by Kate Hiller, Legal Team Manager

In November, I will be contributing to the delivery of our Council’s Corporate Governance Training Programme.  It was introduced last year as an annual programme to highlight key corporate governance topics for officers to learn about.  Whilst last year was introductory, this year we are delving down into the detail!

Whilst the main sessions will be face-to-face, I have been working on an online module to form part of the programme that discusses the roles of Cabinet and the Scrutiny Committees, and how they interact with each other.  The training covers what each body does, the Scrutiny Committees’ role in scrutinising Cabinet and key tips for what the different types of reports should include.

Officers are often so busy preparing their reports for different bodies to get the approvals they need, that it is easy to forget that different parts of the organisation are looking at it from different perspectives.  Often officers will prepare their draft Cabinet and Scrutiny reports at the same time and with good intentions set out to tell them both the same thing but in doing so, it can overlook the fact that the Scrutiny Committees are there to make comments and recommendations and Cabinet is there to make the decision.  As such, they need different information to do their different roles and it is open to officers to put forward options and ideas that they want Scrutiny to input on before they take it to Cabinet.

Hopefully the new training module, when run in November, will be a key reference point for officers to tailor their reports to what each body needs to do – no doubt saving them many questions from members in the process!