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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. 

Tags: Overview and scrutiny, Scrutiny

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. 

Tags: Overview and scrutiny, Scrutiny