“What’s the secret of a good scrutiny recommendation?” Chairperson Alex asked me this the other day and we spent a little time trying to work it out over a coffee.

It’s not so much, Alex tells me, that recommendations from scrutiny inquiries don’t get accepted, they nearly always do, it’s more that not much seems to happen as a result.

The response that annoys Alex the most is ‘accepted in principle’.

For Alex, this often means: “Sounds like a good idea but we’re not going to do anything as we believe this is happening already”. (Actually, it’s not, according to Alex)

I asked Alex to think about the times that recommendations had been accepted and something had actually happened as a result. After some back and forth we settled on two success factors.

The first is the ‘weight’ of the recommendation. It seems to help when there is evidence from a range of sources to back up a proposal eg, ‘this is an idea that was strongly supported by the chamber of commerce and received well by local residents when we met with them’. Yes, if it’s more than simply ‘the committee thinks that...’, this seems to help.

The second success factor was a bit of a lightbulb moment for Alex. They remembered one inquiry that had been particularly impactful and, after thinking through why this had been, recalled how the executive member had been involved at the start and then throughout the process. There was even an informal discussion around the draft recommendations to hear the executive member’s reaction before they were finalised.

It wasn’t just that the executive member was part of the conversation throughout, the topic for the inquiry was one that they cared about finding answers for.

After all, if the person receiving the recommendations is not invested, why would we expect them to care about what happens next? Yes, maybe they accepted most of scrutiny’s proposals but was this just out of politeness, to be seen to be doing the right thing?

We didn’t really touch on how the recommendations should be designed, I know some people like theirs to be SMART, for example.

My own thought is that they just need to be succinct and specific.

The test I often suggest is ‘how easy will it be to know this has happened if you were to follow up in 12 months time?’ So, for example, ‘publish a feasibility study’, ‘change the policy’ or ‘report to the committee’ are the kinds of phrases I like to see. Fuzzy phrases like ‘continue to improve’ or ‘provide better information’, not so much.

By keeping it specific you might also avoid another bugbear of Alex’s - when a proposal is ‘partially accepted’. This often happens to complex recommendations - they get ‘cherry picked’.

Anyhow, it seemed like Alex had some ideas about how the next inquiry might work with the first stop being a cup of tea with the executive member.
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I hope this was useful to reflect on 🙏