Changes are being made to the constitution of Croydon Council. The thrust of those changes is to give fresh life to Scrutiny and shake it up a bit. That has to be welcomed in principle. The proposal is to create two sub committees from the existing three and focus more on 'task and finish' working groups. This format has been used elsewhere and found some success.
The problem that I have with the Tory proposals is that they have made a significant and undemocratic change to the main Overview and Scrutiny Committee. This committee is responsible for handling formal call ins and setting the overall agenda of Scrutiny.
The Tory leadership has spotted that if this committee has responsibility for education matters (alongside its general functions) it HAS to have 4 independent members from the education community (the old LEA committee functions). This means that the committee ends up with only 5 Labour Councillors to the Tories 11. This because the majority party has to have a majority over the whole committee.
Cleverly from the Tory point of view, this means that the committee will have a cast iron majority on all issues, because the independent members have a history of not wanting to get involved in any party politics, and so don't get involved in any issues other than education.
The simple solution to ensure that this main Overview & Scrutiny committee maintains a cut and thrust to it would be to deploy the education / LEA function with one of the sub committees or make a third committee with the same membership as a sub committee but with the additional majority group members and 4 independent education members.
Crucially, the Tories did not gain approval for this change from the Labour side. They knew all too well, that if this had been put to us we would have made the above argument. They did share the idea of task and finish groups and a re-organisation of scrutiny. Such re-organisations take place every so often and it is important that all sides in the Council chamber have faith in the structures that they participate in.
This is an important issue for anyone who cares about municipal democracy. The centre for public scrutiny has done a study that shows high performing councils have strong and robust scrutiny functions. Surely, on a cross party basis, we could agree that everyone in Croydon would benefit from Croydon having a high performing council?
So far Council leader, Councillor Mike Fisher, has shown he is weak and afraid of robust and open scrutiny of his administration and senior officers. He still has time to change his mind on this, to do so would be a good day for democracy and a good day for his administration and this Town.
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