Richard Baum

Last night was a meeting of the Performance and Resources Scrutiny Commission, the body that I sit on comprised of back-bench Councillors scrutinising the Executive’s work on performance and finance.

It was a one item agenda last night, a “call-in” of the Executive decision to award the contract for a Home Improvement Agency to Six Town Housing rather than go for an open tender. This will radically improve the way that disabled facilities grants are dealt with. The “call in” meant that the Scrutiny commission wanted to examine the decision in detail. The Executive (essentially the Council’s “Cabinet” of executive members) are held to account by Scrutiny, and this “call in” system is one way of doing that.

We could decide to accept the decision as it stood, or refer it back to the Executive with comments, or refer it to full Council for debate. 

I have to say that it was an excellent meeting. The debate was thorough and fair, and the meeting really did benefit from a single item agenda allowing for proper scrutiny and giving members the chance to read twenty pages of papers properly, rather than not read 150 pages of papers and struggle through a dozen agenda items like normal.

In addition, there was no split on party lines, as I’d feared.

At the vote, the Commission voted that the original Executive decision was right (there was one abstention) and that no tender was needed. Although the call-in didn’t result in anything changing, it did scrutinise the decision and give reassurance that the Executive were right to proceed as they did. Which is what Scrutiny should be about.

So STH will run the Home Improvement Agency, and this appalling service will hopefully get much better very quickly. Scruiny can’t be held responsible for the performance of the service, but at least we know that the decision to go with STH was fair and proper, and we can scrutinise performance in the future.

A good night, and I felt useful and like I’d really helped decide something positive. Which is a novelty for a Scrutiny system which I think sometimes needs a radical shake-up. And I hope to be able to start talking about that shake up soon to the people who might make it happen.

Rick