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hearings. It is important to work out what is tryingto be achieved, and how this would be best done.Durham County Council takes this veryseriously:

“At the first meetings of any working groupwe discuss our terms of reference and whowe want to call for witnesses so we set thebenchmark before we start and we are notjust jumping from one thing to another.”

To assist this process they have devised a‘Scrutiny Checklist’ (see Appendix 1). This is notso much a list of requirements for a piece ofoverview and scrutiny work, but a list of things toconsider whilst planning. This checklist isconstantly being updated and modified as theofficers and council lors learn from theirexperiences.

Camden’s scrutiny team sets out a timetable foreach panel enquiry before it begins. Membersdecide, with the assistance of the officers, onwho to invite in as witnesses. The timetable isoften constructed around the availability of thesepeople. Unlike at other tiers of government, eachstage of the enquiry process is timetabled—agiven number of meetings is set aside forstudying written evidence, for taking oralevidence, for visits, and for deliberation on thefinal report. This is a very helpful way of guardingagainst enquiries becoming over-long, which hasbeen a common problem in the devolvedassemblies in particular. Camden initially set alimit of six months on all panel enquiries, thoughthis has subsequently been extended to ninemonths (though panels may report earlier ontopical issues).

Scoping of scrutiny hearings tends to be lesssophisticated: some authorities, such asPreston, use a pre-meeting as preparation timebefore the meeting proper of the scrutinycommittee. Members use this time to agree thedivision of questions between members andparties, so as to avoid overlap. We found veryfew instances of detailed questioning beingprepared by members and officers jointly forscrutiny sessions, in the manner ofparl iamentary select committees. Mostrespondents indicated that members would askquestions off the cuff, responding to what officersor cabinet members said in the sessions, ratherthan coming with a prepared set of issues.Indeed, in Kent County Council the officers who

assist the overview committees are explicitlyforbidden to assist the scrutiny committee.

Call-in“I don’t think [scrutiny] works. Becauseactually I think the Labour group know thatif they want to get promoted elsewhere, theycan’t be seen to be calling in decisions.”

The Local Government Act 2000 provides that anexecutive’s decision may be called in by ascrutiny committee. The effect of the call-in is tosuspend the decision until a scrutiny meetinghas been held. The meeting may either endorsethe original decision, or may send the decisionback to the executive to be rethought. Thescrutiny committee is at liberty to make its ownsuggestions.

In the majority of authorities studied, call-ins hadbeen used infrequently. Often they seemed to beperceived as a last resort, after a failure to reachagreement through the normal processes ofdiscussion and debate. Mostly they were notperceived as part of the week-to-week businessof either scrutiny or local politics. The respondentwho declared “I want to see more call-ins—call-ins are the spice of life” was an exception, not therule.

The 2000 Act requires councils to have a call-inprocedure. In the authorities studied, proceduresmight typically require between two and foursignatures, normally from any councillors, to bebrought to an overview or scrutiny committee inorder to trigger a call-in. In some instances (suchas Cornwall) scrutiny committee chairs can calla decision in on their own. Where a singlescrutiny committee exists the call-in is brought tothat forum in the first instance, and the decisionis endorsed or sent back to the executive. Inother authorities the decision may go to aspecially-convened scrutiny committee, to theover-arching scrutiny committee, or to fullcouncil.

Most call-ins in majority authorities resulted in theoriginal decision being endorsed, by virtue of theruling party’s majority on the relevant committee.We found few clear examples of a majorityauthority changing a called-in decision. Oneexample comes from Kent, where the executivepublished two consultation papers at the sametime making contradictory recommendations: ithad to accept that it had made a mistake. The

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call-in resulted in the executive clarifying itsposition. Though not a tough political battle, thisevent does demonstrate how “good scrutinymeans good government” in practice.

In some authorities we found that call-ins wouldbe referred to a panel of chairs or a scrutinycommittee in the first instance, before beingpassed to the executive—and that sometimes,or even often, the ruling party majority on thatcommittee would prevent the call-in from goingany further. In part this relates to the provisionsfor call-in which are laid down in the individualauthorities’ constitutions. There is a difficultbalance to draw between majority parties votingdown irksome call-ins and allowing minorityparties to call in enormous numbers ofdecisions. If the balance is skewed towardsmajority parties, this may affect motivation, assuggested by this parent-governorrepresentative:

“The ruling party always gets its way. It islike the Arsenal back four, one ruling partyhand goes up, all ruling party hands go up.Many times, logic, at least to me, hasindicated that this has been the correctcourse of action…[but] if I was a minorityparty representative I would seriously bequestioning all the considerable effort I putinto council activities.”

One difficulty with call-ins is that the memberswho call a decision in may have difficulty injustifying the call-in on anything other thanpolitical grounds. This is starkly illustrated byEast Cambridgeshire, where members of theLabour group called in the entire annual budget.12

A sub-committee of the scrutiny committee wasconvened to hear the call-in, but the Labourgroup did not present any alternative proposalsfor the budget, merely stating their unhappinesswith it. Although this appears to be an ill-thoughtout move by the Labour group, it would be verydifficult for a party to come up with properlycosted alternative proposals of any policy (letalone the entire budget). In this instance thedirector of finance offered his services in thefuture to any party group which wished toconsider alternatives.

In Durham, meanwhile, the large majority of theLabour Party leads to most signif icantdisagreements being sorted out through informalmeans rather than through the all-in. By contrast,in North Tyneside there had been five call-ins inthe previous twelve months when the researchtook place. This is linked to the cohabitationbetween the Labour council and theConservative mayor and cabinet.

For the most part the call-in procedure tends tobe used fairly rarely, although the fact that theprocedure exists is certainly a factor affecting thebehaviour of the various actors in the authority.

OutreachIn doing policy development and review work, it iscrucial that committees make recommendationsbased on evidence. This should not just be theevidence provided internally within the council,but the evidence of those whose lives areaffected by the issues under consideration. TheGovernment’s guidance makes it clear that it is akey role of overview and scrutiny:

“Overview and scrutiny committees shouldbe a key mechanism for enablingcouncillors to represent the views of theirconstituents and other organisations to theexecutive and local authority and henceensure that these views are taken intoaccount.” 13

“In particular local authorities and theiroverview and scrutiny committees shouldpay particular attention to obtaining viewsfrom ‘hard to reach groups…”14

This was realised in the local authorities wherescrutiny was considered to be working the best,and where there was the least back-benchdissatisfaction with the new local governmentstructures. Taking evidence from externalwitnesses was an integral part of policyenquiries. This has advantages for thecommittee, which can access information notavailable to the executive, and to the community,which can meet councillors and speak to themdirectly. This was far less true of scrutiny

12 See Table 1—the four-strong Labour group on East Cambridgeshire all lost their seats in May 2003.13 ODPM, Local Government Act 2000: Guidance to the English Local Authorities, para 3.19.14 ODPM, Local Government Act 2000: Guidance to the English Local Authorities, para 3.56

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sessions, where public involvement wasminimal:

“I think that the most important thing that ascrutiny committee does is look at aparticular part of an area and look at theservice that is supposed to be provided, thengoes and discusses with stakeholders howthey see the service. Looking at thedifference between what we are doing onpaper, and what the recipients see.”

Committees’ outreach work is far more commonat local government level than at Westminster, oreven devolved, level. Several examples of visitsto service users, and of public meetings inrelevant parts of the authority’s area, were found.Camden held a panel on private financeinitiatives on one housing estate and one schoolin the borough, and held a well-attended publicmeeting in both the housing estate and theschool. The panel chair chaired the meeting,explained the role of the panel and invitedmembers of the public to make their viewsknown. There are affinities between this processand methods of consultation and publicparticipation. However, not all councils havefollowed the spirit of the government’srecommendations:

“This council does not embrace publicparticipation, it puts up with it.”

Recommendations• Overview and scrutiny is an ideal

opportunity to expand participation, inparticular because of the opportunities forcouncil lors to connect with theirelectorates. Participation and visits shouldbe routinely used in enquiries.

• Committees should aim to carry out avariety of work, balancing the types of workdescribed above. Time limits, and in somecases confusion, has often led to certainpatterns of work getting locked in early onin the process.

• Forward planning of the overview andscrutiny process is particularly important,to enable councillors to plan their personaldiaries in advance. This is particularly sofor part-time councillors, and where time-limited panels are used.

• Committees should spend at least part oftheir time on focused work, instead ofsimply monitoring. Receiving reports is a

passive process and does not make thebest use of the power available tocommittees.

• Procedures should be in place to ensureall committee members have an equalright to place an item on an agenda.Officers need to be prepared and able toensure that items do not get repeatedly orroutinely ignored.

• As the Government has recommended,the presumption in overview and scrutinycommittees, and panels, should betowards public meetings and openness.Where meetings are not held in public,minutes and agendas should be availableto the public. Overview and scrutiny isweakened if it becomes a private, internalpractice.

• Panels are a valuable part of the processof overview and scrutiny. Opportunitiesshould be given to members to work onthem. This implies making the panelsaccessible in terms of time and members’existing workload.

• It is particularly important to balance workbetween scrutiny of internal and externalmatters. These are distinct roles, but bothproperly part of overview and scrutiny.External scrutiny enables relationships tobe built with other organisations, allowingthe council to exercise its communityleadership role. But monitoring and critiqueof the council’s own performance andworking practices should not be excludedfrom overview and scrutiny.

• Overview and scrutiny committees shouldconsider how they might developrelationships with the executive to preventduplication of work. It is rarely a good useof time for both executive and overview toreview the same policy. This might, forinstance, take place through formalprotocols or through regular meetingsbetween the executive and a co-ordinatingpanel.

• All parts of an enquiry should be timetabledwell in advance. Local councillors’ time isvery limited and precious, as most of themare part-time. It is particularly importantthat enquiries do not sprawl out of the initialtime allocated to them, as has beencommon in Scotland, Wales and NorthernIreland.

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There are a number of sources of expertise andsupport open to councillors when carrying outtheir overview and scrutiny function.

OfficersThe importance of dedicated scrutiny officers

As local authorities are bodies corporate, theirofficers serve all of their members. Under the2000 Act, the executive is not a separatelyconstituted body but results from anadministrative division within the council. The Actdoes not oblige councils to distinguish betweenofficers who work on executive and scrutinyissues. However, the government guidancestates that:

“To be effective, overview and scrutinycommittees must have effective and properlyresourced support from officers.Members…will need help in researching thepolicy area or decisions they are examiningand in deciding which avenues of enquiry topursue and which witnesses to call.”15

Our research supports this. West Oxfordshireand East Cambridgeshire have no dedicatedscrutiny support. Committee chairs will rely onthe officers from the council departments foradvice on what to scrutinise, and how to do it. Yetthe people they are seeking the advice from arethe very same people who will be called toaccount for the work of the department.

“If an officer wants to push somethingthrough in a particular manner you canmanipulate the system and I don’t think thatis a good way to do it.”

Whereas in authorities with a split in officertasks, councillors can be more confident:

“the good thing about it is that scrutiny hasits own officers which helps so that there is asplit distinctly between the two so therecannot be any sort of compromise on theoutcomes or the questions being asked.”

However, for a small authority with a limitedbudget such as West Oxfordshire and Preston,

the employment of a full time scrutiny officer maynot be seen as a necessity. Scrutiny officers arevital to the effective conduct of scrutiny. This isnot purely because of the potential conflict ofinterests of the officers. Councils with dedicatedofficers do more pro-active work; they cansupport more working groups; the members arebetter prepared for meetings; evidence is takenfrom people outside the authority as the officersare able to spend time identifying witnesses; and,as a result, recommendations are accepted bythe cabinet because they are thoughtfully writtenand presented. Respondents suggested moreofficer time, dedicated research staff and a morepro-active approach by officers as ways ofimproving overview and scrutiny within thecouncil.

“Because we are dealing with lots ofdifferent officers on lots of different topicsyou can get shunted around a bit. It alsomeans that if we, as a committee, want topursue a particular project, time has to bemade from existing officers time sheets.”

However, one councillor saw the problem lyingjust as much with fellow councillors as it did withthe lack of officer support:

“I think the difficulty is that in a districtcouncil with relatively low levels of overallresources you are not going to have oneofficer who is going to provide full timesupport for this sort of thing. I initiallythought that without that it wouldn’t get offthe ground. The fact that it hasn’t got off theground may be thought to confirm myoriginal view but I think the tendency wouldbe that if officer support had been providedit wouldn’t have been taken up bymembers.”

The government has not provided localauthorities with a budget for overview andscrutiny stating that overview and scrutiny will inthe long term create savings for local authorities:thus it is self-financing. However, in order forscrutiny to be effective enough to create savings,it needs officer support. This is an issue forcentral government to address. As oneinterviewee stated:

Chapter 4: Expertise and support

15 ODPM, Local Government Act 2000: Guidance to the English Local Authorities, para 3.45

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“Really you should have totallyindependent people for both sides.But…staff are expensive, and it wouldcreate very large financial problems to beable to do that properly.”

Councils with dedicated officer support

Where committees do have dedicated officersupport, these officers provide all the support forthe committees. Even the largest authoritiessuch as Camden have no more than sevenofficers working on scrutiny. In some authoritiesscrutiny officers have other responsibilities.These individuals therefore need to be able tograpple with vast amounts of detailed knowledge.Where there are only two or three officers, theymust, by definition, be generalists. As councillorsattempt to do more in-depth scrutiny of serviceprovision they may benefit from more specialistsupport. Already the officers sometimes rely onthose they are scrutinising for advice. This maywell be an inevitable part of overview and scrutinyat such a small scale, and should not necessarilybe judged by the standards of national ordevolved institutions.

“In terms of individual expert witnesses weare reliant sometimes on what the officersfrom the departments are telling us. They arethe ones that have the specialistknowledge.”

For authorities with only one or two officers, thereis a limit to how much the staff members can beasked to do. Each ad hoc working group that isset up stretches the officers’ capability. It is notalways possible to do as much at one time asmembers would like. Ealing runs an informal limitof two panels per committee at any one time,though committees are not obliged to stick tothis. Limits such as this will help in prioritisingbetween scrutiny projects, but there may be atime when lack of support becomes a constraint.

“There have been two study groups todate—there would have been more but forthe problems we have had in terms of lack ofcapacity in officer support for the scrutinyprocess.”

“One of the problems is that there hasn’tbeen enough officer support for scrutiny togive the lead officers and their committeesthe help that they need.”

Councils that do have dedicated officer supportoften base the scrutiny unit within the ChiefExecutive’s office—and in some cases the sameofficer teams are responsible for servicing bothcabinet and overview and scrutiny committees.Interviews did not find any evidence that this ledto a direct conflict of interest between scrutinyand executive sides of the council. Linksbetween the cabinet and their fellow partymembers are also strong.

Departmental officers

As intimated previously, in local authorities thereis a much less clear division between executiveand back-bench roles than at Westminster or thedevolved institutions. Local authorities are farsmaller in size and more accustomed to workingcorporately. It was common for departmental (asopposed to scrutiny) officers to be involved quiteclosely at every stage of an enquiry process: thepolicy-making role was regarded as a joint role ofback-bench members and officers. On paperthis is an eccentric feature of a ‘scrutiny’ role. AtWestminster or the devolved assemblies, itmight be expected to allow officers or theexecutive to capture the system. However, atlocal government level we found that therelationship between executive, back-benchers,and officers, was far more co-operative andconsensual than at higher tiers of government.

In many authorities, departmental officers areconsulted when overview and scrutinycommittee workplans are drawn up, and areconsulted on the timing and terms of reference ofpanels. They will then be required to providewritten, and normally oral, evidence to the panel,and will also be consulted on the draft report andrecommendations. Senior officers will alsofrequently be required to draft a response onbehalf of the cabinet. Hence officers are involvedat every stage of the scrutiny process. Few of ourrespondents regarded this as inappropriate,seeing such a joint culture as the natural shapeof the authority.

There is evidence from our case studies thatsome officers were reluctant to accept thepossibility that significant changes, different tothose aspired to currently by the executive orofficers themselves, might result from a scrutinyprocess. Frequently they would attend to monitorthe development of committee thinking (thoughoccasionally officers would be asked by thecommittee not to attend), and would feed back to

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the executive member regularly. One officerstated that part of his role was “internallyagreeing with my own departmentalmanagement team what we wanted theoutcomes of the panel to be…one of ourobjectives was to influence the outcome asmuch as we could.” Another remarked:

“There was no point in [one panel enquiryproposal] from our point of view, becausethe old system was about to end and we’rebringing in a new system, contract criteriahave been set. And you didn’t really wantscrutiny saying either this is fine or this isawful. Whichever way they decided to go itwould have been fairly irrelevant…. All theofficers in that area were working inrelation to getting ready for the newcontract, and we didn’t really have a spareresource to service the scrutiny panel.”

On the other hand, several respondents indifferent authorities thought that officers wereincreasingly coming to terms with the possibilitythat scrutiny processes might lead new ways ofthinking or cause changes in Executiveprioritisation of matters. In Cornwall, there wassome evidence that officers and membersformed an unspoken alliance to press the casefor certain policy changes. The existence of anall-party cabinet leads to a different dynamicbetween committee and executive:

“[Public rights of way] got £500,000 in adifficult budget year, because of pressurefrom the panel, other members and theportfolio holder. Under the old structure,there would simply be an officers’ report.This way, there are 7 members who haveseen 20 witnesses, produced a 30-pagereport, and can back up theirrecommendations…. We all know thatofficers only ever want more money, but ifthe members want more money, with goodreason, and this is why, then there’s greaterownership [of the policy].”

Officers are normally involved at all stages,including that of scoping, where they will advisethe committee on the usefulness of a proposedenquiry:

“They wanted to look at the early yearscurriculum initially, so that they couldinstruct all early years providers, bothprivate and voluntary, as well as [the

council], what they had to teach. Therewasn’t any discussion about the fact thatthey could come up with whatever theywanted to and nobody was going to take ablind bit of notice of them…[We convincedthem that] it would be better for them toconcentrate on the benefits or otherwise ofearly years education, because that wassomething they could do something about.”

ResearchCommittees at all levels of government carry outor commission research into their areas ofcompetence. Whether this is the comparison ofhigher education systems carried out by theEducation Committee of the National Assemblyfor Wales, or research carried out into the settingof government targets by the PublicAdministration Select Committee of the House ofCommons, it is considered a key way ofproducing evidence and setting out theboundaries of inquiries.

Research can be of the same use to committeesin local government. Again, time and money limitthe capacity of local authorities to carry it out. Wefound only one instance of the appointment of aspecial adviser in the manner of Westminster orthe devolved institutions (a panel on floods inCamden). However, many authorities were ableto interview and consult fairly senior experts oncertain issues (often through personalknowledge of members or officers). County andunitary authorities would often allocate a panelenquiry to one scrutiny officer, who wouldassemble documents and brief members onissues. This officer would not necessarily haveany prior knowledge of the policy under review,but might quickly become an expert. Analternative example comes from Kent, where aPGCE student was hired on a short-termcontract to service an enquiry into early yearseducation.

Use of officers to carry out research for scrutinyrather than overview is much more restricted.Most respondents who raised the issue wereopposed to the possibility that scrutiny officerswould be required to systematically question thework of other departments within the council. Itwas felt that this would not be good for officermorale, nor for the scrutiny officers’ careers.

Durham County Council has contractedNorthumbria University to provide research to the

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overview and scrutiny committees in the council.They are especially useful to the committees incarrying out comparative work:

“They have provided us with some veryvaluable work. Particularly when lookingat best practice elsewhere—which councilsare doing things better than us and why theyare doing it—looking at a particular area ofservice delivery that is not doing so wellhere.”

Some councils might find it difficult to allocatemoney for work of this kind. However, Durham ishelped by the fact that the current leader of thecouncil had been a previous scrutiny chair. Thismight have had some impact in keeping theexecutive’s mind open to scrutiny.

Co-opteesA source of constant expertise open tocommittees is the ability to co-opt members ontocommittees, sub-committees and workinggroups. Instead of just calling these people togive evidence, giving them a role in the designand process of an inquiry can help to give theinvestigation the most appropriate focus. Mostrespondents favoured the use of co-optees,citing better links into the community and a moreexpert focus as reasons to bring them on board.The actual use of co-optees was rather lesscommon than the popularity of the idea, thoughboth Durham and Camden have made regularuse of co-optees:

“The most important community involvementis from the co-opted members in the scrutinyprocess. We take these experts from allwalks of life. For the environment: fromAgenda 21; for education: parentgovernors. They give you a different slanton the problem.”

The membersMembers can be a source of expertisethemselves. They are resident in their authority,and have contact with their electorate on theissues which effect them the most. However,members are not always expert in the scrutinyprocess itself.

One member issue in the new structure wasbrought up again and again in interviews bymembers and officers. Under the old committeesystem new council members would have anopportunity to sit on a policy committee as soonas they were elected, and would be able to buildup knowledge of how the council worked and of aparticular policy area quite early on. Underoverview and scrutiny, it is far less easy formembers to do this, meaning that back-benchnewcomers may have very little idea of how thecouncil works in practice. In-depth policy reviewsare normally carried out by small panels.Normally these are so focussed that thecouncillors who do sit on them will gain expertisein only a very small area. Councillors may beunable to contextualise their knowledge unlessthey receive regular reports on a number ofaspects of a policy area. On the other hand, thefocus of some time-limited scrutiny panels on aproblem enables them to cross bothdepartmental and council boundaries and gain awide understanding of how the Council and otheragencies are addressing an issue and to whateffect.

Although a balance must be drawn between thisperceived problem and the stereotype of longcouncil meetings receiving and noting officerreports, it was noticeable that in some councilsthere were not enough places on committees forevery member to sit on one. This would havebeen extremely odd in the old structure.

Member training

Although the government guidance states that“Local authorities should ensure that all thosewho undertake overview and scrutinyduties…are given adequate training to adapt totheir new roles”, very few of the case studyauthorities had provided training for theirmembers in both the skills they would need tocarry out effective scrutiny and in the new localgovernment structures of which they were part.16

Most authorities had given basic training tomembers and councillors about how the newstructures work, but had not made suggestionson how best to utilise the structures.

“There has been only fairly limited trainingto date on scrutiny, largely due to the lack ofstaff resources. Such training as has been

16 ODPM, Local Government Act 2000: Guidance to the English Local Authorities, para 3.53

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provided has concentrated on structuresand philosophy.”

Most of those interviewed and questionnairerespondents (with some exceptions) showed adesire for more training opportunities:

“I personally think we now need to haveanother teaching/information session on theway the new committees should beoperating.”

In North Tyneside County Council, the HealthScrutiny sub-committee has carried out a wholeyear of training and development in readiness forits new responsibilities. This culminated in a pilotscrutiny exercise undertaken over one day. Themain purpose of this pilot exercise was to testvarious scrutiny techniques. Camden hascarried out training events in issues such asquestioning witnesses and scoping panels:these have taken place regularly since overviewand scrutiny was established.

A number of networks of scrutiny officers, andsome of members, have been set up (forinstance, in the North-East and London).

Recommendations• It is vital that overview and scrutiny

committees and staff maintain goodrelations with departmental officers. Butthis depends upon an authority’s officerculture accepting overview and scrutiny’sright to investigate; and likewise, uponmembers treating officers with respectduring an investigation.

• Co-opting members from outside thecouncil on to committees can be a usefulway of bringing in new experience andexpertise into an enquiry. More use couldbe made of them in some authorities: thereare affinities here with the value ofoutreach. But co-optees should not betreated uncritically, as they may well haveprofessional or personal agendas of theirown.

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Why take evidence?Not only does taking evidence help committeesor panels to reach conclusions, the evidencestrengthens those conclusions. When makingrecommendations to Cabinet and Council, theoverview and scrutiny committees cannotcompel the executive to take up itsrecommendations. The effectiveness of scrutinyat all levels of government is partly about theability of the scrutiny committee to persuade. Ifrecommendations are backed up with reasons,based on evidence—that is both factssurrounding the issue and the opinions ofstakeholders, experts and other interestedparties—the recommendations begin to havesome force.

Evidence based work carries more weight withthe executive and is a crucial accountabilitymechanism. By taking evidence from officersand cabinet members, back-bench councillorshave an opportunity to pursue a l ine ofquestioning with those who have executivepower. This allows both decisions and actions,as well as policy positions to be examined.Questions can be asked in full council as well ascommittee, but in full council there is rarely theopportunity to take a line of questioning.

Evidence also allows facts to become public. Byquestioning officers on their reports, thecommittees can ask for additional information,which is put into the public domain. It is thereforean incentive for officers to maintain performancelevels and for cabinet members to have realreasons for their decisions. One councillorexplained the value added by this process:

“The portfolio holder has produced a paperthat shows the performance managementfigures, and we go through that almost on apage by page basis and pull out the oneswhere we are under performing and say‘why are we under performing?’, what areyou going to do about it?, ‘how much is itcosting us for your bad management?’, and‘we’ll see you again in three months’.”

The Local Government Act 2000 provides apower for overview and scrutiny bodies to requiremembers of the executive and officers of thelocal authority to appear before it and answerquestions. Committees can ask others to attendand answer questions, but cannot require themto do so. (Health authority staff can be required toattend under the health scrutiny regulations.)

Taking evidence from outside the authority, bothfrom external service delivery bodies and otheroutside groups including the general public is acrucial part of the scrutiny process. As thegovernment guidance states:

“Policy development and review will benefitfrom input from all key stakeholdersincluding the local community and otherlocal public, private and voluntaryorganisations, and such organisations andrepresentatives should be involved in policyreviews by overview and scrutinycommittees. In particular, local authoritiesand their overview and scrutiny committeesshould pay particular attention to obtainingthe views from ‘hard to reach groups’ suchas minority ethnic communities and peoplewith disabilities.”17

“the Secretary of State encouragesoverview and scrutiny committees to seekviews from as many communities andinterested parties as necessary to get abalanced picture of the effects of policy andexecutive decisions. In particular, anoverview and scrutiny committee couldconduct a review of how certain decisionshave affected a particular community orarea, taking advice from area committees orforums and other community groups andrepresentatives.”18

However, some authorities have struggled toadapt to this part of their new functions. Forinstance, East Cambridgeshire has only heldone session where anything approximating tooral evidence from outside sources has beengiven to the scrutiny committee. WestOxfordshire committees likewise show a great

Chapter 5: Evidence

17 ODPM, Local Government Act 2000: Guidance to the English Local Authorities, para 3.4518 ODPM, Local Government Act 2000: Guidance to the English Local Authorities, para 3.40.

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reluctance to involve outside groups in overviewand scrutiny.

WitnessesThere are five groups of people that committeesmay want to speak to during the course of theirinquiry:

• relevant officers;• relevant cabinet members;• external ‘experts’;• stakeholder representative groups;• service users.

Internal witnesses

Internal witnesses (off icers and cabinetmembers) are, by their nature, the easiest toidentify:

“We sit down and say, ‘right, we needwitnesses on mental health. Where are theparts of the county council that have themost contact with young people with mentalhealth problems’. It is going to be socialservices, education, probably the youthoffenders services…. We would thennormally contact the heads of service in thedepartment. You tell them that members havedecided that they want to do the project,‘who do you want to nominate as your leadofficer’. They then provide a bridge into thedepartment.”

A lot of authorities only regularly take evidencefrom their internal witnesses. They will often askthe officer to prepare a report on which they thenquestion the officer or portfolio holder, mimickingthe old committee system. Often the reportsrequested are not linked to a wider issue underscrutiny or review, and the evidence sessionleads to the report being noted, in the manner ofthe old system, and no action beingrecommended by the committee. Althoughreceiving reports in this way may help to identifyissues needing attention, solely concentrating onmonitoring in this way is not, itself, an effectiveuse of overview and scrutiny.

External witnesses

Sessions where evidence is taken from externalbodies can have a number of different purposes.Sessions where evidence is taken from external

service providers are important to build uprelations with those providers.

“Because scrutiny has only been going fora couple of years, a lot of these outsidebodies don’t actually know what it is, sothere’s got to be one or two meetings wherethey come along and its all scene setting,background information. So they find outwhat scrutiny is and the members find outwhat the fire service is.”

“We see overview and scrutiny as being abit of a link between us and other agenciesto make sure that our objectives get throughto them.”

The external experts, representative groups andthe service users from whom evidence shouldbe taken can be difficult to identify. However, timeinvested in identifying witnesses reaps greatrewards. Some officer respondents admittedthat they felt their experience within severaldepartments within the council eased thisprocess as they had built up extensive networks.Others might not have this experience andtherefore lack the necessary insight into the areaof investigation.

“Around mental health we had realdifficulty identifying young people withmental health problems. Even health andsocial services weren’t able to say ‘we havea support group’ or, ‘we have a group ofyoung people we consult’. Sometimes itrequires quite a bit of forensic work.Sometimes it is a chance remark orsomething that you see on the web, orsomething you read it a report and itthemnprovides the way forward.”

Making a witness feel comfortable

It is very important to create the right atmosphereto take evidence from any particular witness.Making witnesses feel comfortable is particularlyimportant when taking evidence from membersof the public who would not usually findthemselves in a formal public speaking position.There are many methods available to get thebest out of witnesses. Often committees orpanels go out and speak to witnesses on their‘home patch’. Committees which havedeveloped these skills most effectively includethose in Camden and Durham. In one enquirymembers visited a centre for refugees and spoke

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to them about their experiences of the varioussystems and services they had encountered inthe UK.

“We will give witnesses a cup of tea and putthem at ease. The members are good at that.If it is a member of the public usually we willgo out there and see them. We have been toworking men’s clubs and all sorts of placeswhere hopefully people feel a bit more athome.”

“A group of us went out and talked to someparents in a pretty deprived village and wevisited a support group at a nursery school.Asking them to give a presentation to thecommittee wasn’t really on. But on the otherhand they had things that they wanted to sayand needed to say and they told us.”

“Occasionally chairs or vice-chairs go offand interview people on their own andreport back. Sometimes you deal withpeople who wouldn’t be comfortable in ameeting room—you can visit members of thepublic in their own rooms.”

“It’s about reading how people react to whatyou ask—body language, getting people torelax and give you answers they wouldn’tgive if they were being formal.”

Internal witnesses are often treated in a moreinterrogative fashion as they are often being heldto account. This is again a throwback to the oldcommittee system, where councillors mightoften feel uninformed about the authority’s policyand activities and feel the need to demandanswers from officers. This is not the case inDurham:

“We try to make it a non-confrontationalatmosphere. That is the best thing to get thebest results. People are more open withyou.”

“…particularly in relation to internalwitnesses, you know the word soon gets outif an officer goes along to a meeting and isgiven a really really hard time then theywon’t hold back in telling the rest of thedepartment. The next time we need to call awitness from that department it might be that

much more difficult to get a good witness.People are more open and the process ismore positive”

In some authorities, officers approach witnessesbefore the formal evidence sessions to let themknow what they should expect at the hearing. Thecouncillors and officers claimed that this madefor better evidence as witnesses could prepareand be relaxed. In Preston one interviewee saidthat “we were told if we had questions we were toprepare them in advance and email them throughso the portfolio holders had them so they couldanswer the right questions”. One such case wasan investigation into the collapse of WestHampstead Housing Association in Camden,where the Housing Corporation was invited togive evidence. The evidence already available tothe panel led them to be quite critical of theCorporation’s role vis-à-vis WHHA, and the panelwas also aware that the Corporation was underno compulsion to give evidence. The panel hadan hour-long meeting to draw up questions,which were supplied to the Corporation beforethe evidence session itself. The panel also askedunscripted supplementary questions to followthrough lines of questioning where the initialanswers given demanded a more searchinginquiry: being ready to ask supplementaryquestions is a vital part of preparation for ascrutiny session. However, allowing witnesses toprepare is not necessarily a good thing. It canallow witnesses to prepare stock answers todifficult questions. A fine balance has to bemaintained.

Witnesses to Durham Committees are givenfeedback forms asking them whether they ‘weretreated courteously and put at ease’ and if theyhave any suggestions for improvements in theprocess. This allows the councillors and officersto seek ways to improve the evidence sessions.

Asking questions“Whereas politics before was more aboutmaking statements, scrutiny is about askingquestions and getting information, which isa quite different technique.”

We divided questions into the categories of‘interrogative’ and ‘informative’ in Scrutiny underDevolution.19 The same division can be identified

19 See Sandford and Maer (2003), p. 29

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at local government level. However, localauthorities used interrogative questions far lessthan informative ones: the balance was skewedtowards open questions, inviting informationfrom witnesses. In fact, the divide between thetwo types of question reflects the distinctionbetween ‘overview’ and ‘scrutiny’.

“If you can get the witness to talk about thesubject rather than pinning them down to analleged fault, that’s going to be moreconstructive on the whole. There is a placefor interrogative questions of course, butlargely you want the witness to expandrather than retreat into their shell.”

“You can ask questions for a number ofreasons. A good one is a penetratingquestion where there isn’t an answer on thepapers in front of you, and you get ananswer which wouldn’t have otherwise beendisclosed. You sometimes ask questions,wearing a political hat, when the answer isabsolutely clear on the papers in front ofyou, where you do it so that you can bringout a point.”

The information obtained from oral witnesses isvery much dependent on the questions asked.Although questioning styles may differ, short andfocused questions are most likely to produce theanswer required. The following two questionswere asked by a committee member in ascrutiny committee meeting, attended by one ofthe authors:

“How do you intend to improve thecouncil’s profile?”

“What does ‘further work on staffing issues’mean?”

These are exemplary scrutiny questions. Theyare short (eight words each); they ask a questionwhich was relevant to the issues beingdiscussed; they do not contain long statementsof the member’s own position; and they askabout future policy instead of the reasons behindpast failures (obliging the portfolio holder to givethoughtful, rather than evasive, answers). Both ofthese questions caused the portfolio holder andsupporting officer considerable difficulty, despiteappearing to be fairly simple on paper, and bothestablished that the policies of the council wereunclear. Most other questions in this hearing didnot achieve either of these ends.

“Effective questions are sharp and to thepoint. If questions are long winded andsome of it is irrelevant, then the answer thatyou would received would most likely be ofa poor quality.”

However, we found much evidence thatcouncillors were using the opportunity to askquestions as an opportunity to make speeches.As one councillor put it, there is a “readiness ofmembers to express their own views.” Othersexpanded:

“There are certain people of the old stylewho see the word ‘committee’ and they goalong thinking, this is my opportunity tomake a five-minute speech, and then youhave to say ‘what is your question’? Andthey add the words ‘do you agree?’ to theend. Then, because it is a five minute speechby a member, most officers take the viewthey’ve had five minutes, I’m going to haveten, to explain why it’s not the case that….That radically throws out the timing.”

“I do like to ask questions to which I wouldlike to know the answer. That is quiterevolutionary sometimes, because…generally people tend to ask questions andmake a comment, because it makes themlook concerned. It’s a statement.”

Inevitably, making statements of this kind bringspolitics into the overview and scrutiny committee.This can be irksome for witnesses as well asdistracting from the purpose of overview andscrutiny. In order for the committee to workcohesively, party political point scoring has to beavoided as it will inevitably cause friction withinthe committee. The committee must worktogether if it is to have any impact on theexecutive. Moreover, witnesses may not be sokeen to attend again if they were forced to sitthrough a number of 5 minute speeches. Therewas a general agreement by the respondentsthat members should avoid making longstatements in overview and scrutinycommittees. Statements and points of viewdoubtless have more role when deliberationsover the output of the process are under way anda report is being drafted, but not when witnessesare present.

In contrast to devolved and national levelcommittees, writing of questions by officers wasthe exception rather than the rule amongst our

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case studies. Questions are sometimesprovided by the officers, but most respondentsagreed that much of the time panel members donot follow the suggestions, and ask questions oftheir own which flow from the evidence providedby witnesses. This point applies more clearly toinformative rather than interrogative scrutiny. Arespondent in one authority stated that:

“We tried doing that [having preparedquestions] and it doesn’t work…I must admitI was surprised when I saw how the selectcommittee system works…but once you seethey’ve got the questions there in front ofthem I just wonder how much homeworkthese guys do. They turn up, read thepapers, and then just like actors, read thequestion out. I’ve got a horrible feelingthat’s exactly what they do, they don’t knowwhat they’re asking.”

It is often as effective to ensure that thecommittee or panel is sufficiently prepared itself,than to provide them with a list of questions. InDurham County Council the officers oftenproduce a briefing which explains the informationthey hope to get from the witnesses and a pre-meeting is held. This is an effective way ofpreparing members for the evidence session asthe session will be focused, but there will besufficient flexibility to respond to answers, and formembers to feel empowered rather than ledthrough the process. This approach is commonto other authorities:

“When we had the director of housing andthe portfolio holder in, at the meeting priorto them coming we’d actually gone througha list of topics we wanted to ask them. We’dprepared quite extensively in advance. Thatexperience for me was replicated in othertask groups I was on.”

In some authorities, at the end of an evidencesession in a scrutiny sub-committee or workinggroup meeting, the chair will ask the scrutinyofficer present if they have any further questionsfor the witness. At other tiers of government,officers or clerks may pass notes to the chairoffering possible further questions, but theywould not be invited to ask a questionthemselves.

Good chairing

The committee chair can be one of the mostinfluential factors in a committee enquiry. Keytasks include directing oral questioning, andmanaging the relationship with witnesses. Onechair explained his role as follows:

“The most important thing is having a cleardirection in your mind as to what you areseeking to achieve, and allowing enoughtime for the meeting to come to aconclusion.”

This is a different process from the traditionaltask of the committee chair. Under the oldcommittee system, the chair was the leadingfigure of the committee, the nearest equivalent toa member of the executive. The chair’s role wasto deliver decisions on behalf of the full council.Under the new system, the chair’s task is morefacilitative, brokering interaction between politicalgroups, managing the process of takingevidence, welcoming non-members to themeetings, or taking a lead role in visits toservices or service-users. This is particularlyimportant if external witnesses are present(which was very rare under the old system).

At Westminster, the role of committee chairs hasrecently been acknowledged with an increase inpayment for those who hold these posts, andchairs are only allowed to remain in post for eightyears. In some authorities, chairs and vice chairshave increased allowances, as, occasionally, dopanel chairs.

Chairs may need to be particularly active undertwo circumstances. One is when there is a partypolitical edge to questioning. This was witnessedin Preston City Council, where a Labour memberof the scrutiny committee became agitated at theline of questioning taken by a Liberal Democratmember. The situation was skilfully defused bythe Conservative chair, who took over the line ofquestioning himself. The other requirement onchairs is to prevent members from talking for toolong. In local government, committees weretradit ionally the place in which polit icalstatements were made and principles set out. Asshown above, many members have been unableto move from statement mode into questionmode: this is an example of the problemidentified earlier of trying to make the newcommittees work in the same way as the oldones.

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Recommendations• External witnesses are one of the greatest

advantages of the overview and scrutinyprocess. Panel enquiries should make useof them at every opportunity.

• Members should be prepared to askquestions of witnesses in overview andscrutiny committees instead of makingstatements. Making statements confusesthe new system with the old and will haveno positive effect during witness sessions.

• Short, succinct questions are the mostlikely to gain useful information fromwitnesses. This is particularly true whereevidence must be coaxed out of portfolioholders or officers who may be unwilling togive it.

• The role of the chair in overview andscrutiny is to guide rather than to lead. S/heis not responsible for decision-making butfor managing relationships betweenmembers, and between members andofficers and other witnesses. Thissuggests that chairs have a particular dutyto avoid party political behaviour incommittees.

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Reports“Scrutiny doesn’t need to be a three monthor a six month project. It can be a one-offhour, or an A4 page report…. It might bethat a presentation will satisfy members interms of providing them with informationand letting them feed back their views to therelevant officers…. We had an issue withTravellers and we were able to wrap that upin one meeting where we took evidence froma couple of officers.”

Not all overview and scrutiny activities lead to thepublication of a report with recommendations.However, where investigative work is done by acommittee or panel, it is often useful to draw theinformation into a document, laying out theevidence, and showing the conclusions thecommittee reached and their ideas for furtheraction.

Reports are written by the scrutiny officers inclose consultation with members, in particularwith the chair. The reports are then agreed by thecommittee, sub-committee or panel before beingpassed to the executive. Precise forms ofprocedure are discussed below.

There are a number of factors involved in gettingrecommendations agreed by the Cabinet. Thethree crucial factors are: the writing of smartrecommendations, the procedures in agreeingreports, and the relationship between thecommittees and the executive.

RecommendationsIn order to have a successful uptake inrecommendations, the recommendations mustbe carefully structured. Some respondents wereof the opinion that “you can recommendwhatever you want—you don’t have a budget. It isall pie in the sky isn’t i t .” However, i frecommendations are realistic they are morelikely to be implemented. They should not ask forthings which would be impossible to deliver. Theyshould not be vague, or they cannot bemonitored. In Durham County Council, mostrecommendations are implemented by theCabinet. As one interviewee stated:

”We are trying to make sure that therecommendations are sensible, achievable,and that they are things that we can review.”

A similar process occurs in Camden:

“The whole process has to be geared toproducing results—from choosing suitabletopics and setting sensible terms ofreference through to making feasiblerecommendations. We’ve got better on this.At first, members tended to recommend alarge number of actions, often quitedetailed. Panels are smarter now, and aregoing more for a smaller number of keyrecommendations that will really make adifference.”

“You have always got to be careful not tomake recommendations that have bigresource implications. But all of them haveresource implications because they involvestaff time.”

“When we got to the draft report…weweren’t at all happy with it in the departmentbecause there was a whole series ofcompletely unsubstantiated comments. Italked through my response with theexecutive member…and made sure she washappy with it. And she picked up somepoints to feed in to the chair of the panel.”

This points also to another key way of ensuringsmart recommendations: basing therecommendations on the evidence collated. Asmentioned earlier, having evidence addsinfluencing power to recommendations.

Many respondents felt that the recommendationswhich had the most effect in the scrutiny processwere those made at a practical rather thanstrategic level. One spoke of a “more subtle andgradual influence on policy”. In Camden, suchpractical impacts were at the level of establishinga policy on an issue that had not previously had apolicy worked out; appointing a new officer to co-ordinate better networking, making changes todelivery in order to improve a service; orobtaining an agreement to better monitor anexisting policy.

Chapter 6: Outputs

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The practice of external scrutiny raises issues ofhow far recommendations can be enforced onexternal agencies. Where a process ofpartnership exists, as with health, it is more likelythat recommendations will be heeded, butequally it is more likely that recommendations willbe adopted if they relate to “things that arealready on their way” as one respondent said.The contribution of overview and scrutiny can beto speed up or initiate plans for change which hadbeen under consideration. Some panelrecommendations ask officers or cabinet topromote matters, or ‘urge’ or lobby otherorganisations, including central government.Though this may be done, its success dependson timing and attitudes outside the council’scontrol.

“There’s no point in me writing togovernment departments saying ‘we’ve hada scrutiny panel and recommendation 22says X’. If you’ve got a sensibly constructedscrutiny process that’s running parallel to,or before, a government white paper orinitiative, and comes up with sensibleproposals that you can feed in to theconsultation process, then you stand a veryhigh chance…. But just doing it off the wallis pointless.”

Durham County Council has almost all therecommendations of the committees agreed bythe cabinet. Following the agreement of the draftreport by the working group, the report wouldthen be agreed by the relevant sub-committee,then the overview and scrutiny committee. As theoverview and scrutiny committee has all non-executive members of the council on it,agreement of each report by this committeemeans each report is strengthened by the buy-inof all members.

There is an agreement within Durham CountyCouncil that draft reports are looked at by theChief Officers Management Team to make surethat they are realistic.

“Before we come up with anyrecommendation they are tested out with thedepartment. The members are fairlyindependent on this. If someone came alongand said ‘well we don’t want you to do that’they are more likely to say ‘well we aregoing to do it’ but much depends on the waythat the recommendation is framed.”

The scrutiny officers and relevant committeemembers explain the recommendations to theofficers and discuss them. The report then goeson to the cabinet briefing session (the cabinetmeets in camera before the full meeting). Therelevant officer and chair of the working grouppresents the report to the cabinet in the publicmeeting. The Council Constitution states that theagenda for executive meetings shall include anitem entitled ‘issues arising from overview andscrutiny’. Where an item is not considered by theexecutive within two months, the executive iscompelled to explain why this is the case. Thereis a clear process for moving reports through thecouncil to the cabinet.

In Cornwall, the overview and scrutiny committeechair and the relevant cabinet member presentthe report together to the rest of the cabinet. Thereports are also presented to the Chief Officers’Management Board. This curious alliancederives from the all-party cabinet andconsensual tradition of Cornwall. A cabinetmember interviewed stated, “if a panel ofmembers have looked at it, I don’t feel it’s myplace, as a member of the executive, to in anyway counter, gainsay, or argue with what a panelof members have looked at.” This suggests alevel of decision-making involvement for panelsthat is unusual elsewhere.

In Camden, each panel report goes through aspecified process. If it concerns Councildepartments, it must be read through by thedepartment, which can draw attention to factualerrors or points with which they stronglydisagree. The report must be approved by theOverview and Scrutiny Commission, who willthemselves add or subtract points if they feelthey have not been dealt with. The panel chairand the chair of the Commission will thenpresent the report to cabinet. This means that agoverning party and, sometimes, an oppositionparty representative present the report together.

The full acceptance of recommendations by theCabinet in Durham is undoubtedly, to someextent, the result of the large Labour majority. Themembers do not feel threatened by theopposition and feel more prepared to accept bothcriticism and recommendations of the overviewand scrutiny committees.

Again, the fact that the current Leader hadpreviously been involved in scrutiny makes adifference.

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“The current leader used to be chair ofscrutiny. That makes a big differencebecause he is very supportive of theprocess.”

The review of early years education in Kentindicated the importance of relationshipsbetween the different people involved in theoverview and scrutiny processes. The panelcontained a majority of Conservatives (themajority party), who were able informally to keeptheir cabinet colleagues informed on theprogress of the review. The panel recommendeda substantial expansion of council spending onnursery provision, which ran against the grain ofthe ruling party’s efforts to keep spending downand to permit free rein to market provision.However, the majority party on the panel werepersuaded that expanded provision wasnecessary. There was also tacit support for achange in policy from officers. Hence, it waspossible to build up support for the change duringthe process: if a panel report had been presentedto cabinet in a confrontational way the changesmight not have taken place so easily.

Implementation and follow-upIn order for the overview and scrutiny process tobe fully effective it must be followed through pastthe production of a report. The purpose oftracking recommendations is to ensure thatmembers known what has happened as a resulteither of overview work or of criticisms in ascrutiny committee process. Tracking also aidsthe collective memory of the scrutinycommittees—if members know that a certainpolicy was unsatisfactory six months ago, and isstill not satisfactory, they may redouble theircriticism.

“Our first report had 23 recommendations,then after a year I started following it up.Jaws dropped amongst the officers…. I gota note saying ‘why have you asked thesequestions?’ You made recommendations,now it’s up to us to get on with it. There is noneed to check up on us. So…westraightened that out.”

In the above member’s authority, it was his ownintervention (as an overview committee chair)which established the propriety of membersfollowing up recommendations. Elsewhere, aformal process exists in Camden—there areregular reports back to the overview and scrutiny

committee on progress on action plans whichresulted from panel recommendations, and apanel and call-in monitoring report is producedeach quarter. In other authorities, neither theconstitution nor individual members haveestablished any process, leaving therecommendations of a report in limbo:

“We produce a report, it gets signed off bycommittee, goes to the cabinet and thenwhat happens to it? You tell me—I don’tknow. I think a lot of the time we are atalking shop.”

The fact that most detailed enquiries in our casestudies were carried out by time-limited panelsstrengthens the need for an effective follow-upprocess. Often the responsibility for follow-upwould devolve on to the member who hadchaired the panel—who, six months later, wouldthen be an ‘ordinary’ member again. Alternatively,the chair of the parent committee sometimestook responsibility for following up. It helps toensure that there are processes in place in orderto know what happens to a report after it goes toCabinet. Once the cabinet has seen the report,the recommendations they agreed should betracked through to implementation. NorthTyneside are currently developing trackingsoftware for use by both scrutiny and the bestvalue reviews.

“The key issue emerging now is the need totrack recommendations and make sure theyare delivered, which is monitoring thedepartments where the work is actuallydone.”

Not only is it a case of tracking recommendationsthrough to implementation, but pressing theexecutive members and officers on theirprogress towards implementation on a regularbasis.

“The Council has a tracking system fordecisions of the Council and Cabinet. Inaddition the scrutiny committees and sub-committees periodically call in the Mayor orCabinet members to report on progress inimplementing recommendations.”

“We always re-visit our recommendationsevery six months. We monitor what has beendone. I was on a working group onsustainability. We are going to be comingback to that for the second time because we

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did flag up that we thought that, althoughthey were implementing ourrecommendations, they weren’timplementing them as fast as they could.”

Reports can also be followed up by committeeslooking into the same policy area or sameservice provision a number of years on to seewhat differences can be monitored. Once acommittee builds up a level of expertise into anissue, repeating investigations can be a fastprocess and can retain the pressure on theexecutive to move towards a certain course ofaction.

Recommendations:• It is not improper for overview and scrutiny

to gauge officer and executive reactions torecommendations in advance. This neednot lead to committees abandoning pointswhich they know are opposed by theexecutive. Knowing likely reactions maylead the committee to stress somerecommendations more strongly thanothers, in order to impact strongly wherethey can and play down where they cannot.

• Recommendations by overview andscrutiny committees often relate to issueswhich are already under discussion by theexecutive or departmental officers. But anintervention from overview and scrutiny willoften push an issue several places up theexecutive’s list of priorities, which in itself isa significant and valuable contribution tothe policy-making process. Overview andscrutiny should not be troubled by seeingits contribution in this light.

• It is vital for authorities to have a protocolfor following up reports, which has beensigned up to by the executive, the seniordepartmental officers, and the leadmembers for overview and scrutiny. Areport which is not followed up stands astrong chance of being ignored,particularly if no follow-up is the typicalpattern of events in the authority.

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Cultural HangoverA number of authorities ostensibly conductoverview and scrutiny in a similar manner to theold committee system. They receive copies ofcabinet reports written by officers, and mayquestion officers, demand more information, ordecide to carry out an enquiry through a review.This is not necessarily an entirely ineffective wayof conducting overview and scrutiny, but it canlead to similar problems as those encounteredunder the old system: the need to prepare forhuge quantities of paperwork, lack of time in themeeting itself, and lack of focus on what is beingdone by the council. It can also encouragemembers to focus on the functioning of theauthority and the services it provides—a kind ofproducer interests mentality—rather than lookingat the authority’s interaction with its residents.

Politics in committeesScrutiny committees at all levels of governmentare an opportunity for the assembly body toquestion the executive body. Plenary sessionsare the place where the political parties clash.Committees are where the serious questioningof the executive should take place. Party politicsonly weakens the ability of committees to beeffective in their task.

Recommendations which are based on strongevidence gathered during the course of theinquiry are usually not a matter for a politicaldebate. The recommendations will be weakenedif the whole committee has failed to agree,particularly if they disagree along party lines.Therefore whipping by parties in overview andscrutiny committees is strongly discouraged bygovernment guidance:

“Although this is a matter for politicalparties to consider, both locally andnationally, the Secretary of State believeswhipping is incompatible with overview andscrutiny and recommends that whippingshould not take place.”

However, old traditions die hard in localgovernment, and we found plenty of evidence ofparty political activity within committees.Members normally sit in their party grouping incommittees as they would do in plenary. This

may either be a symptom of, or exacerbate, theadversarial relationships within the committees.Contrary to the government guidance, onerespondent stated that:

“Conservatives have pre-meetings. I can’tsay whether there is whipping in there. Isuspect that if not whipping there is aconcerted attempt to produce a commonview beforehand. It almost defies belief thatit doesn’t happen.”

North Tyneside currently has a peculiar politicalsituation, with a Conservative mayor and cabinetbut a Labour majority on the council. This createsa source of tension between the two. Oneinterviewee stated that, since the election of theConservative Mayor “there has been somenoticeable party political influence in the way inwhich meetings have been conducted.” Oneinterviewee expanded on this:

“[the Cabinet] just put their bullet proofvests on. They see us as assassins. [They]think we are attacking them because theyare Tories, not because of their policies. Ittakes a lot for them to turn round and saythat is a valid point. There is a reluctance onthe other side to see why we are here.”

However, this was not the case in all authorities.For instance, Cornwall County Council has astrong tradition of consensus between thepolitical groups. Interviews suggested that thiswas not an empty boast: the tradition ofconsensus was referred to by manyrespondents as a fundamental factor both inmaking scrutiny work and in influencing theshape that the system has taken on. Cornwallhas only had one majority party in its history.

It seemed to be a common theme that, whereasparty polit ics was common in the fullcommittees, panels were much less adversarialwhen undertaking policy development. This kindof work is more likely to encourage individualsfrom different parties to work together.

Another common theme was that new councilmembers were normally more enthusiasticabout overview and scrutiny, and less prone tomaking political statements in committee.Significant turnover in councillors, of 20–35%,

Chapter 7: Old habits die hard?

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had occurred in all of the case study authoritiesduring the last three years. New councillorstended to abandon party politics more readily inoverview and scrutiny, whilst political division andwhipping was a key characteristic of the previouslocal government structures. As older membersretire, it is possible that political division will retirewith them. And as more members get used toworking together on working groups, it is likely forthe less adversarial relationships created tospread into the work of the full committees.

The relationship with Cabinetmembers

In order for scrutiny to be successful, there hasto be a good relationship between the cabinetand overview and scrutiny committees. A goodrelationship is important because the mutualrespect means the cabinet member is morelikely to take seriously a recommendation of thecommittee, and the committee is more likely towork seriously if it feels that its views will be takenaccount of. While, as suggested earlier, wefound relatively few examples of direct attemptsto influence overview and scrutiny by cabinetmembers, it was rare for cabinet members tocultivate committees as positive forums forpolicy development, especially if committeechairs were not from the executive party.

However, in West Oxfordshire the cabinetmembers attend overview and scrutinycommittees and tend to be vocal during themeetings. Although there can be benefits fromthis (for instance, cabinet members can besources of information and expertise) it canthreaten the autonomy of the committee.

“I do have certain misgivings aboutmembers of the cabinet turning up formeetings and trying to put forward thecabinet’s position because that is not whatoverview and scrutiny is about. We try towalk a tightrope there.”

Possibly the attendance of cabinet members hasthe biggest impact on members of the majoritygroup:

“With one or two possible exceptions on theConservative side there isn’t any realquestioning of things. We have cabinetmembers sitting in on everything. We havecabinet members actually leading

discussions on overview and scrutinycommittees.”

The cabinet member interviewed saw nothingwrong with his sitting at the same table as thescrutiny members and intervening in theirdiscussions.

“Generally I find that they not only questionme, but that they are very open in the sensethat they chair normally allows non-votingmembers to put their oar in because they aresaying ‘what made you do that decision’. Itmight well be that I put up may handbeforehand and say ‘we decided thatbecause….’”

Other authorities witnessed different reactions:on one early occasion in Cornwall, a committeevoted to ask the executive member to leave whenhe attended their meeting. In other meetings inCornwall, executive members attend andrespond when questions are directed at them,otherwise remaining silent. In EastCambridgeshire, the former leader had regularlyattended overview and scrutiny sessions andhad spoken without any protest.

We found increasing instances of authoritiesestablishing annual or six-monthly scrutinysessions between each executive member andthe relevant scrutiny committee. Where this wastaking place it had normally been introduced laterthan the remainder of the overview and scrutinystructure, in response to a lack of opportunity toask general questions of the executive. This is acommendable development, mirroring the‘ministerial monthly report’ in the NationalAssembly for Wales. It permits committees torange over the portfolio of an executive membermore easily than can be done if a specific policyarea is under scrutiny.

Back-bench frustration?A crucial ingredient to successful overview andscrutiny is the enthusiasm of members. Formany of those who were members for a longtime before the changes introduced by the LocalGovernment Act 2000, their new role as back-bench members has left them dissatisfied andun-motivated. As overview and scrutinymembers it is true that they are no longerinvolved directly in much of the decision-makingin the authority. However, in a sense this battlehas already been fought and lost through the

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passing of the 2000 Act. For overview andscrutiny to be successful, a different processand culture is needed.

A vital part of this process is simply thewillingness to make overview and scrutiny work.It is not a passive system, and it will integrate intothe council’s activity, and extend its reach intopolicy, according to the actions of the memberswho carry it out. Where members do not have avision for the system, it is unlikely to work. Forexample, West Oxfordshire appears to be stucka vicious circle: committees will not carry outinvestigative work because they think the cabinetwill not pay any attention to it, but the cabinet maynot pay any attention to the work committees dobecause it lacks the force of evidence.

A key feature of the findings of much researchlooking into the new local government structureshas been the evidence of frustration at the newsystem by many councillors. This researchproject has found that authorities that do no pro-active work, have more frustrated back-benchcouncillors.

“I think in the main most councillors havestruggled. They still can’t get their headaround what it means from being incommittees that have made policy andimplemented policy to having to scrutinisepolicy by a certain view. I think if you wentaround and the majority of members wouldprefer to return back to the old systembecause it has so long been embedded inthem and it is still within the culture of thecouncil.”

“There is still, and this is true of all parties,there is still a hankering back to the oldcommittee system and a feeling that this hasbeen foisted on us and therefore they are notparticularly interested.”

“Overview and scrutiny is a waste of time”

However, it is important to note that this was notthe view of the majority of members interviewed.Many welcomed the changes in principle whilstbelieving that either party politics, or aninappropriate structure, was preventing it fromworking properly in their own authority. Othersbelieved that the new process was working welland was an improvement on the old system.

Most respondents believed that new memberswere far more eager than existing ones to getinvolved in, and make use of the scrutinyprocess:

“We’ve got the old committee members andthe new ones. The new ones want to getinvolved, they’re quite happy to take thingson. You give them a job to do and they goand do it, whereas the old ones are used tobeing spoon-fed. They want to sitback…[The younger ones] are the best—they have a broader education and aremuch less impressed by rhetoric.”

“There are some that are steeped intradition and unwilling to change. But astime goes by more and more take part.”

“More and more members have begun torealise that they have a lot moreinvestigative powers. They can bring aboutchange and hold the cabinet to account andmake the cabinet members change.”

A notable theme from respondents in Cornwallwas the popularity of the scrutiny systemamongst members, many of whom suggestedseveral ways in which it was an improvement onthe old system. Even respondents who weresceptical about its effectiveness so farsuggested advantages of the new system. Onerespondent suggested advantages of the newsystem included “a wider perspective, ability toput pressure on the cabinet, much moreinvolvement in the budget process.” Anothersuggested that members were moreknowledgeable about the subjects theyinvestigated and hence more involved.

“I can give you a dozen examples of peoplewho I know would never, ever have chaireda working party or a committee in their fouryears on the council, and have chaired asingle-issue panel and have become thelead member on that issue and made theportfolio holder’s life a misery.”

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53

This section contains all of therecommendations set out in the previous sevenchapters. We have re-arranged therecommendations here by the actors to whomthey are addressed.

Chairs and committees• Committee chairs, and vice-chairs, should

be held by members of all political partiesin rough proportion to the number of seatsthe party holds on the Council. Wherethere is a ruling party, this will help to offsetany defensiveness of the cabinet againstoverview and scrutiny.

• Overview and scrutiny is an idealopportunity to expand participation, inparticular because of the opportunities forcouncil lors to connect with theirelectorates. Participation and visits shouldbe routinely used in enquiries.

• Committees should aim to carry out avariety of work, balancing the types of workdescribed above. Time limits, and in somecases confusion, has often led to certainpatterns of work getting locked in early onin the process.

• Committees should spend at least part oftheir time on focused work, instead ofsimply monitoring. Receiving reports is apassive process and does not make thebest use of the power available tocommittees.

• Panels are a valuable part of the processof overview and scrutiny. Opportunitiesshould be given to members to work onthem. This implies making the panelsaccessible in terms of time and members’existing workload.

• It is particularly important to balance workbetween scrutiny of internal and externalmatters. These are distinct roles, but bothproperly part of overview and scrutiny.External scrutiny enables relationships tobe built with other organisations, allowingthe council to exercise its communityleadership role. But monitoring and critiqueof the council’s own performance andworking practices should not be excludedfrom overview and scrutiny.

• Co-opting members from outside thecouncil on to committees can be a usefulway of bringing in new experience and

expertise into an enquiry. More use couldbe made of them in some authorities: thereare affinities here with the value ofoutreach. But co-optees should not betreated uncritically, as they may well haveprofessional or personal agendas of theirown.

• External witnesses are one of the greatestadvantages of the overview and scrutinyprocess. Panel enquiries should make useof them at every opportunity.

• Members should be prepared to askquestions of witnesses in overview andscrutiny committees instead of makingstatements. Making statements confusesthe new system with the old and will haveno positive effect during witness sessions.

• Short, succinct questions are the mostlikely to gain useful information fromwitnesses. This is particularly true whereevidence must be coaxed out of portfolioholders or officers who may be unwilling togive it.

• The role of the chair in overview andscrutiny is to guide rather than to lead. S/heis not responsible for decision-making butfor managing relationships betweenmembers, and between members andofficers and other witnesses. Thissuggests that chairs have a particular dutyto avoid party political behaviour incommittees.

Authorities as a whole• Authorit ies should establish a co-

ordinating body to prevent unnecessaryduplication of tasks and to prevent issuesfalling between committee remits. Thiscould take the form either of a panel ofchairs or a single co-ordinating overviewand scrutiny committee.

• The use of time-limited panels should beencouraged in those authorities wherethey are not used. They are largely aneffective way of realising the 2000 Act’saim of moving the scrutiny process awayfrom party politics.

• As smaller committees generally workmore effectively than larger ones, for mostpurposes numbers should be kept low ifpossible. This might also enable morecommittees to be established, reducing

Recommendations

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the workloads of councillors on theexisting committees (though this hasstaffing implications).

• It is not clear whether overview andscrutiny are best carried out by onecommittee or divided between two classesof committee. If the latter, however, it isimportant that information is sharedbetween the two types of committee. Itshould also be possible to ask searchingquestions in an overview committee, andprobe alternatives in a scrutiny committee:the two activities are not so distinct as torequire total separation.

• As the Government has recommended,the presumption in overview and scrutinycommittees, and panels, should betowards public meetings and openness.Where meetings are not held in public,minutes and agendas should be availableto the public. Overview and scrutiny isweakened if it becomes a private, internalpractice.

• It is not improper for overview and scrutinyto gauge officer and executive reactions torecommendations in advance. This neednot lead to committees abandoning pointswhich they know are opposed by theexecutive. Knowing likely reactions maylead the committee to stress somerecommendations more strongly thanothers, in order to impact strongly wherethey can and play down where they cannot.

• It is vital for authorities to have a protocolfor following up reports, which has beensigned up to by the executive, the seniordepartmental officers, and the leadmembers for overview and scrutiny. Areport which is not followed up stands astrong chance of being ignored,particularly if no follow-up is the typicalpattern of events in the authority.

Officers• Forward planning of the overview and

scrutiny process is particularly important,to enable councillors to plan their personaldiaries in advance. This is particularly sofor part-time councillors, and where time-limited panels are used.

• All parts of an enquiry should be timetabledwell in advance. Local councillors’ time isvery limited and precious, as most of themare part-time. It is particularly importantthat enquiries do not sprawl out of the initial

time allocated to them, as has beencommon in Scotland, Wales and NorthernIreland.

• Procedures should be in place to ensureall committee members have an equalright to place an item on an agenda.Officers need to be prepared and able toensure that items do not get repeatedly orroutinely ignored.

• Overview and scrutiny committees shouldconsider how they might developrelationships with the executive to preventduplication of work. It is rarely a good useof time for both executive and overview toreview the same policy. This might, forinstance, take place through formalprotocols or through regular meetingsbetween the executive and a co-ordinatingpanel.

• It is vital that overview and scrutinycommittees and staff maintain goodrelations with departmental officers. Butthis depends upon an authority’s officerculture accepting overview and scrutiny’sright to investigate; and likewise, uponmembers treating officers with respectduring an investigation.

• Recommendations by overview andscrutiny committees often relate to issueswhich are already under discussion by theexecutive or departmental officers. But anintervention from overview and scrutiny willoften push an issue several places up theexecutive’s list of priorities, which in itself isa significant and valuable contribution tothe policy-making process. Overview andscrutiny should not be troubled by seeingits contribution in this light.

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DURHAM COUNTY COUNCIL

A SCRUTINY CHECK LIST

CHOICE OF PROJECT

Take into account:

• Best Value Performance Plan and relevant Performance Indicators.

• Comprehensive Performance Assessment

• Council’s Medium Term Improvement Priorities 2004-7

• The timing of relevant Best Value Reviews.

• Complaints report.

• Timing of inspections or external/internal audit reports.

• Potential litigation or Ombudsman complaint.

PROCESS

(these are possibilities and may not all be appropriate)

• Form Working Group – use existing expertise wherever possible.

• Consider best layout for accommodation.

• How should information be provided – would e-mail only be appropriate (eg. like Sustainability Group)?

• Consider ground rules – timescale, frequency of meetings, any potential conflicts of interest, challenging but positive, effective listening.

• Factual position statement – What are we scrutinising and why?

• What are the criteria by which to judge whether or not the service/policy is effective?

Appendix 1

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• What might be the outcome?

• Agree terms of reference of project and the scope.

• Consider whether external ‘expert’ assistance required.

• Consider whether an external stakeholder should be co-opted.

• Consider the four Cs – challenge, compare, consult, compete.

• What specific evidence is needed (Why? From whom?). What are the main questions to be asked and of which parties? What would be the impact of any proposed changes? Prepare questions in advance. (Oral evidence or written?)

• Check on any other scrutiny reports on this topic with the Centre for Public Scrutiny

• Consult/interview stakeholders

• Consult public?

• Site visits (consult/invite local member(s)

• Consult Citizens Panel/Focus Group.

• Consult/Involve ‘Investing in Children’

• Discussions with officers.

• Consult/ask for views from local MPs

• Speak to Cabinet member with appropriate portfolio, or members’ champion.

• Consider good practice in other areas – how are other authorities dealing with this issue. Is there good practice outside the public sector?

• Consider duty of continuous improvement.

• Frame recommendations.

• Report to Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

• Report to Cabinet and seek action plan/response.

• Set review date.

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Box 1: A typology of scrutinyStrategic policy review: these are large-scale forward-looking reviews into widely-drawn policyareas. Examples include the Review of Higher Education in Wales, a substantial tranche of theEducation portfolio; also the Impact of Drugs on Deprived Communities enquiry in Scotland, across-cutting issue but with a similarly wide range. Despite being forward-looking in their focus,these reviews often look in depth at recent approaches to the policy field.

Forward policy proposal: these focus on particular issues or policies. Examples are thecommittee enquiries into proposals for Children’s Commissioners. These may be inspired byproposed or draft legislation.

Event enquiry: These are backward-looking reviews of one-off events. The ‘disaster review’comes into this category. An example is the Titanic Quarter lease enquiry in Northern Ireland,triggered by allegations made on a television documentary. Compared with strategic enquiries(and legislation), these reviews are relatively rare in the devolved institutions. They offer the bestopportunity for press coverage due to their topical quality. As with strategic policy reviews, thesereviews often find it necessary to delve into recent policy practice. The Exam Results enquiry inScotland is an example of this: the committee heard considerable detail about recent reformswithin the Scottish Qualifications Authority as background to the analysis of the event (a failure ofthe SQA computer systems).

Box 2: Other forms of scrutinyLegislative and secondary-legislative: subject committees in the Scottish Parliament and NorthernIreland Assembly are obliged to consider primary legislation passing through the institution. Thistook a very substantial amount of committee time in the first term. The National Assembly forWales has only secondary legislative powers.

Annual reports and legacy reports: committees are increasingly producing annual reports listingtheir achievements. Both the Scottish Parliament’s committees and those of the NationalAssembly for Wales have produced ‘legacy reports’ enumerating the Committees’ achievementsand suggesting directions for future work.

Budget reports: these are distinct from the work of public audit committees. The ScottishParliament’s Finance Committee reports annually on the Executive’s budget, incorporatingreports from subject committees. The Northern Ireland Assembly’s Committee for Finance andPersonnel produces co-ordinated reports on the Draft Budget and on the financial aspects of theExecutive’s Position Report. Practice in Wales has been less assiduous, with some reportsproduced on annual budgets by the committees.

Non-departmental public bodies: some NDPBs are invited to annual sessions examining theirperformance and forward work programme. This procedure appears to be most common inWales: however, opinion over its effectiveness is divided. NDPBs will frequently be present atother committee sessions, particularly if a review of policies which relate to them is taking place: itis in their interest to keep in touch with Committee opinion.

Appendix 2: Typology of scrutiny in the devolvedinstitutionsThese boxes are reproduced from Mark Sandford and Lucinda Maer, Scrutiny Under Devolution:Committees in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Constitution Unit, London, 2003, p.6–7.

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