This is known as the power of “call in”.

Usually, this requirement will be seen as applying to senior directors and Cabinet members, and councils’ constitutions will set out the rules for attendance in more detail. Reasonable notice of the requirement should be given.

You can read more about members’ access to information in “Access to information for elected members” (CfGS, 2023). Members have a range of legal powers around access to information which will mean that it is unnecessary for them to use the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act in order to secure information held by their own authority. Members of overview and scrutiny committees hold enhanced information access rights ((Local Authorities (Executive Arrangements) (Meetings and Access to Information) (England) Regulations 2012, Regulation 17).

When a committee makes a report, it can publish that report and must give notice to the executive (or the authority, of recommendations relate to non-executive functions). This notice should require a response, setting out what action is proposed to be taken, and that response should be public (s9FE(3)). A response to the report and recommendations is required within two months (s9FE(4)), and the response must comply with what requirements were set out in the committee’s original notice (s9FE(5)). In practice, this gives committees making recommendations an opportunity to be specific about the kind of response they expect.

Call-ins can be “triggered” by a request made by a certain number of councillors, within a given timescale (usually, there is a period of five clear working days before the decision being made, when it is signed off by Cabinet or an individual, and the point at which the decision is legally deemed to have been “implemented).

Different councils have different thresholds in terms of the number, and type, of councillors making such a request for it to be valid – there is broad discretion here, but councils need to be careful not to design the requirement in such a way as to inadvertently make requesting a call-in functionally impossible.

Call-in requests may need to be justified by a rationale in order to be valid. Ultimately, the obligation on members to provide reasons for requesting a call-in is all about entrenching the fact that call-in is meant to be unusual. It is mean to be a “by exception” tool used where other opportunities to influence and inform a decision have failed, and where members have sufficient concern about the decision to justify its reconsideration.

One reason for calling a decision in might be because councillors consider it has been made outside the budget and policy framework. This usually means that the decision has to be remitted to Council to resolve, rather than going back to the executive. This is extremely rare, and the council’s Monitoring Officer is best placed to make a judgement as to if and when it applies.

The validity of a request may be determined either directly by the Monitoring Officer, or by a relevant scrutiny chair on the Monitoring Officer’s advice – it will depend on the council’s constitution. There will usually be a need to make a decision on validity quite quickly.

Council’s constitutions usually provide that a meeting be convened to hear the call-in within 10 days of a valid request. Some councils convene a special meeting of an existing committee to do this (where the call-in is the only item on the agenda). If an ordinary meeting of the relevant committee is within this time period, some councils will seek to place the call-in on the agenda of that meeting (although this can be risky, as it may hinder the transaction of other items – especially as discussion and debate around call-in can be lengthy). Finally, some councils have as part of their committee structure a “call-in (sub)-committee”, which is convened only when a valid call-in is made, with a distinct membership.

Relevant members and officers will need to be required to give evidence at the meeting. This may include people from outside the council.

Councils may or may not have a formal process for how call-in meetings should be conducted – if such a process exists it will usually be set out in the constitution.

Usually the members requesting the call-in will have an opportunity to address the meeting first. These members may or may not be members of the committee itself.

There will then be a debate and discussion framed around the reasons for the call-in.

At the end of the discussion the chair will determine which of three courses of action the committee could take.

• Recommending that the decision be withdrawn entirely (ie that it not be implemented);
• Recommending that the decision be amended prior to implementation (some councils do not provide for this option in their governance arrangements);
• Recommending that the decision be implemented as it currently stands.

A recorded vote may be is taken, or the committee can resolve its approach through general agreement.

The decision with the recommendation from scrutiny is then remitted back to the original decision-maker, who will take a view on what action to take. In the vast majority of instances the decision goes on to be implemented unamended. It is for this reason that we tend to talk about call-in as a tool for delay and debate rather than for actual change.

This does not mean that call-in has no impact, however. That impact comes about in a couple of ways, and is driven by the fact that council executives usually want to avoid call-in, because it is time-consuming, causes delay in what may be business-critical issues, and can also be reputationally damaging. So:

• The executive may seek to pre-empt call-in by opening up policy development, or opportunities for pre-decision scrutiny, on matters where they think call-in might be a risk;
• The executive may promise to give scrutiny a larger role in the overview of how decisions come to be implemented – performance management, and so on – in a way that brings organisational focus to the issue, and hence seeks to mitigate the risks that scrutiny members might see as being present.