Using Scrutiny to Engage the Public

I suggested before that Scrutiny should have a bigger part to play in Brent Council than appeared to be planned at that time.  Subsequently, there appears to have been some back pedalling, but it is still far from clear what is planned.

I thought I would offer some opinions around the three functions of Scrutiny that I see.

The first was using Scrutiny to engage the public.  It is important not to be naive about this.  The biggest topic facing such a process is how to cope with the huge cuts to central government grant that the coalition has decreed.  At present, I don't think these are remotely well understood in their sheer scale.  I think that goes for many people actively involved in the Council as well as the public at large.  A better explanation of how it all works may help get people to understand things better, but it will not change the fact that cutting spending on this scale can only be done in ways that are inevitably painful.

In the past I have detected a certain wishful thinking that better communications can make such cuts popular or turn up some magic bullet that saves the day without any difficult decisions.  I think that idea is unrealistic.

One thing we have not tried in Brent is trying to set out a three year process that can give a road map over time, and hopefully make the budgets more understandable as a coherent approach.  I think sometimes, many people just see whichever service they particularly cherish as just being randomly targeted out of the blue.

In fact, the budgets over the past four years were constructed via long term planning, largely though the One Council process.  Transformation of  services may be easier to accept if it is seen as part of a longer term strategy to balance spending and income, minimise negative impacts over time, protect against future liabilities and safeguard agreed priorities rather than a series of binary options. 

The Scrutiny process has a real potential to combine with some of the imaginative techniques used previously to get this working better.