Category: News
Scrutiny and the cost of living
Although the cost of living crisis is dominating political conversation this week – especially in light of the rise of the energy price cap – for us in local government this is a crisis that has been going on for years now. For more than a decade councils have had to grapple with the challenges […]
Chief executive’s update: 23 September 2022
With national politics restarting this week after the Queen’s funeral, there is plenty in the new PM’s inbox – and plenty for those of us in local government to think about as the autumn approaches. Levelling Up At the moment we at CfGS are thinking a lot about levelling up. In the trade press in […]
Reviewing council constitutions
[UPDATE: the guide referred to in this blog was published in late 2022 and can be found here]. A bit later in the autumn we will be producing a guide to the drafting and revision of effective council constitutions, funded by the LGA. In carrying out this work we’re get to get the insights of […]
Electoral reviews: offering support
Before the pandemic, we and the Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE) embarked on a project looking at the way that councils (and councillors) engage with electoral reviews. This project is now concluding – it will result in the publication of our research, and amendments by the LGBCE to their guidance to councils on […]
Post-pandemic scrutiny and policymaking
A few weeks ago we published a paper exploring how scrutiny in local authorities can play an active part in helping councils to learn lessons from the pandemic, and to use those lessons to deal with current and forthcoming challenges. This has two areas of focus – looking back (debriefing, and learning lessons, from the […]
Governance risk and resilience
In March last year (2021) we published the “Governance risk and resilience” framework – a set of material designed to support people working in councils (and in other parts of the public sector too) to understand some of the behaviours and challenges that can lead to weakness in the corporate governance framework. Since then we […]
Our annual survey
We have now published our annual survey of overview and scrutiny in local government – the definitive picture of scrutiny’s effectiveness in the first year post-pandemic. You can read a summary of the key findings here – https://www.cfgs.org.uk/resource/what-makes-for-effective-scrutiny-excerpt-from-the-cfgs-annual-survey-2021 . The full report can be read here – https://www.cfgs.org.uk/resource/cfgs-annual-survey-2021-22. The findings are perhaps unsurprising – reflecting […]
How to write effective survey and research questions
The use of surveys to gather and triangulate evidence for scrutiny reviews is easier, now that we can be more confident that a majority of local people have access to the tools to fill them in online – making the use of hard-copy questionnaires unnecessary other than in situations where scrutiny is keen to gather […]
Into the horizon: scrutiny looking into the future
Horizon scanning is often said to be a key part of the contribution that Scrutiny can make. But how far into the future is far enough? Scrutiny has come a long way since its inception in 2000 where a key feature was safeguarding through transparency. The need for transparency has not diminished, but the focus […]
Chief Executive’s update: on health scrutiny, and levelling up
It’s been a busy summer – although nobody really expects August to be a period of “downtime” any more. We head into the autumn with a new Prime Minister and hence some uncertainty over the future of some key national policies with an impact on local government and, by extension, scrutiny. Health scrutiny The first […]