I was having a catch up with Chairperson Alex the other day, and the subject of induction for scrutiny councillors came up. I thought he had a few interesting points, so I wanted to share them. If you have elections round the corner or new councillors coming onto your committee next municipal year, maybe you’ll find them useful.

Alex doesn’t like the word induction, by the way, he says it sounds a bit too medical. He prefers ‘introduction’ in the sense of ‘you are meeting scrutiny and we are also meeting you - we are all meeting each other!’

Now Alex has been around the scrutiny block a few times, so to speak. He’s actually been a councillor with three different councils and a seen a few scrutiny inductions, sorry, introductions.

Here is what he told me about his first experience:

“To be honest I don’t remember much about the scrutiny session. We had an induction fortnight that involved some useful stuff, yes, but a lot of very long PowerPoints with a thousand bullet points of all the things we needed to know about social care, planning and whatever else. Scrutiny just got a bit lost in the wash.”

Telling me this he was reminded about what a friend who worked at the Welsh Parliament who had told him, a few years ago, about their policy of ‘just in time’ induction. This meant having the introduction to scrutiny in the run up to the committee’s first meeting. They also had team development sessions outside of the formal meetings - another thing that Alex liked the sound of.

Some of the subsequent inductions that Alec had experienced had been better, however.

“A lot less chalk and a lot more talk.” I remember he grinned when he told me this.

“We got to spend time in small groups talking things through. Some of those conversations were more useful than the presentations, actually, and it really helped that we were joined by the more experienced councillors. That’s why I’m always happy to join in with these sessions when invited. I’m always learning something new and a refresh never hurts in any case.”

“Oh, and one thing I really liked was, one year, all of us more experienced committee members got asked ‘if there is one thing you know now that you wish you could have found out when you started scrutiny, what would it be?’”

“I loved that question and kudos to the officer that came up with it!”*

By the way, I wonder, what's one thing YOU wish you had known when you started out in scrutiny?

[*I got this idea from Dave Burn - thanks Dave!]

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