Monday's Council Meeting
More commentary on Monday's Extra-Ordinary Council Meeting.
In many ways the meeting was a useful training session for Councillors on Council procedure, rather than a debate on the short-term Leisure Contract, which this Blog has covered in some detail (see earlier posts).
Extra-ordinary Council meetings are no doubt great fun and the acoustics of Meeting Room 1 make it much more lively, but in many ways they indicate a failure of process in a number of ways:
1. The GLL takeover of SCL was really a done deal. The big issue is the letting of a much longer contract in 2 years. If the Tories are serious about the issue they will use the Performance Commitee for post-decision scrutiny so lessons are learned for the future. In addition they should use the Leisure SCAG for pre-decision scrutiny of the 2009 contract. If they don't now do this the Lib Dems will rightly be able to criticise them after this debate.
2. The Council meeting also illustrates the fact that without an all-party Strategy Committee Tories will feel excluded from the decision-making process. The Lib Dems should offer them a place instead of the Scrutiny Chairs and the Tories should accept, however I suspect they will now refuse. Whilst I think they were right to refuse the Scrutiny Chairs (especially after the Lib Dems excluded the opposition from them in the 2002-06 period), I think they would be wrong to refuse a place on Strategy even if they want more than one. If they were to sensibly accept, they would need to ensure they were clear as to their position on issues prior to them coming to Strategy. So far they have not yet demonstrated that level of clarity, thus we end up having extra-ordinary Council meetings as a mechanism of post Strategy decision scrutiny.
3. The current Scrutiny Structure is weak. An alternative would be for Scrutiny Co-ordinating Committee to be beefed up as the Principle Overview and Scrutiny Commitee (with the audit role farmed off to a separate Audit and Performance Scrutiny Committee) with the Tories offered the Chair of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee (which they should accept - Graham Whitham would make an excellent choice?) with some stronger taskgroups and existing and some new SCAGs replacing the other Performance Committees. I suspect this sort of structure may well be adopted by next Summer.
I currently assume that lessons will be learned from this process and we may not see another extra-ordinary Council meeting.
In many ways the meeting was a useful training session for Councillors on Council procedure, rather than a debate on the short-term Leisure Contract, which this Blog has covered in some detail (see earlier posts).
Extra-ordinary Council meetings are no doubt great fun and the acoustics of Meeting Room 1 make it much more lively, but in many ways they indicate a failure of process in a number of ways:
1. The GLL takeover of SCL was really a done deal. The big issue is the letting of a much longer contract in 2 years. If the Tories are serious about the issue they will use the Performance Commitee for post-decision scrutiny so lessons are learned for the future. In addition they should use the Leisure SCAG for pre-decision scrutiny of the 2009 contract. If they don't now do this the Lib Dems will rightly be able to criticise them after this debate.
2. The Council meeting also illustrates the fact that without an all-party Strategy Committee Tories will feel excluded from the decision-making process. The Lib Dems should offer them a place instead of the Scrutiny Chairs and the Tories should accept, however I suspect they will now refuse. Whilst I think they were right to refuse the Scrutiny Chairs (especially after the Lib Dems excluded the opposition from them in the 2002-06 period), I think they would be wrong to refuse a place on Strategy even if they want more than one. If they were to sensibly accept, they would need to ensure they were clear as to their position on issues prior to them coming to Strategy. So far they have not yet demonstrated that level of clarity, thus we end up having extra-ordinary Council meetings as a mechanism of post Strategy decision scrutiny.
3. The current Scrutiny Structure is weak. An alternative would be for Scrutiny Co-ordinating Committee to be beefed up as the Principle Overview and Scrutiny Commitee (with the audit role farmed off to a separate Audit and Performance Scrutiny Committee) with the Tories offered the Chair of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee (which they should accept - Graham Whitham would make an excellent choice?) with some stronger taskgroups and existing and some new SCAGs replacing the other Performance Committees. I suspect this sort of structure may well be adopted by next Summer.
I currently assume that lessons will be learned from this process and we may not see another extra-ordinary Council meeting.
posted by Charlie Mansell at 4:00 pm
2 Comments:
sound advice to the 22
regards
jx
Thanks for that!
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