Lack of Scrutiny in Brent

I have recently come back from a two day course in Council scrutiny solutions given by the Local Government Centre at Warwick Business School in their rather impressive Scarman Conference Centre.

Immediately on getting back to London, I went to a meeting of the Forward Plan Scrutiny Committee in Brent Town Hall. I doubt whether anyone would consider Brent Council’s scrutiny committees as a model of how scrutiny committees should work.

Once again, Brent’s Lead Member for Adult Social Services (Cllr Reg Colwill) simply failed to turn up. That really isn’t good enough. He is supposed to be democratically accountable for adult social services. A number of members of the public attended this meeting. He chose to leave all explanations to the Director. That is a failure of democratic accountability pure and simple.

However, I must say that two of the Liberal Democrat members were little better, leaving as soon as the most controversial item on the agenda was over. At least this time they managed to ask some questions, although not very expert ones. Indeed one of the Liberal Democrat councillors misunderstood the Director when he started talking about stars. She seemed to think having a "first" (i.e. one) star was better than "third" (i.e. three) stars. That shows a truly extraordinary level of ignorance about local government.