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 ideas a bit further and explain more about the way we are rethinking our own framework for evaluating scrutiny in local government.Just as we have seen in our last couple of blogposts, demonstrating “influence and impact” is difficult. Study inevitably leads to more questions; ...
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 recent paper, “Select committees under scrutiny”, written by Hannah White at the Institute for Government.These pieces of research identified respectively a number of sources for select committees’ influence, and ways to measure that influence. Those sources and measures are, I’d suggest, relevant to local ...