All councils are required to have at least one ‘Overview and Scrutiny Committee’ to hold the Cabinet to account. At St Edmundsbury we have three such committees: Overview and Scrutiny Committee, Policy Development Committee and Performance and Audit Scrutiny Committee.
Overview and Scrutiny Committee
The Overview and Scrutiny Committee is a politically balanced Committee of 13 members, appointed by the council. It holds the Cabinet, full Council and staff to account by monitoring the decision making process and testing existing practices to check they are working properly. It can also call in Cabinet decisions to scrutinise them before they are put into practice. The committee will also take on the community development and cohesion role envisaged by expected legislation, which may give the committee the power to look at the performance of other public bodies and examine issues of wider concern in the borough. The committee has eight scheduled meetings per year.
Policy Development Committee
A politically balanced committee of 13 members, appointed by the council, this committee takes a similar broad view of the council’s work but has the specific role of advising on the development and implementation of new policy and processes. In addition, the committee examines proposals for future corporate plans and budgets. Its five or six meetings per year are based around the budget and corporate planning cycle.
Performance and Audit Scrutiny Committee
The Performance and Audit Scrutiny Committee is a new committee created with the restructure of the scrutiny process which came into place in May 2007. This committee will play an important role in monitoring the performance of services, and also leads on improvement planning and risk management. It looks at how well the council’s services are performing by considering a range of information such as performance indicators, reports from external inspectors and the monitoring of action plans. It also monitors the council’s budget, and recommends the annual accounts to Full Council. It has four quarterly monitoring meetings per year, plus one other to consider the annual accounts.
All three committees will take responsibility for Community Calls for Action (CCfAs) when these come into being in 2008, so that the Cabinet is able to call upon the relevant councillor expertise.
