[Ed Hammond]

Looking through some of the responses so far on the Annual Survey, and considering previous annual surveys, one of the things which people have repeatedly said we should do is make more of an effort to get out around the country and attend ordinary O&S meetings.

It's something we've always been keen to do, but capacity and resource constraints do make it difficult. That said, given that it's a long-standing request from a number of people, we do need to give more thought to it. For example, watching webcasts of meetings when particularly interesting issues are under discussion might provide us with a cost-effective mechanism to do this in many instances.

I haven't yet discussed this with my colleagues but thought I could use this thread to tease out exactly how we might attend and observe committee meetings in a way that would be useful to you, but which wouldn't end up using up a disproportionate amount of time at our end (remembering that there are only 7 of us).

[Earl Piggott-Smith]

(13-04-2012 12:45 PM)Ed Hammond Wrote:  Looking through some of the responses so far on the Annual Survey, and considering previous annual surveys, one of the things which people have repeatedly said we should do is make more of an effort to get out around the country and attend ordinary O&S meetings.

It's something we've always been keen to do, but capacity and resource constraints do make it difficult. That said, given that it's a long-standing request from a number of people, we do need to give more thought to it. For example, watching webcasts of meetings when particularly interesting issues are under discussion might provide us with a cost-effective mechanism to do this in many instances.

I haven't yet discussed this with my colleagues but thought I could use this thread to tease out exactly how we might attend and observe committee meetings in a way that would be useful to you, but which wouldn't end up using up a disproportionate amount of time at our end (remembering that there are only 7 of us).

I think it would be idea to have a theme visit which looks at how different authorities are looing at a topic - for police and crime panels. This would give a focus to the work and also be a useful source of information for other authorities who are looking developing policies in response to an issue.

[Sian Parry]

We webcast quite a few of our scrutiny meetings if they're discussing interesting topics so seems to be an easy way of gauging scrutiny across the country ! But not sure if other LAs do this ?