Author: Ed Hammond
Survey on devolution governance
The Centre for Governance and Scrutiny wants to understand the views of local politicians, council employees and other local people about the process of devolution currently underway in England. In particular, we want to understand people’s views of governance. That means the way that decisions are made and by whom under devolution, and how those […]
Combined authority consultation – what do *you* think of devolution?
Combined authorities – and areas aspiring to establish combined authorities in the near future – are taking the first steps towards introducing the concept of devolution to local residents, and inviting their views. Devolution is complicated. It’s no Schleswig-Holstein Question, but its twists and turns still baffle even those of us whose jobs it is […]
Standards for standards, and whether we need to revisit councillor conduct
It’s over five years now since the abolition of Standards for England (formerly known as the Standards Board). My first encounter with it was the faintly surreal training video which the Board produced way back in its early days. Connoisseurs will recall that it starred the actor Andrew Hall (he played one of Wendy Craig’s sons […]
Collaring complaints – can ‘dip testing’ help us learn from individual failures?
We often talk about scrutiny’s role in handling and mitigating major systemic failure. Our publication “Hiding in plain sight” highlighted the critical responsibility for scrutiny in recognising and acting on this kind of (often catastrophic) failure for public authorities. But where does the intelligence come from to allow scrutiny to look at these systemic issues? […]
Devolution, local scrutiny and the Public Accounts Committee
The Public Accounts Committee has been interested in the Government’s policies on English devolution for some time now. Earlier this year, they put out a report on accountability and devolution which we critiqued here. It’s safe to say that the PAC view on scrutiny has undertaken something of a pivot since that report. More recently, […]
Evaluating scrutiny
This is the third in a series of blogposts reflecting on how the work of scrutiny might be evaluated. In the first two posts (here and here), we reflected on recent evaluations of the work of select committees by the Constitution Unit and the Institute for Government. In this post, we’ll develop some of those […]
Design experiments for local democracy
A #notwestminster and CfGS initiative What is this? #notwestminster brings (or bring, if you consider them to be a plural) people together to create and share new ideas for doing local democracy. You can find out more about it, or them, here . The Centre for Governance and Scrutiny is a charity which does work on […]
Brexit, devolution… and scrutiny?
Following the referendum result there’s a lot of chatter about the likely impact of the decision on local government and the devolution agenda. If this seems parochial – my God, we should be talking about macroeconomics, the invocation of Article 50 of the TEU and the Labour leadership crisis! – it’s important to recognise […]
Impact and influence: more lessons for local government from select committees
This is the second of three blogposts about scrutiny’s impact. In the first post of this series, I introduced two recent pieces of research carried out into the impact of select committee work – “Selective Influence”, a detailed study published in 2011 by Meg Russell and Meghan Benton at UCL’s Constitution Unit, and a more […]
Scrutinising select committees
This is the first of three blogposts about scrutiny’s impact and how scrutiny might be improved. It anticipates the publication by us at the end of the summer of a revised methodology for local areas to use both to evaluate their existing scrutiny arrangements and to review and design new ones – joint systems and […]