Web Content

Hello Alexandra,

I've always thought that the Salford City Council pages are quite good - http://www.salford.gov.uk/scrutiny.htm

I hope this helps,

Stephen Rowan

We tend to use our web pages as our "shop window" and try to keep it up to date. We run consultation excercises from it and try to use it as a live resource rather than a bland description of "this is what Scrutiny does." Having a dedicated Scrutiny address also helps as we can use that as footers on reports etc and other publicity material.

The details are below.

oops - sorry

www.newport.gov.uk/scrutiny

We run a blog for our live content and have reorganised our pages on the council site to support.

The blog also allows us to post up presentations which are probably more interesting than reports.

We link as much as we can to specific pages for minutes agendas etc.

Hi Please find detailed below the link to our scrutiny webpage:-

www.northampton.gov.uk/scrutiny

Tracy

In Hampshire we are also beginning to think about updating our scrutiny site so I have done a lot of looking at other Council's sites. The sites that have been offered as examples on here are definitely some of the better sites I have seen. I have noticed that many other councils barely mention the current scrutiny reviews they have going on, and reports and documents are tucked away in the committee papers publishing system with no direct links which to me seems unhelpful.

Hampshire publishes the supporting evidence documents as well as the final report because we are aiming to be more transparent. I don't think I've seen another council that publishes any more than the final report of a review. I would be interested to know any one else's thoughts on this.

I think one of the challenges for sites of this sort of topic is to make them more useable for your average member of the public who may know nothing about local politics or committee structures etc, while retaining the deeper levels of information for those that require it. Not always an easy balance!

Hi we have a dedicated scruitny website which has information about current and future reviews and copies of the reports we have completed: http://www.scrutiny.canterbury.gov.uk/

I have done quite a lot of research into the use of ITCs and social media in scrutiny and as regular visitors to this forum will testify I need only the most tenuous of excuses to start banging on about it. For the full polemic check out our confusingly titled report; Cannot find server: reconnecting public accountability.

1. Keep it up-to-date: what you are doing now and what is on the work programme for the future is far more important than what you did in 2006. If we accept that scrutiny ought to; a) have a higher profile in the community, and b) encourage the public to engage with and feed into the process – then they should at the very least be able to find out what you are planning to do so that they can get involved. 
2. Contact information: Having visited A LOT of scrutiny pages looking for contact info I would guess at almost half have no direct phone number and no personal email addresses. People want names and human contact and scrutiny needs more public involvement… so no excuses here. Check out Hackney's page.  
3. Advertise achievements: if you can’t show off about the positive outcomes of scrutiny on your own website then where can you? Cambridgeshire show how this is done (although I’d make it front and centre of the home page). 
4. Scrutiny hub: Start seeing the scrutiny home page as the hub for public access where people who have been redirected from your other online content come to find out about what you do. By other online refer to things like Facebook groups, Twitter accounts and blogs. Your engagement efforts have to be coordinated rather than random ad hoc and thematic. The Swansea example is indeed an excellent one. 

 Wow! 

Thank you for your input Adam, that's certainly given me some interesting things to think about. I came across Canterbury's site a while ago and it remains the best I've seen yet. It makes it very easy for those that don't understand scrutiny to find out what they do and all about the work that's been undertaken and that Canterbury rightly seem to be proud of. Unfortunately the site is let down by non-scrutiny related issues - mainly that I can't get back to Canterbury's main site from that page (I would expect the logo on the top left to be a link back) and other logos and objects I would expect to be links actually aren't (sorry, I'm a web editor not a scrutiny officer so I notice these things!)