[Peter Marrington]

Does anyone operate a minimum age limit for co-optees. We are thinking of co-opting young people (under 16) to work on an inquiry (rather than asking them to be a witness) Is there any legal minimum age limit people have come across?

[James Walsh]

We have a number of co-optees on our Children's Services Scrutiny Forum in Hartlepool who have undertaken a series of investigations over the years. We have never come across any age restrictions, although they do have a support officer who sits in with them during the meeting and sorts out getting them to and from the meeting.

Please feel free to drop us a line if you need anymore information.

[edit] Just to confirm that our young people do not have voting rights.

[tim gilling]

Great that you want to include young people.

I imagine you'll have all the usual 'safeguarding' arrangements in place. The age limit for councillors is 18, so that may affect younger people being actual co-optees (which suggests a notion of 'membership'). I'm afraid that might be one for your Monitoring Officer - a tipping point might be whether the co-optees are being given voting rights.

Interestingly when I looked at whether there was a lower age limit for members of LINks I discovered that the youngest you could be a member was 10 (the age at which you can get a criminal record).

There are examples of councils establishing young people's scrutiny committees (Westminster is a recent one) made up of young people entirely - but they didn't have the functionality of a committee of local authority councillors.

[Earl Piggott-Smith]

hi, the members of the youth council nominate people to be co-opted to the children and young people scrutiny panel. There is no minimum age - the difficulty I found is that young people can find the formal meeting process and the language difficult to grasp and a bit challenging.

I think very young children will need a lot of support in preperation.