[M Ewbank]

Local Authorities (Executive Arrangements) (Meetings and Access to Information) (England) Regulations 2012
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2012/...tents/made


New Regulations (as above) have been issued by the Secretary of State which, quite significantly in some respects, affect the Member-level decision making process. Some of it is relevant to scrutiny and some "new scrutiny powers":

• Stronger rights for scrutiny members: Where the executive decides not to release the whole or part of a document to a member of an overview and scrutiny committee as requested by a councillor, it must provide a written statement to explain the reasons for not releasing such document (regulation 17).
  

• 10-day rule: where a member of an overview and scrutiny committee requests a document the executive must provide that document as soon as reasonably practicable and in any case no later than 10 clear days after the executive receives the request. (regulation 17).
  

• Stronger rights of individual councillors: Where an executive has in its the possession a document that contains materials relating to a business to be discussed at a public meeting, members of the local authority have additional rights to inspect such a document at least five days before the meeting (regulation 16). Previously no timescale existed.
  

• Holding private meetings: In the past council executives could hold meetings in private without giving public notice. Where a meeting is to be held in private, the executive (or executive committee) must provide 28 days notice during which the public may make representations about why the meeting should be held in public. Where the notice requirements for a private meeting and an agreement of the chairman of the relevant overview and scrutiny committee or chairman of the relevant local authority has been obtained, the decision-making body must publish a notice as soon as reasonably practicable explaining why the meeting is urgent and cannot be deferred (regulation 5).
  

Any commentary on this anywhere? This is stapled and edited from LGiU



KR

Mark

[Ed Hammond]

Hi Mark - I am back at work tomorrow, and will put out a short briefing in due course.

Initial thoughts are that the strengthening of scrutiny powers in this way is welcome. The part about private exec meetings is particularly interesting; in my experience most councils have informal meetings of the executive on a semi-regular basis (eg cabinet pre-meetings) and I'd be intrigued to see how these are now handled, particularly given the powers held by an OSC chair (which you put in bold). I will try to speak to people at ACSeS, ADSO and the LGA to see how councils are planning to change their executive meeting arrangements as a result, because on the face of it this has the potential to be quite wide-ranging.

[Laura Latham]

Hi Ed,

The issue around informal Cabinet pre-meetings, dicussions etc isnt covered.

The regulations cover meetings of the Executive where the public is excluded for part or whole of the meeting in line with the usual categories of exempt and confidential information.

So as such, nothing will change with regard to other meetings related to Cabinet which may be held informally or 'in private'.

Thanks

Laura

[Ed Hammond]

Thanks Laura, yes, you're right. A "meeting of a decision-making body" is just that, and informal Cabinet member briefings and other meetings, even though they might have exactly the same membership and be meeting to discuss the same issues, are (because of their informality) inherently not formal "decision-making bodies" for the purposes of the regs. Although a part of me would be interested to see what would happen if this went to the courts.

Briefing is out shortly, but in summary the regs promise quite a lot but don't deliver it. The situation isn't helped by the fact that the accompanying press release makes claims about what the regs do that are not substantiated by the content of the regs themselves.

[Ed Hammond]

Just to provide an update, I'm waiting on responses from DCLG to a number of urgent queries for clarification before I do any more work on this.

[Ed Hammond]

The District Councils Network has now produced a briefing on the regs:

http://districtcouncils.info/files/2012/...t-2012.doc

We are producing something a little more detailed, which is "on ice" until we get responses from DCLG on some key issues, as explained above.

Hopefully it shouldn't be too long now.

[Paul James]

You are probably aware but the ADSO Forum has a long thread running on this raising multipal issues.
Regards
Paul

[Ed Hammond]

Don't worry, I am - I've been having some detailed conversations about this with people from both ADSO and ACSeS which builds on the discussions over on their forum.

In short we agree with the concerns that have been raised by other parties - in particular the worries over officer decisions, which I didn't realise was so broad at first, as I just assumed that "executive decision" referred only to a small category of delegated decision that would otherwise be made by a cabinet member. Reading Reg 2 on "interpretation" again, I realised that the meaning was in fact far broader.