Scrutiny ? Really?

On November 7^th we had Corporate Overview Group meeting at Rushcliffe Borough Council.  You can find the papers here and watch the meeting on youtube here. There were a number of items on the agenda, but it is the last two that are particularly notable.

First we discussed the future Corporate Strategy. We were repeatedly reminded that they only got 4 responses to a councillor consultation on this, although one of those responses was from a group of councillors (us- Labour) rather than an individual councillor. Nonetheless it seems that we might have wasted our time in responding since the committee was not provided with a copy of the comments, nor any proper explanation of how they had been considered when revising the strategy.  An officer told us we didn’t need to see them as they had taken them into account and in any case were generally too detailed to be relevant. We were quite surprised by this. To add insult to injury we were actually being asked to ‘considering the results of the councillors consultation’ in the report we were meant to approve!

Subsequently we were told this was a mistake and we should have been shown the comments. We need to keep your eye on things! We will finally get to see the responses at Full Council at the vote on the new Corporate Strategy; I do hope there are no missed good ideas in the consultation, as it will be too late to do much about them then.

Next we went onto consider a number of scrutiny matrices. This is when the meeting became bizarre. Some councillors seemed to be holding their heads in their hands; I was wriggling in frustration.

Scrutiny matrices are a way in which councillors can ask for a particular aspect of the council’s work to be considered, to dig into whether it is working the way it should and whether it could do better. These are the matrices we considered:

• Retrospective Planning Applications (Cllr Way, Independent):
• Local Power Generation (Cllr Billins, Lib Dem)
• Rushcliffe’s Offer for Care Leavers (Cllr Plant, Labour)
• Housing density in new sites (Cllr Thomas, Independent)
• Parking provision funded by Rushcliffe (Cllr Thomas, Independent)
• Sustainable Drainage Systems (Cllr Thomas, Independent)
• Infrastructure delivery (Growth and development Scrutiny Committee)
• Rushcliffe Oaks Crematorium (Growth and development Scrutiny Committee)
• Connectivity and communications : Cllr Combellack, Tory and CHAIR OF THE COMMITTEE).

We sat through all of the initial ones submitted by opposition councillors and we were generally told they were all simply questions to officers, or would waste officers’ time when they should instead be trying to resolve a problem, or should be a motion, or maybe should be brought at some future date.  Even the two from the committee seemed to be sniffed at. The best that happened was that they were put on a list to be considered by a committee sometime in the future.

Guess which one which was accepted? The one from the Chair of the Committee! I don’t know how she had the nerve really. At best it was embarrassing. But leaving that aside it clearly shouldn’t be a matter for a Rushcliffe committee to consider: telecoms is absolutely nothing to do with Rushcliffe Borough Council.- it is a County responsibility. If she thinks we should be raising an issue with County we should be writing to the chair of the responsible committee to highlight a problem, or even better, raising it with our County Councillors.

On that matter: does anyone else lose mobile signal and internet when NFFC are playing at home?