Jessica Crowe, Centre for Public Scrutiny
I think the key themes that are coming out of the conference from what I’ve seen as Chair, I think there’s two really strong messages both from the presentations and from the conversations that delegates are having. I think one is about the importance of consistency, and the Auditor General mentioned that, and I think it’s a really good important point to make, that it’s not enough just to have one committee that’s good, it’s got to be all committees in a council that are working. It’s not good enough if a number of authorities in Wales are doing really well, we’ve got to get everybody firing at the same level and to the same standards as the best, and I guess that needs a bit of self-critical appraisal, a scrutiny of scrutiny if you like, so I think getting that consistency right and really upping the game right across the board is coming through very strongly.
I think the other message that I’m picking up from talking to delegates is about the importance of individual cultures and approaches and the way each council works. Because every council is different, and there isn’t a one-size fits all solution. Something that works really well in Wrexham might not work really well in Cardiff, and vice versa. So it’s really important for people to develop their own solutions, but also crucially to have the leadership on board with the importance of scrutiny.
Lesley Griffiths AM, Minister for Local Government and Government Business
Effective scrutiny is so important, so it was really good to see such a large audience here from right across Wales, and I’m sure they’ll have a very fruitful day where they’ll learn more about effective scrutiny, about good practice of effective scrutiny and what they hope to gain from it. We’re in a very unprecedented, difficult financial time at the moment, and I understand that the provisional local government settlement is very challenging, and scrutiny is even more important when times are tough I believe, but it’s really important that elected members feel that they are empowered to make sure that they have effective scrutiny, so that was the message I was hoping to get out there today.
Huw Vaughan Thomas, Auditor General for Wales
The emphasis that I want to place is on developing scrutiny, continuing to develop scrutiny. We already see a lot of good practices, our study is reflecting that. But we need to see more investment. We need to recognise that scrutiny isn’t something that takes place in one committee, it’s the totality of the work that local authorities do, in terms of ensuring that the decisions they make are soundly based. And that it can reassure the public of that, and that means that even when it comes to difficult decisions, that the public has a trust that the issues have been thoroughly examined.
Cllr Peter Farley, Monmouthshire County Council
Well the theme of what I’ll be saying on the panel discussion is the importance of public engagement through scrutiny. Both public engagement as a means to making better scrutiny work, and also the value of public involvement in the work of scrutiny committees in its various ways. I’ve got three examples of that particularly to mention. One is an inquiry done by one of our select committees, the second is a pre-cabinet decision scrutiny, and the third was a call-in. And all of them I think were significantly changed and changed for the better by involving the public in various ways – stakeholders, effected individuals, communities and interest groups. So, very significant I think for the way that we do scrutiny in Monmouthshire.
Dave McKenna, City and County of Swansea
The key points of the example that I talked about on the platform earlier, really it was an example around young care leavers in Swansea and the work that the overview and scrutiny child and family services board had done that led to a really positive outcome for those young care leavers. It actually led to a scheme being set up whereby peer mentoring was being provided to those young care leavers by other young people that already had experience of leaving care. So that was a very positive outcome. Not only for the young people receiving that service and that support, but actually the young people that were providing that peer-mentoring training had an accredited qualification out of that as well, so that was a really positive result for them also. And what I wanted to try and illustrate with that little story, was that scrutiny is a process with a number of different stages, and if you get all of those stages right, you get a really good outcome.
Dr. Helen Paterson, Wrexham County Borough Council
I suppose today I’ll be showing how hugely proud I am of our scrutiny function and how we work. I’m proud of our scrutiny colleagues because they focus on what really matters and making a difference, and actually scrutiny is terribly important nowadays, because we’ve got really important and difficult decisions to make around the budget. So in Wrexham, we have five scrutiny committees – economy, people, place, organisation, and then a partnerships and a collaboration committee. And I’m going to talk today about our collaboration committee and our partnership committee, because clearly they’ve worked in terms of focusing on the processes, but the other committees have focused on outcomes.
Catherine Howe, Public-i Group Ltd.
So the key points from my workshop will be looking at the way in which society, largely driven by technology, is changing, and what that means for the scrutiny community. It’s very easy to get very hung up on the fact that the austerity measures that we’re undergoing at the moment mean that we have to change what we’re doing, but actually there’s a pressure to change which comes from the way in which the world is changing. And there are many things in that which I think creates a fantastic opportunity for the scrutiny process, for example the pressure to be open. The pressure to be open by default and to get your ideas and your thinking and your decision making out in public.
Virginia Hawkins, National Assembly for Wales
The key points of my presentation are that the benefits of public engagement in scrutiny far outweigh the effort and resources that actually go into doing it. That there needs to be a culture and a buy-in to public involvement in scrutiny throughout the whole of the organisation. It doesn’t have to be resource intensive – you can use the resources you’ve got, you can be smart about it. We’re going to looking at some of the techniques that we use in the Assembly because we’ve had quite a long journey to get to where we are with public engagement, but we’re really reaping the benefits of that now, and we’re producing really, really good scrutiny because of engaging the public. So we’re going to be sharing some of those, and hopefully getting delegates to think about how they can use them in their scrutiny functions.
Brenda Cook, Centre for Public Scrutiny
The key points from my presentation today are to explain the return on investment model that we’ve developed for use in health scrutiny, particularly around health inequalities. And what I want to do is describe the model – how it’s developed and how it can be used for different types of health scrutiny in different parts of the country, and looking at different forms of health inequality.
John Dwight, Wales Audit Office
I think one of the key messages is the need to build trust and the relationship between members and officers, so that members can ask the questions they want to ask and to receive open and frank answers. But I also think it’s about members taking ownership of the scrutiny process. They need to be able to set out what it is they want to know, how they’re going to get the information and how it’s going to be set-up.
Chris Tidswell, CIPFA
Certainly one of the key points was around information that members request, how they request it and the timing of it. It’s quite clear that members need to have a better understanding of what they actually want, so they can direct officers to be able to present the information in the right way to make an informed decision. It also gives an opportunity then for greater time for review and challenge to arrive at a more balanced decision and oucome.
Huw Rees, Wales Audit Office
Well the workshop on evidence based scrutiny was a joint effort with our Estyn inspection colleagues. We very much shared a view of the importance of good information being presented to scrutiny members, but also that that information needs to be challenged prior to scrutiny meetings. And what our workshop aimed to do was to emulate a pre-meeting of scrutiny to give participants the opportunity to look at some sample reports and decide what it is about the information that either was good, bad or indifferent, or what other information they need to carry out their role effectively. So we wanted participants to go away with a better understanding of how to challenge those reports, and how to use those reports to ask the right questions in scrutiny.
James Downe, Cardiff Business School
The key message from our workshop on collaborative scrutiny was that collaboration is hard. It takes up-front resources, dedicated officer time, and clear champions for the cause, whether they be officers or councillors.
Tim Gilling, Centre for Public Scrutiny
The key points I’m going to share are really how important scrutiny is in fitting-in to the framework of accountability for public services in Wales. Councillors as visible and democratic representatives of people and communities, really need to play a strong role in some of the tough decisions that will have to be made in how money is invested in public services over the next few years. So I really want to stress how important it is that councillors and officers supporting them in their scrutiny role, and local authorities generally, and the public sector value the role that scrutiny can play in some of the discussions that will be taking place over the next few years.
Alison Ward, Torfaen County Borough Council
To start with we weren’t very good at scrutiny, I have to say, and I think probably we share that with most of Wales - that it’s probably the most challenging bit of democracy and how members interact with the council. But for my money, it’s one of the most important things, because you take the discussion away from adversarial politics into really intelligently looking in-depth at what’s going on within the council, and having an intelligent debate and asking some really searching questions.So for me it’s very important and I was worried that we weren’t getting it right. We used the 2012 elections as the opportunity, to think we have a new set of members, we can really work with them, train them, and get them into that inquiring mode. So we brought the WLGA in, they did a warts and all appraisal of how our scrutiny was. There was a lot to learn, a lot to take in, but we did make a lot of changes. As a result of that we’ve completely transformed the way that we do scrutiny. One of the main things that we do that is very important is that we have an annual visioning session. And at that members look at information from the public, what the public think about things. They look at information from staff, some of the consultations that we’ve done with staff, they look at all the performance information, and from that they build a picture of where they think the issues are that they would like to explore more thoroughly through the scrutiny process. And by doing that, they’re really focusing, rather than the scatter-gun approach which is what we had before, they’re really focusing on the things that are important to them as members. That’s more challenging for officers because they’re really drilling down into something important. Officers have to think about what they might be asked, they have to prepare very thoroughly, but on the other hand they don’t have to do volumes of reports, which nobody to be honest ever reads because there’s just too many of them. So our scrutiny sessions now are really strong – questioning, exploring and coming up with some key recommendations.
Peter Watkin Jones, Eversheds
I think the key message for the public sector in Wales is that the Francis Inquiry and the Francis Report is relevant to them. It’s an ambitious report because it’s trying to change the culture in the entire NHS, and if it is successful in that then you cannot expect the consumer, the patient who is put at the heart of the whole system, to have one attitude towards the NHS and a different attitude to the rest of the public sector. The patient is also a consumer of public services. It will demand of anybody providing public services a culture of openness, a culture of putting the service user first, a culture of transparency, and a culture of candour. And therefore I think that the message going out from the Francis report is that the public sector in its entirety needs to take note.