Councillor Bob doesn’t go to scrutiny committee pre-meetings. He says he’s happy to do his own thing and doesn’t need telling what to do. This is a problem for Vice Chair Jo, though, as she thinks that pre-meetings are really important. But what do you think?

Let me tell you a little more.

Jo thinks that it’s better if everyone goes to the pre-meeting. Her committee gets together for 30 minutes before the formal meeting to agree who is going to lead on what questions and to pick up anything that might be better discussed in private.

She says she has found it super useful when she has been chairing, to help her prepare as a chair, and feels it allows the committee to have more impact. Jo has had feedback from others attending scrutiny meetings that the committee comes across as well organised and focussed and she puts this down, in part, to the pre-meetings.

The issue for Jo is that, when Bob asks his question, it can set the committee off in an unexpected direction or cover something that someone else had prepared to ask about later on. It’s not that Bob’s questions are unhelpful, sometimes the opposite, but everything would be better managed if others on the committee knew what Bob was thinking beforehand.

When she does chair, I know Jo tries hard to make sure Bob gets a fair turn even if he is not part of the questioning plan. She knows that Bob is dedicated and he is always sat ready when the other committee members arrive at the meeting.

I also had a chance to speak to Councillor Bob about this.

He explained that he has been involved in scrutiny a long time, almost since the start, and is perfectly comfortable with how he does things. He always reads the papers and thinks carefully about what he’s going to ask.

He also thinks that scrutiny needs a degree of unpredictability and committee members need to be prepared to be spontaneous. He says that things can get a bit sterile if everything is managed according a pre agreed questioning strategy. In fact, he told me, he thinks he’s doing the committee a favour by throwing the occasional, unexpected spanner in the works.

So, what do you think? Do you empathise with Jo more or with Bob?

Personally, I’m not sure. On the one hand I’m reminded of Ed Hammond at the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny, who describes scrutiny as a team sport. And we know that committees that employ questioning strategies are likely to be more effective. On the other hand I suspect we may need to accept and even embrace the fact that there will always be committee members who value their independence.

Scrutiny is about being independent minded after all!