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Thursday 17 July 2014

The Collapse of Scrutiny in Brent

Martin Francis has a lengthy post about local democracy in Brent.  I think it fair to say that democracy in Brent is sliding backwards, and one example of this is the effective abolition of the scrutiny function just as Ed Miliband comes out for more scrutiny.

The previous system of scrutiny, which certainly had plenty of inadequacies, has been abolished and replaced with a single committee.  The Council's own web site informs us that:

"The Scrutiny Committee sets its work programme for the year, usually at its first meeting of the year. It is important that the committee has a focused work programme that makes best use of the resources available to it."

This seems particularly important if it is going to have a series of task groups devoted to specific investigations.  As yet, it doesn't seem to have met, have any work programme or even had any kind of debate on what members think should be investigated.

In many ways, I suspect that this committee may mimic the failings of the old Forward Plan Committee, where I was a member.  This could in principle examine any subject on the forward plan, which sounds a significant power.  In practice it became a reactive committee that jumped from subject to subject without really pursuing anything for long.

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