Cllr Anthony McAlmont has chaired overview and scrutiny since 2014
Buried in the papers for Monday’s full council meeting was a report entitled ‘Scrutiny Improvement Review’. It is the output of work carried out by something called the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny.
I must admit I wasn’t aware of this review and completely missed an earlier interim report, produced back in 2022. Given that the CfGS were
unable to speak to the Chair of O&S, the Mayor or mayoral support officers and Cabinet members or CLT
during the first phase of work I doubt it contained anything of value. But happily, they were invited back to complete their review and the final report is damning.
Here is the summary of findings:
Some recent improvements in minor aspects of scrutiny’s operation cannot detract from the fact that the function is not performing as it should. The core of the challenge lies in poor relationships – principally, poor relationships between Members, but also poor member-officer relationships. Without sustained effort to improve relationships it will not be possible to achieve any tangible improvements.
Trying to improve relationships will be difficult while ongoing behavioural problems continue. There is real personal animosity between certain councillors, and between certain councillors and the Mayor.
It is right that the Mayor should be subject to robust scrutiny, but for this scrutiny to work at all well requires a degree of good faith on all sides. It does not serve anyone, least of all Newham’s residents, for scrutiny to be used as a way to act out personal disagreements and factional Party disputes. There is an unusual, and unhelpful, focus on the need to hold the Mayor to account exclusively, rather than the Mayor, her Cabinet, and senior officers individually and collectively.
It is unsurprising that senior officers do not want to enter the political space, but they are going to have to, as these problems left unaddressed will come to have real-world impacts on the ability of the authority to do business, if this is not already happening. As things stand this general absence of officers from a role of active management within the political space is exacerbated by the unusually high number of interim staff in senior positions.
Member-member relationship challenges influence and inform member-officer relationships as well. They have prompted two undesirable trends:
▪ An extremely variability in the quality of certain relationships. In respect of certain committees, individuals, and topics under scrutiny, member- member and member-officer relationships are quite positive. In other spaces, the opposite is the case. This variability occludes systemic weakness and means that it has been difficult for the organisation to find consensus about the nature of the problem.
▪ A tendency towards defensiveness – from most if not all key stakeholders – about their role in scrutiny, its work, the quality of corporate governance generally and the state of the Council’s political and organisational culture. We have found that in areas where weakness is admitted it, and its impacts, can be minimised – or the fault for that weakness is placed at the door of another individual or group.
It is everyone’s responsibility to work together to admit that these problems exist, that everyone bears some responsibility for their presence, and to try, despite disagreements, to put improvements in place. This will be challenging. While improvement is possible it will require meaningful reflection and self-criticism from everyone in the system.
The report is only 12 pages long and is worth reading in full.
Long-term readers of this blog will know that ineffective scrutiny is nothing new. Indeed, under the previous mayor it was designed not to work. Things have clearly not improved and it is fair to ask why not. There is more than enough blame to go around, but one person in particular should now be considering their position.
Cllr Anthony McAlmont has been chair of Overview and Scrutiny since 2014. He has held the role under both Robin Wales and Rokhsana Fiaz. If, as the report says, “there is not a clearly articulated role for scrutiny to perform” what has he been doing for the past 10 years?
The resignation – or, if he won’t do that, his ousting by Labour Group colleagues – won’t fix scrutiny. That’s a long term programme, the first steps towards which are recommended in the report. But it would show that at long last someone is being held accountable for their failings.
forestgatedotnet 
From the report: “The core of the challenge lies in poor relationships – principally, poor relationships between Members, but also poor member-officer relationships.”
But nowhere is there any mention of relationships between any of them and the public. Residents are not thought worthy of having any useful contribution – we’re just the victims, to be managed and put up with, not capable of having anything relevant to say about the services being scrutinized – even though the scrutinizing is supposedly done to improve to service that residents get.
I wonder what the outcome would be if *we* got to scrutinize the services that are actually for *us* in the first place?