As I wrote earlier in the week, the conduct of the overview and scrutiny function at Newham council has been severely criticised in a report from the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny.
But what is overview and scrutiny, and why is it important?
The role that overview and scrutiny can play in holding an authority’s decision-makers to account makes it fundamentally important to the successful functioning of local democracy. Effective scrutiny helps secure the efficient delivery of public services and drives improvements within the authority itself. Conversely, poor scrutiny can be indicative of wider governance, leadership and service failure.
That’s from the ministerial foreword to 2019’s “Statutory Guidance on Overview and Scrutiny in Local and Combined Authorities” written by then-minister for local government Rishi Sunak MP. I wonder whatever happened to him?
Overview and scrutiny committees have been part of the local government landscape since 2000 and are mandatory for local authorities with executive governance arrangements, which means councils with a leader and cabinet or a directly-elected mayor. Councils run on the committee system don’t require O&S, but can opt for it if they want.
The idea is that councillors who are not part of the executive can hold the executive to account for the decisions and actions that affect their communities.
When overview and scrutiny works well it should provide constructive ‘critical friend’ challenge; amplify the voices and concerns of the public; be led by independent people who take responsibility for their role; and drive improvement in public services.
Given that directly-elected mayors hold so much power and unlike leaders in the other governance models can’t be removed, effective scrutiny by councillors provides vital checks and balances. As the guidance puts it
A strong organisational culture that supports scrutiny work is particularly important in authorities with a directly-elected mayor to ensure there are the checks and balances to maintain a robust democratic system. Mayoral systems offer the opportunity for greater public accountability and stronger governance, but there have also been incidents that highlight the importance of creating and maintaining a culture that puts scrutiny at the heart of its operations.
Authorities with a directly-elected mayor should ensure that scrutiny committees are well-resourced, are able to recruit high-calibre members.
The failure of overview and scrutiny in Newham is nothing new. It was appalling under the previous mayor, who regarded the whole thing with contempt. That things have not improved since 2018 is more than disappointing. But, as the statutory guidance says, the
prevailing organisational culture, behaviours and attitudes of an authority will largely determine whether its scrutiny function succeeds or fails.
Anyone who has paid any attention to local politics in Newham, which until last year meant the internal politics of the local Labour party, will recognise the truth of that.
forestgatedotnet 
“Scrutiny Improvement Review: London Borough of Newham” paints a highly disturbing picture in very diplomatic language. “Poor relationships” are identified as a major, systemic problem on a number of occasions. Nowhere, however is the precise nature of these poor relationships – or even a representative instance of one of them – actually spelt out in clear, unequivocal terms with the result that guesswork, surmise or “reading between the lines” becomes the order of the day. Indeed the presence and very persistence of such poor relationships conjures up the image of a political arena continually in use for playing one person off against the other. The general impression conveyed by the report is one of increasing secrecy at all levels, a state of affairs that the “Actions” recommendations section goes some way to addressing. Ingrained to an increasing degree in the general population over the last forty years and mirrored to some extent in the current state of governance, the Newham-wide tendency to a tight-knit and determined conspiratorial default position will nevertheless be a major obstacle to any attempts to tinker with the present system.