The latest views and opinions from members of the CfGS teams and occasional guest blogs.
Earlier this year, we published guidance to support councils to engage with Ofsted inspections of local authority children’s services under the “inspecting local authority children’s services” (ILACS) framework. This blog ...
At the recent North East Scrutiny Joint Officer/Member Network, Scrutiny and Democracy Support Officer, Jonathan Lunness from South Tyneside, presented a report on the 'Commission on Tackling Poverty in South ...
If you are a councillor on a health overview and scrutiny committee, or an officer supporting one, you will want and need to know about the forthcoming introduction of the ...
To empower or intimidate? When I started my secondment with CfGS I didn’t anticipate the fascination I would develop with council chambers. They really are the most enchanting spaces, each ...
Public participation par excellence Recently I wrote out to colleagues asking for approaches to how Councils invite public participation at Committee. I must begin with a huge thank you to ...
Working in local government is unlike any other organisation and working in democratic services and scrutiny is unlike any part of local government! It’s a balancing act between providing support ...
Hot off the heels of our own Annual Conference in mid-June, CfGS then attended the LGA Conference 2023 in early July, joined by our colleagues the Association of Democratic Service ...
With the local elections having recently taken place, many council officers are thinking about putting together a structured training and development programme for their newly or returning elected members and ...
Next year we celebrate our 50th anniversary. That’s nearly half a century investigating complaints about councils. Each year we investigate thousands of cases, many shining a valuable light on people’s ...
As you may be aware, we recently held our Annual Conference at the King’s Fund in London! Now that the dust has settled, we have drafted this blog to recap ...
ADSO, CfGS, LLG (the good governance hub) are in attendance at the LGA Conference 2023, stand T9. Join us to explore: • Learnings from best practice and poor practice ...
Nearly every year since 2004 CfGS has carried out an annual scrutiny survey. The intention of the exercise is to understand not only how scrutiny is carried out, but how ...
Not the most encouraging of phrases is it, really? But true in part. As we approach the elections, and the first that requires voter ID, it is reasonable ...
An Ofsted monitoring visit letter to Devon in July 2021 stated that the “quality and effectiveness of scrutiny and critical challenge provided by elected members and the corporate centre are ...
Local Public Accounts Committees – You Heard It Here First It’s been a few weeks since the publication of the Labour Party’s ‘A New Britain: Renewing our democracy and rebuilding ...
This post represents a “first look” at the just-published of the English Devolution Accountability Framework – the early thoughts of our Acting Chief Executive rather than, for the moment, the ...
For Councils, May is a time of change. It’s when Annual General Meetings are held and changes in positions among council members, or important changes to constitutions tend to happen. ...
CfGS is currently (February 2023) reviewing its material on the committee system. In light of this activity, some of our thinking on how councils approach committee system operations, and governance ...
This week (on 26 January) Lisa Nandy MP announced that the establishment of local Public Accounts Committees would form part of a new approach that the Labour Party would take ...
Over the past few months we have been working to better understand how the arrangements for scrutiny of health and care services will be changed by the 2022 Act. In ...