[Ed Hammond]

I'm sure that others will have a view on this but I thought I would also stick my oar in.

I've known Dem Services officers and managers who've taken profoundly different approaches to minutes. In my first authority my manager liked notes to be detailed - in licensing and planning panels they had to be practically verbatim (which was a nightmare). Equally, for some, a note of decisions made is all that's required.

I've always thought that the purpose of minutes, as well as to formally record what decisions (if any) were made, is to give anyone not at the meeting an idea of the general thrust of discussion and to indicate how this discussion led to decisions or recommendations being made at the end. Bullet-pointed lists of particularly pertinent points, brief summaries of who said what and indications of any disagreements between participants can give a richer flavour for someone who wasn't there, but who wants to know what actually happened, rather than what those at the meeting would liked to have happened.

Then decisions/recommendations can be extracted onto a separate action sheet which could take the form of a simple matrix, allowing you to follow them up at a later date, and giving readers a birds-eye view of the committee's business.

I have a prejudice in favour of writing minutes in more detail than most people, and I expect that had I worked in Dem Services for longer, my style would have become tigher, more focused and less, um, discursive. But there you go.

[Nick Beale]

I spent 25 fun-packed years in Democratic Services so I helped develop how things are minuted here and I see two distinct issues, decisions and narrative.

Decisions need to be fully recorded if the minutes are to be of any value. ("Resolved: that the recomendations be accepted" is no help to anyone who doesn't know what those recommendations were).

As a minimum, the narrative should say who who reported on a given item and what documents/information were considered. Where you have major latitude is in the recording of discussions. We use "Among the points raised by members in discussion were:" followed by some bullets. We do the same sometimes if outside speakers attend a main committee rather than a task group.

We studiously avoid attributing those comments to named individuals or any prolonged "he said and she said, then he said" account of proceedings.

[Dave Mckenna]

This is something we are also thinking about at the moment so this thread is useful - would be interested in the outcomes of your piece of work.

I'm also in the 'action points' camp although I have never been a democratic services officer so maybe it's an outsider's view.

I don't really understand why lengthy minutes are needed or who the readership would be.

Here in Swansea we produce 'chairs letters' to cabinet members after most meetings to share views, raise concerns and make requests / ask questions. They are public documents and (hopefully) written in accessible language - I think they can compliment short minutes quite well.

The other issue is whether you want to capture evidence from witnesses in minutes - my view is that notes taken by scrutiny officers, agreed with witnesses and published in findings or review / inquiry reports is a reasonable way to do this.

Finally, for something a bit more far out, I wrote this on social council decision making covering some wider issues / ideas.

[Peter Foulsham]

I'm in Dave's camp, and his comment "I don't really understand why lengthy minutes are needed or who the readership would be" is one to which I would subscribe. That said, this is a purely personal opinion and not one necessarily shared across the board here at Wyre.

For OSC committee meetings the main things for me are the outcomes. I try to avoid the detailed attributing (is that the right word?) of comments to individuals in order to avoid subsequent complaints from members along the lines of, "You've included Cllr Bumble's views, but you have omitted mine". For me, the clarity of future actions is more important than the detailed history.

I believe that the notes of Task Group meetings is a different matter. I think they should be more detailed, in that they are something to which I, and the Task Group members, will need to return in due course in order to provide a comprehensive report of the evidence gathered. In other words, the detail will better reflect the work of the Group and provide the background to their recommendations, as well as making my life easier when drafting the report, which seems to me a very valid reason for doing it that way.

[Tim Young]

When I was Head of Scrutiny at Camden, we also had to thrash out this issue. Our conclusion was that there were some occasions when detailed minutes were necessary - for example, when the (then) Housing Corporation came to give evidence to a panel and the minutes needed to record what happened very accurately and in detail so that the Corporation could be held to what they said and promised - before the final report was published which was a number of weeks away.

To make sure Dem Services and Scrutiny agreed on what was required, we drew up a protocol setting out different types/standards of minutes for three or four common situations - and this helped to ensure that all staff knew what was expected.

Tim

[Tim Young]

Unfortunately, I doubt if the protocol is still around, but you could try the Head of Democratic Services, Asha Paul.

Tim