What is scrutiny?

Since 2001, the Council has had a structure that divides the elected Members into Executive and non-Executive Councillors. The Executive is selected by the Leader of the Council after he/she has been elected by all the City Councillors at the Annual Council meeting in May. At present, there are seven Members of the Executive and these individuals are called Portfolio Holders. The Executive is responsible for running the council and whichever political party (or parties) make up the Executive are often termed to be ‘in power’.

Scrutiny is considered to be the main balance to the power of the Executive and involves many of the Councillors who are not on the Executive. Individual councillors are selected by their political parties to sit on the scrutiny committees. The key roles of scrutiny are:

• ensuring that the Council and the Executive is accountable. This means questioning members of the Executive and senior officers about decisions that have been made or are about to be made. It also involves looking at how well the Council is doing against its policy objectives and targets for achievement.
• reviewing and developing policies. In this role, scrutiny can help the Council to develop its policy and budgetary framework. This might involve research and consultation with the community and other agencies on policy issues, good practice and looking at alternative ways of doing things.
• ensuring the continuous improvement of Council services. Scrutiny can make suggestions to the Executive for service reviews. Members of scrutiny committees are often involved in individual reviews where a particular service or function of the Council is thoroughly examined

There are other aspects of scrutiny which are still developing. For example, a committee can scrutinise a range of organisations – in previous years the committees have invited Cumbria Tourism, Stagecoach and United Utilities to attend meetings and answer questions.

Another element of scrutiny that is growing is ‘joint scrutiny’, where scrutiny Members from the different District Councils around Cumbria and Cumbria County Council work together to examine an issue which is best considered in this way. So far, we have carried out joint scrutiny on waste management, car parking and the local area agreement.