The Home First Working Party Scrutiny – an analysis
Sarah Harvey
This assignment analyses the scrutiny review conducted by the Suffolk County Council (SCC) Home First Scrutiny Working Party (HFSWP). It starts by outlining the background to the review, including why and how the working party was set up, membership, setting objectives and scoping the review. Moving on to look at the review itself, it examines how the evidence was collected and evaluated, and used to inform the resulting recommendations. It then examines the report itself, how it was received by the Committee and the subsequent activity and actions that have taken place as a result of the scrutiny. The analysis concludes by examining what SCC and its Scrutiny Committees have learned from this experience and assessing the overall impact of the scrutiny.
This essay considers a scrutiny review that took place in Buckinghamshire County Council during 2006-07. The subject under review, ie. eating disorders in adolescents aged 11 – 16, was of particular interest because of its multi-agency external dimension. The essay briefly introduces the context of the review, its aims and objectives, the key issues that the review sought to address and the recommendations. The author then offers a critique of the process undertaken and the learning points that came out of it.
Innovation in Scrutiny: the South Norfolk Experience
Christopher Kemp
This discussion of South Norfolk District Council’s innovations in Overview and Scrutiny structure and practice must begin with a description of the dispositions first made in anticipation of the introduction of “executive arrangements” as required by the Local Government Act 2000.
Collecting data and involving the public
James Dearling
In comparison with the traditional committee system it replaced, overview and scrutiny undoubtedly offers the possibility of innovative ways of collecting data and involving the public. Indeed, following the Local Government Act 2000 and the establishment of the overview and scrutiny function, central government encouraged local authorities to adopt new behaviours and engage with the public. However, while central government recognised that a successful overview and scrutiny process was needed to increase openness and transparency, and develop public accountability under the modernised political arrangements, its original guidance left many of the arrangements of the process ‘a matter for local choice.’ Such self-determination might have been hoped to cultivate innovation within the scrutiny function (alternately it may have been a measure to help ensure a strong executive) but this approach, it will be argued, needs revision if the overview and scrutiny function is to progress and engage communities on a wider basis.
Titles and job descriptions for the role of the Scrutiny Officer (SO) vary across different councils, but the literature reviewed for this paper, and the research done by the author with current SOs, support the view that the role is integral to the success of the scrutiny function.
"The accumulation of all power, legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, or few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
James Madison, The Federalist, No.47, 303
The above quotation comes from a piece of polemical journalism written by James Madison and first published in The Independent Journal on 30th January 1788. Madison’s task was to persuade the thirteen states to ratify the Constitution of the United States which he contended had embodied the principle of the separation of powers.
Andrew Coulson
Andrew is the module director for INLOGOV's Assessed Qualification of Oversight and Scrutiny. Read his introduction to these papers.
