[Suzanne O'Leary]

So, in relation to County & Districts in two tier areas. Are they saying that Counties can make recommendations (on LAA target issues) to partner organisations, but Districts can only make recommendations to partner organisations via the County??

[Michael Chard]

Also although seemingly scrutiny will be recieving no additional resource from central government for the forseeable future, the CLG are saying that they are looking for local authorities to work together at a sub-regional level to hold the Leaders Board (made up of LA leaders from the region) to account.

The formation of a joint scrutiny committee at such a level would take up huge resource in terms of both finance and officer time. A nice idea in theory, in practice unworkable without additional finance from central government.

[Suzanne O'Leary]

sorry to be dumb! These don't appear to be the regulations that would allow us to form a joint County/District LAA scrutiny committee. Or are they?...!

[Michael Chard]

Apologies, I have posted a reply on the wrong forum link! I was meant to comment on the 'strengthening local democracy' consultation thread.

[Sue Crosland]

There is not a single word of difference between the draft and what has been finalised, despite LGA, CfPS and individual councils making some substantial comments within a very tight timetable.

However, we now have powers for district councils to scrutinise LAAs. To reply to queries above, the recommendations to partners don't have to go via the county, but the county does have to be given information about them, which is fair enough as the LAA is county-wide with the county council having a lead/co-ordinating role. The sixth paragraph means that if a district produces a scrutiny report on the LAA, it has to send it to the county council and can require a response (similar to the way scrutiny can now require a response from its own council executive). The seventh paragraph gives powers for the district to make recommendations direct to partner organisations (having sent the report to the county council, but in no way conditional on the county's response) and require them to have regard to the recommendations. The exception is NHS partners, who are explicitly excluded. If a district scrutiny report made recommendations to the NHS on Local Area Agreement matters, you would have to send that to the county and seek their endorsement.

We still don't have regulations for joint committees in two tier areas. CLG is using the new Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill to amend the law on this, tying it in with a provision to create other types of joint scrutiny body. They could have dealt with this separately, or issued regulations on that now, and changed them later. But they didn't.