Which Executive decisions can be Called In and which can't?

At Blackpool, Officer key decisions considered urgent are also exempt from being called in - unless the Chairman or Vice-Chairman of the Scrutiny Management Committee decides upon notification of the decision that it isn't urgent, and it hadn't been implemented by that time. In such circumstances it could still be called-in. This is a bit of a technical mouthful I know and in practice I've never known it happen.

We also have something of an anomaly at present whereby Development Control decisions can be called in, although our Constitution is likely to be changed shortly to prevent that happening. Again, I've never come across an example of this actually taking place.

As well as urgent decisions, we have a couple of other excluded categories. One is day to day management or operational decisions made by officers, and the second is decisions that take the form of a recommendation to full council. So if cabinet decide to support a particular policy document, but the decision on that lies with full council, the cabinet recommendation can't be called in, on the basis that there will be a full debate at council.

This second one is recent, and based on a call in we had a few months back, which caused a bit of a hoohah, especially as some of the signatories to the request asked to withdraw it 2 minutes before the meeting, as long as they got a promise that the matter would be properly debated in full at council. The request was denied as our rules don't allow for a call in to be withdrawn (and we couldn't actually promise a debate anyway - just that it would appear as an item on the council agenda, and then the normal rules would apply), so the meeting went ahead  with some of the speakers not quite sure what to argue for.