Promoting effective scrutiny

Scrutiny should operate beyond the authority and work with local public services more generally, finding solutions to shared problems and not just focusing on what the authority itself does. There should be more engagement of local people in scrutiny and more pre-decision scrutiny giving councillors the opportunity of asking "should we?" as well as "why did we?".

We believe that scrutiny is the council's own internal inspection regime to hold itself and its partners to account. The process should be about people and their experiences - focusing on the ends and not the means.

This means examining honestly whether you are making the best of your Scrutiny Committees. Where can you introduce a new approach? Are the right questions being asked of the right people?