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Dear scrutineer,

What are your scrutiny fundamentals?

Published about 3 hours ago • 1 min read

What are your fundamentals, dear scrutineer? When it comes to local government scrutiny what are your non-negotiables? Your minimum standards? Your key principles? Your ‘basics’?

Well, here are ten ‘commandments’ from me. Make of them what you will.

  1. Scrutiny must talk directly to the executive: Whether in the committee meeting or via letters or reports, the conversation should be between scrutiny and the mayor, leader or cabinet member and not mediated via officers.
  2. The scrutiny committee must own its work programme: It’s down to the committee to independently decide what goes on its agendas - after listening to advice of course.
  3. Scrutiny committee meetings must feature no more than two substantive items: Two hours is a good length for a meeting which gives time for two 40 minute items sandwiched in between all the necessary standing reports.
  4. Scrutiny meetings are for challenging questions and dialogue: Not for lengthy PowerPoint presentations. If the committee is prepared then only a short intro (or none) is required.
  5. Every scrutiny committee item requires feedback: Scrutiny being an active contributor to good governance means that everything has a clear purpose - nothing can be ‘to note’ or ‘for information’.
  6. Preparation for scrutiny must take at least twice as long as the meetings themselves: Scrutiny is like an iceberg and it’s the good work below the surface that ensures the good work above.
  7. Conclusions, concerns and recommendations must reflect cross party consensus: Narrow political point scoring does not make for good scrutiny.
  8. Scrutiny must have access to the officer support it needs: Just as the executive expects support, so should scrutiny
  9. The role of senior officers is to provide advice to scrutiny: With a small number of exceptions, senior officers are there to advise the committee not to be scrutinised.
  10. Scrutiny must have access to the information it needs to carry out its work: Even if this access needs to be creative.

Which of these stand out for you? What have I missed? What have I got wrong?

By the way, you can see and add comments to this post on LinkedIn here.

Dear scrutineer,

Here are some reflections that I hope you will find helpful. They are mainly about local government and parliamentary scrutiny, but I hope that these ideas are useful for the wider scrutiny collective. Yours, Dr Dave Mckenna

Get reflections like this straight to your inbox. I also share them on LinkedIn.

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