CfGS is pleased to invite you to join us and fellow scrutiny members, officers and others passionate about good governance at our Annual Scrutiny Conference on Wednesday 1st December 2021. Following a year off due to COVID, we are going ahead with a much needed in-person event returning to the fantastic King's Fund venue near Oxford Street, London. The day will provide you with a unique opportunity to meet-up, network, share learning and ideas and hear from thought-provoking speakers. Conference focus As we hopefully enter into a period of pandemic recovery, it is important to reflect on the ...
Resilience in Local Government As the new decade unfolds and we reflect on the past 10 years in local government, it is timely to review the current position of local government and its ability to respond to austerity, uncertainty and how well it is prepared for future threats and opportunities. Whilst there have been some examples of failure, we would argue local government is a collectively a showcase for organisational resilience. ‘Resilience’ has become a buzzword across many disciplines, and for a concept traditionally applied to engineering, ecology and psychology its transfer to other contexts involves a degree of interpretation. ...
We’re hoping to do some work in the coming months on how scrutiny can engage with the climate emergency – engaging with the global challenge to understand the practical local action that can be undertaken to both mitigate and adapt to the crisis. The next meeting of our Advisory Board is devoted to the subject, and we’ll report on that discussion in the due course – in the meantime, here are some introductory thoughts. The nature of climate change, as a topic, is a tough one for scrutiny to tackle. It is urgent, and its is high profile – ...
On 4th December, the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny will host its annual local government scrutiny conference in London where around 150 scrutiny practitioners will gather to focus on this year’s theme of ‘Strategies for Success’. At the event we would like to showcase examples of scrutiny work that you are most proud of. To do this we’d like you to send us examples that we can share. To make it easy and hopefully interesting for others, they can come in any format that suits you – with a few guidance notes: The audience is your fellow local government scrutiny ...
Are you bold enough to conduct a scrutiny review into your council’s preparations for Brexit? I ask because the shape and complexion of our relationship with the EU beyond the end of March 2019 still looks unclear. There is, it seems, the real prospect of the Government not being able to negotiate a “transition deal” – an agreement about the extent to which our existing relationship will remain once we leave. If it is impossible to negotiate such a deal there is a real risk of the UK “crashing out” – the “no deal” scenario which has been prominent in ...
(EDIT, September 2018: We have now published more information about the overview and scrutiny guidance, which you can find here) We are working with MHCLG to produce guidance on the operation of local authority overview and scrutiny, which we expect will be published during December. This guidance follows the Communities and Local Government Select Committee’s inquiry into overview and scrutiny, which reported late last year, and a Government commitment shortly afterwards that such guidance would be issued in due course. ...
One of the recommendations made by the Communities and Local Government Select Committee when they investigated overview and scrutiny was that councils experiment with the idea of directly elected chairs of overview and scrutiny committees. Of course, in a strict sense, this already happens. Councillors vote on appointments to scrutiny committees, including chair positions, at council AGM. What the Committee were after was something a little different – something that echoes similar reforms in Parliament in 2010, reforms which are generally seen as having led to something of a renaissance in the impact and effectiveness of Parliamentary select committees. To ...
Last week, the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee had a bit of a public tussle with Dominic Cummings, former special adviser to Michael Gove and more recently campaign director for Vote Leave. The CMS Committee wanted to speak to Cummings about inconsistencies between evidence he had already given to the Committee and more recent evidence which suggested that Vote Leave had sought to swing the referendum vote by planting “fake news” on Facebook. How does this kind of thing usually play out? In recently years we’ve seen this happen a couple of times – first with Rupert Murdoch and ...
In our previous blog dedicated to the annual scrutiny survey 2017 results (key statistics and infographics available here) we shared our ideas on scrutiny’s role and various methods of agenda prioritisation. In this blog, we would like to discuss two other outstanding issues – cultural change, and how can scrutiny show its impact and value. Starting with the latter, scrutiny can change perceptions around its work and be able to easier demonstrate its value through at least two channels - through changing recommendations and their continuous tracking and through a different approach to annual scrutiny reports. In our previous research, ...
One of the immediate consequences of central Government intervention in councils - the kind of intervention that is expected imminently in Northamptonshire - is that commentators and journalists begin to crawl over the council, dissecting what went wrong and offering their own insights. These sorts of “noises off” are often precisely what the council involved – bruised after brutal criticism, reeling with the thought of what comes next – doesn’t need. This period is a punishing one for councillors and officers, many of whom have done nothing wrong but who find themselves attached to a council whose name will be ...
Last week, the Government produced its response to the Communities and Local Government Select Committee’s inquiry on overview and scrutiny in local government. The full response can be found here – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-authority-overview-and-scrutiny-government-response-to-select-committee-report This blog post focuses on those areas where Government has responded – the report itself covers some other issues, which we will be looking at and taking forwards separately. Some of the main themes comings out of it are: Government plans to issue new guidance on scrutiny (the last guidance of any kind having been issued in 2006); Government is open to further discussion on the election ...
Before I went off on paternity leave I saw an interesting blog about how New Orleans is using “big data” to improve performance and accountability. A few years ago, big data was the big thing in public services – the idea that professionals gathering information from a wide range of sources to give them as good an idea as possible about how services are experienced by people on the ground – and how we can find novel solutions to the complex challenges they face. The blog is a good read (you can find it at https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/new-look-new-orleans/?utm_source=Centre). It ...
We can all tell stories about times when we have been in meetings and large amounts of time have been expended by those present arguing volubly about something comparatively insignificant, only to neglect something extremely important. My own personal example is from a scrutiny committee which I was observing about five years ago, where members spent nearly an hour talking about the rights and wrongs of a £5,000 grant, then to rattle through the scrutiny of the council’s entire capital investment programme in less than five minutes. This is known as bikeshedding, or more formally, “Parkinson’s law of triviality”. Cyril ...
The LGA is currently inviting volunteers to take part in peer reviews. Part of the package from which LGA member councils benefit is the offer to have a “corporate peer challenge” carried out to review the health and direction of the authority and its work. This is not an inspection, but a process by which a small team of fellow councillors and officers are invited by the authority to take a look at the council’s systems, processes and outcomes, and to make recommendations about what might be improved. There is not a complex methodology for this process – it relies ...
We hope that 2017 proves less interesting than 2016. Particularly in the weeks following the referendum, I seemed to get very little work done, as about eight years’ worth of news seemed to have been compressed into only a few days. Not only was there a huge amount happening on the international and national stages; local government saw some big changes too. The big events in the news must have been Donald Trump’s election and Brexit – and it’s important to remember that it will be in 2017, with the new President’s inauguration and the (expected) triggering of Article 50 ...
We’re publishing the draft of a new self-evaluation framework for comment and criticism. You can find it here . Back in 2006 we produced the first of these frameworks. Practitioners have always been keen to hold the mirror up to scrutiny itself, to review ourselves and how we conduct our work. But in recent years those reviews have attained an added urgency. The pressure to make financial savings provokes us to think about scrutiny in different ways. In the worst circumstances, this can mean money taken away from scrutiny without any thought being put into how it must change as ...
After what seems like a very long wait, Government has now published a draft of the Order which sets out more detail for combined authorities on the form of their scrutiny arrangements. The Order will probably complete its passage through Parliament in January, but will not come into effect until 8th May 2017. ...
Last week, we published our latest piece of research on devolution governance: "Governance and devolution: charting the way". Despite the uncertainty around the direction of the devolution agenda itself, areas around England are working hard to have robust systems for decision-making and accountability in place by May 2017, when a number of them will have Mayoral elections. These areas have all experienced hurdles they’ve needed to overcome. Working through relationships with Government has, for some, been tricky. Thinking about the relationship which will apply between the Mayor and the Combined Authority has provoked some areas to think of ways to ...
With winter comes emergencies and floods. Last year, we published a detailed blogpost setting out some ideas for practitioners – this post is just intended as a gentle reminder, now we’re heading into the season when this kind of thing now happens with alarming regularity - starting with the first winter storm of the season last week. Council scrutiny functions have unique powers to oversee local flood risk management plans (originally brought in by the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009). This follows the significant success that scrutiny had in some areas (especially Gloucestershire) engaging with the Environment ...
In July 2015, the NHS England Board agreed on new standards and service specifications for congenital heart disease services and developed a three tier model with split levels of treatment options and responsibilities. The model divides all centres into the following: Specialist Surgical Centres (Level 1) that provide the most highly specialised diagnostics and care including all surgery and most interventional cardiology Specialist Cardiology Centres (Level 2) that provide specialist medical care, but no surgeries or interventional cardiology Local Cardiology Centres (Level 3) that provide initial diagnostics and ongoing monitoring and care, and services run by general paediatricians/cardiologists with a ...
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