Issue - meetings

At its 1 July meeting, the scrutiny committee received the annual reports on shared services for 3C ICT, Legal and Internal Audit services.  Following scrutiny by the committee, in addition to noting the annual reports, the Executive Councillor for Finance and Resources approved the proposal to bring a report to the October Committee on joint scrutiny (across the shared service authorities).  However, a report will not be available for this committee and the Executive Councillor for Strategy and External Partnerships will provide a verbal update to the scrutiny committee instead.  

The Executive Councillor said the following in response to Members’ questions:

i.             It was his view that Scrutiny needed to be retained at each respective Council; the Councils would continue to work closely and jointly with each other in relation to shared services.

ii.            There were various sizes of shared services, there were medium size shared services for example Building Control and Legal services and then there were larger shared services for example Planning, Waste and Recycling and ICT and governance should be appropriate to the needs of that particular service.

iii.           Noted there was a Joint Local Planning Advisory Group (JLPAG) for the new shared Local Plan with South Cambridgeshire District Council reflecting that joint arrangements worked well where joint assessment decisions were needed.

iv.          Several shared services were still evolving, for example there was a large development workload coming up regarding ICT and Councillor Robertson would be working with officers and counterparts at the other two Councils regarding the Council’s priorities for transformation.

v.           Executive Councillors were responsible for shared services which fell within their portfolio. The Strategy and Resources Scrutiny Committee and other relevant Scrutiny Committees would continue to be updated on the progress of shared services and committee members would scrutinise the shared services through the presentation of the annual business plans and annual performance reports.

vi.          Noted that there was no longer a plan to share Finance and Housing Management services at this time.

vii.         The City Council focussed on pre-scrutiny, the other council’s operated different scrutiny arrangements.

viii.       Acknowledged work was continuing to build the Planning Service as a joint service.