Thursday, 29th September, 2016
Paper cuts
Pembrokeshire County Council’s new ‘paperless’ agenda initiative for all council and committee meetings is ostensibly about saving money on the three Ps – paper, printing and postage.
A drop in the ocean – and, some might say, like many things overseen by this authority which knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Dare we forget the green undertones, and all those saved trees?
This scheme was conceived and has been driven by unelected council officers, to little resistance from councillors who are encouraged – or in other words, have little option but – to use tablets or laptops ahead of meetings to keep up to speed with agenda topics, and during meetings to follow proceedings.
I’m one of the only ones who’s publicly opposed to it and said it’s a bad idea.
I’ll let you into a secret: in the County Hall tearoom this paperless scheme is unpopular among a broad base.
No matter what “they” say, you cannot do on a tablet – annotate, turn back and fore between pages instantaneously – nearly as effectively as with the physical medium.
Even for those well up to speed with technology like me, there’s no comparing – tablet devices have many limitations over paper agendas, and, apart from a search facility, no benefits for council meeting agendas which can be lengthy documents filled with complex reports.
Before this paperless scheme came in, councillors had all information posted to their door around a week before each meeting they were required to attend.
Whether councillors understood the leaves of paper as they flicked through them is an issue of capacity (fixed) not policy.
Agendas always have been and still are available online, nothing has changed there, but if councillors wish to continue receiving full paper agendas they now attract a punitive charge of £25 per meeting.
With the number of meetings councillors can attend, this officer-devised pricing strategy is – by design – far from attractive.
“And it’s good enough for ’em!” might say the public, but it’s difficult to see how this will improve decision-making or scrutiny in this beleaguered authority. Potential for harm is more easy to imagine.
If the viewers of council meeting webcasts thought their councillors showed a lack of knowledge of topics and proceedings before going paperless, it will be interesting to find out what effect this gambit has on the size of the council’s silent majority.
I have reason to suspect the council isn’t entirely complying with the law in this scheme – this includes the provision of information to councillors as well as what is made available to members of the public attending meetings in the public gallery – to which I hope to return.
Without a portable electronic device to his name (e-cigarettes excluded) the author of that other website, Cllr. Mike Stoddart, turned up to his first paperless meeting last week without any copy – digital or physical – of the agenda documents.
He was lucky to get from committee staff a copy ungraciously emblazoned with bold red lettering prohibiting its removal from the room.
Seated right next to me, I was unable to miss the old duffer’s sharp intake of breath and his stifled cries of pain at a midpoint of the meeting.
I turned to my left, fearing the worst.
Sucking his finger – today, of all days – even Mike laughed at the irony of cutting his finger on the edge of the page as he turned it.
He subsequently commandeered me to accompany him on a visit to Currys as, he said, he wanted to impress ‘er indoors by returning home with one of these newfangled iPads.
Now I don’t know how much he thought he could pick one up for, but after seeing the prices I think a tablet of the pharmaceutical variety became Old Grumpy’s most pressing requirement.
He left the store empty-handed, and spent the short journey back to the County Hall car park calculating aloud just how many centilitres of merlot an iPad would deprive him of.
If only Grumpette knew!
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Surely the council must provide Councillors with a laptop or equivalent if they decide to go down this path and if I were a Member, I’d be asking for a printer as well!
That’s a brave suggestion, Keanjo, and not what I was angling at, although I couldn’t help but notice council leader Jamie Adams using an iPad with what looked like a council sticker on it at committee this week, visible on the webcast.
My main objection to going paperless is that it effectively deprives councillors and the public of a paper copy of the most basic information to which they are entitled – and also, the effect I think this scheme will have.
I doubt any councillor will pay the £25 per meeting charge, and who can blame them, but if councillors failed to digest all of this information when it has always landed on their doormat for free, then making it even more difficult for them to access – and putting the onus on them to seek it – doesn’t seem an obvious way of improving decision-making and scrutiny to me.
Keanjo, yes they get £500 a year allowance for stationary/IT costs.
As so many councillors sit at council meetings like mute dummies, it could be difficult to measure if they are any less informed as a result of this.
Does Jamie pay for his iPad or is it a council perk, and if so is it available to all councillors or just the cabinet?
If he pays for it and owns it, why would it have a council sticker?
Samsung Galaxy tablets are very good value for money. No need to waste money on an iPad. I’m glad they are not wasting money printing out those massive tomes any more. I have only ever used my phone to access agendas.
The only problem I have with it is when councillors mention specific page numbers at council meetings and the agenda on the website doesn’t have page numbers so I have no idea what they are referring to. Means nothing to anyone watching the webcast either. Could cause some confusion for councillors in the next full council meeting if some have printed agendas and some don’t.
Ryan and Jacob, problem solved, give each member a laptop and printer and he/she can print those pages in which he/she has a specific interest. Cost of paper and ink to be met from the £500 allowance.
Or just carry on issuing paper agendas to any councillor who wants one, or at most, charge a fee which covers the cost, instead of punishing with a fine.
As for self-printing, that would be highly impractical where some reports consist of hundreds of pages.
Aside from my own views, there is also I believe a legal issue relating to this scheme. I brought this to the legal department’s attention but it fell on deaf ears, I’m afraid. More on that in future.
Hi Jacob, reports of hundreds of pages should never be included because few have the time or inclination to read them.
Most reports would have a summary of conclusions which could be included with the proviso that any member could ask for a copy of the full report – very few would.
There are a few well known ploys used to get controversial items through. One is to put the item near the end of the agenda when members are tired and anxious to get away, the other is to hide the recommendation in a sea of verbiage.
By the way I was not suggesting home printing the whole agenda, only those pages in which a member had a specific interest.
There is another angle to this Jacob, without the written ‘hard copy’, there ‘may’ be occasions when data is ‘lost’.
How many times do you email someone and they never receive it? Or it may well be hidden in spam folder between the foreign relatives that have left you millions in Africa, or the latest Russian brides!
The council have already taken steps to ‘lose’ council documents by intending to store them below river level, alongside the river…
So, I would conclude that the penny pinching, whilst commendable, may not be the main driver behind this. If certain officers want to remove data it could be done, quite easily. Not that I subscribe to the conspiracy theory. I am merely a realist.
The advantage for councillors is though that they can continue to play games on their iPads whilst in the council chamber!!!
Yes Jacob, there is a legal issue concerning the disposal of public records. As I understand things, minutes of all public meetings have to be kept for specified periods, council minutes in perpetuity.
Reports, however can be disposed of after 5 years.
It stands to common sense, therefore, that minutes should be self standing in their own right, so that if there is a legal challenge, the minutes must be capable of defending the decision, with reasons for it.
How many times do our council minutes merely refer to “approved in para x in the Director’s report.”
Some years ago in the case of residential home fees, the High Court judge drew attention to the lack of justifications and reasons in PCC decision recording.
PCC would appear to be above and beyond the law.
One thing concerns the “true” matter of public record. Printed minutes, or reports for that matter, cannot be altered after they have been approved and published. The electronic minutes in the hands of a disreputable council could be altered, who would know, unless there was a duplicate independent electronic archive.
It is unlikely that PCC officers would stoop so low as to alter minutes to suit.
Ah, but wasn’t there such an instance?
If this is being done to “save” money, how can the cabinet approve two compulsory purchases, when they have been advised there is not money for them?
They have to print copies for members of the public so running a few more off for members is a fairly simple task.
S 100B (6) of the Local Government Act 1972:
Subsection (8) refers to exempt information which the public is not, anyway, allowed to see.
I actually prefer a paper copy to reading from a screen and I wouldn’t mind paying a reasonable sum to cover the cost of printing.
But, as Jacob says, £25 per committee meeting (£75 for full council) is more of a fine than a charge.
Indeed an officer admitted to me that the charge had been deliberately set high in order to “encourage” members to go paperless.
This is a form of extortion that would have trading standards knocking on the door of any private business that adopted similar tactics.
Surely this cannot be legal?
When, who and how was this approved? If PCC approved this no doubt it would have been justified with legal chapter and verse as a discretionary power. Why do councillors put up with this?
Do people normally have to pay, or be fined, for being provided with the tools to do the job?
If this imposition prevents an elected councillor from effectively doing his/her job to the best of his/her ability, what then?
I would suggest that a single page report may be able to be fully considered properly online, but a budget report or the recent Haverfordwest schools report?
Is this a way of limiting effective consideration and/or scrutiny? How much easier, just to go along with the officers’ recommendations.
I would suggest that if this is legal then members should apply to the Independent Remuneration Panel for a rise.
Why not a motion to the next meeting of full council along the lines of “this council does not agree with the policy of charging councillors for paper agendas of council meetings and requires the provision of such paper agendas without charge to all councillors who request them”.
John it was a full council budget amendment from last year. I have just checked the webcast and it was almost a unanimous decision with no councillors speaking against that particular amendment.
The target saving is £20k, which is more than the savings from the chairman’s car. Similar in that there is a cheaper alternative which comes at the cost of councillor convenience. When we are looking at which services have to be cut I don’t think there will be any public sympathy on this. Probably the opposite if this does get blocked through the legal route.
There’s also the £500 annual stationary/IT allowance councillors can use to pay for the paper copies, meaning that councillors are still not out of pocket if they choose to receive the paper copies.
I can vouch that a digital record was altered by officers in a court case.
The officer responsible pleaded it was a “clerical” error” incurred when making a manual copy of a computer spreadsheet.
Quite why a manual copy was needed was suspicious except it conveniently won their argument on the day, as the “error” managed to manually propagate down to the all important bottom line.
When challenged, they wrote off £2,000 costs, preferable to perjury I suppose, and not out of the officer’s own pocket.
Digital records on cloud computing do maintain a log, accessing the log is another matter, and poor identification of users may make fraudulent editing possible.
Jacob, is the imposition of a charge of £25 per printed agenda, legally kosher? If it is, what is to stop you from including all such charges on out-of-pocket expenses?
Ryan, councillors must have ready access to agendas and reports (legal requirement.) There is no requirement for the chairman’s chauffeured car service to charity teas and ribbon-cutting ceremonies (luxury.)
I don’t think a member of the public or a councillor attending a local government meeting receiving a free paper copy of a report could be considered an excess, but maybe you do.
There may be a matter of convenience in that the option to continue receiving a paper copy delivered to doors for free (which has always been the case) or even a cost-covering charge would be preferable to the “choice” of a digital agenda device or being fined to receive something we are entitled to.
It was also discussed long before the budget approval at behind-closed-doors seminars for group leaders. I don’t know if minutes exist, but if they do you will see I attended as a member from among the unaffiliateds, who by definition have no leader, but were invited to send one member.
As for the £500 allowance, this sum has ostensibly been for office expenses but it has not been introduced or changed as a result of going paperless. Even if a councillor opts-in to the council’s punitive £25 per meeting agenda charge and spends it exclusively in this way, £500 wouldn’t nearly cover the cost for many councillors – who attend way more than 20 meetings per year.
You seem fixated on the cost and price issue. You might have noticed that I discussed what effect going paperless might have on decision-making and scrutiny.
I’m sure you’ll be among the first to complain the next time councillors wave something through without reading or understanding it!
I don’t agree that a digital copy of an agenda in this day and age can not be considered to be providing councillors with agendas and I do think that printing 60 copies of 100+ page reports is an excess. These days it’s quite common for people to read whole books on an amazon kindle device. I don’t think it’s any more than an inconvenience to councillors.
I am fixating on the cost because it’s fundamental to understanding why the decision was taken in the first place. I think it’s important information for anyone to know before they form an opinion and comment on this.
I take your point about the £500 allowance possibly not being enough to cover a whole year’s worth of agendas so perhaps the price should come down a bit to account for this.
I certainly would be at the front of the line to complain about any councillor being unprepared or not reading the information on an agenda item, as I expect you would be. I wouldn’t accept lack of a printed agenda as any justification for this though. I expect councillors to adapt, just as the public have to when facing service cuts.
I’ve owned an iPad for several years and know its benefits and limitations, but for agendas and reports I’ve always used my paper copy, so too have most other councillors I know with tablets, but those who wish to forego their paper version could opt-out. This would reduce the print-run and the rest could be charged cost price.
The vast majority of reports are far fewer than 100+ pages, those occasions where the agendas have been very large are, for instance, on education reorganisation proposals where all consultation responses are published and analysed. It’s true that the number of aborted consultations due to legal oversights has led to much unnecessary deforestation.
Incidentally, this £20k saving figure is I believe the whole cost. However the printing will still be necessary for libraries and the public gallery, and unless councillors change their service address to the County Hall members’ room (another ploy dreamt up by officers!) the law still requires summonses to meetings to be sent to their home address via post.
Also, don’t forget the council chamber has had to be fitted out with new Wi-Fi equipment and charging points.
I don’t believe the paperless scheme will be used to ‘justify’ failures, only that it’s far more likely that the information contained will go unread.
As the price for printed agendas is extortionate, I fully expect councillors will reluctantly use tablet devices or print off a few cherry-picked sheets instead, but I see a negative side effect of either scenario is that less information will be seen and/or digested by more councillors.
Perhaps the most well-known incident where councillors were criticised for waving through sweeping reports without asking questions was the former chief exec’s illegal pay rise.
More recently, cabinet members earlier this year accepted the word of the erstwhile director of social services – whose report on the state of Tenby Avenue Centre for disabled adults was full of errors and assumptions – as gospel in their since-aborted decision over its future.
Both of these examples took place before going paperless.
So, what you might only see as an ‘inconvenience’ to councillors, I believe, will bring (probably indeterminable) consequences – and I don’t mean the cash savings!
If you use the Occam’s Razor principle to look at this it all boils down to being able to cover up and mislead the non IPPG members.
It’s definitely time for a massive clean out of most of the un-elected members of staff and the consultants whose backs they ride on.
Flashbang, your last paragraph about having a clear out carries a grain of truth but I would think it applies to some members of the management team only, those who are still affected by the BPJ culture.
A first step must be a new Chief Executive from outside the authority who would work with members rather than dictate to them.
This is all apparently more insidious and worrying than just a cost-saving exercise.
At last week’s Democratic Services Committee, (webcast available here) discussion centred around prospective and new councillors being required to attend mandatory training, with potential sanctions being imposed for non-attendance.
These ranged from fines and/or barring councillors from being members of committees.
As far as I am aware councils have to pay the rates prescribed annually by the Independent Remuneration Panel, It is not within their powers to limit or withhold payment. So we are left with the possibility of councillors, who do not attend mandatory training, being refused representative roles on committees. Yippeee, £13k a year and only having to attend and endure, possibly, 5 council meetings a year.
Even more worrying, was the intention to advise candidates for the next election that working electronically would be required. How many worthy lay candidates would be dissuaded from applying?
The current basic salary for councillors of about £13k p.a. is based on a part time representative job basis with no training required. This is intended to encourage a more wide and diverse pool of councillors.
Now there may be some justification for some basic training in the way local government/council committee works, but this training appears to extend into the realms of how to challenge and scrutinise properly. (So as not to upset officers?)
Previously, ordinary councillors were assigned mentor IPG cabinet leads to filter their questions and advise how things worked. This may have worked for some less able councillors but not the more “independent” minded. Perhaps the leadership is embarrassed about the ineffective challenge and scrutiny shown by most of the current 60 membership.
Perhaps the Ombudsman would also have something to say about ad hoc penalties being imposed on councillors. This must impinge on the councillors’ code of conduct rules and regulations and their ability to fully represent their constituents.
Where within PCC is all of this coming from, and why are the majority of councillors apparently being blindly led down this path?
At the above meeting, consideration was given to proposals to allow members of the public the opportunity, as of right, to raise appropriate matters at overview and scrutiny committees. The proposals, as recommended by officers were thrown out as being unworkable for simple basic timetable reasons. (One councillor is on record as not having appreciated this difficulty!)
Officers seemed to be unaware of the basic legal requirements for agenda/report pre-meeting publication timing, and will now look at other local authorities’ methods.
What hope is there?
I cannot believe that there are so many comments about the agendas and the cost of printing.
There are bigger savings to be made and let’s start looking at these first.
I passed Lampeter Velfrey on Friday and there are some road improvements taking place, these are in fact being done on a piece of land overlooking houses on the old road.
I have suggested that someone should look at expenditure of over £5k and see if this can be saved. I would be prepared to carry out this due diligence free of charge.
Let’s start addressing the real problems at the Kremlin.
Ryan, I have just found the 2015/16 budget amendment proposed by Cllr Paul Miller (council meeting on 05.03.2015) for a saving of £20,000 in respect of members’ printing and postage. During debate, this proposal was itself amended to requesting the executive to “target” such a cut.
Council was further advised that the legal status of the summons to meetings and the printed reports would need to be clarified, if the authority was minded to support electronic notification.
The current year’s budget includes unspecified savings of £40k in central admin postage costs, NOT democratic representation and management.
(Central admin costs are charged out over all services by some method of cost of allocation, whereas the cost of agendas, reports etc are a direct charge to the democratic representation budget.)
I don’t know whether the cabinet/council ever got around to looking into the legal implications, or even considered what they are. Perhaps someone can point to the relevant report and approved decision, I am sure it would help us all.
John, it was presented to cabinet on 22nd February. Not much in the report in the way of legal matters except for a suggestion about using the members lounge to display a physical copy of a summons. I just watched the webcast and there is also a suggestion from councillor Huw George for how councillors may cheat the system if anyone really can’t live with this.
“THE POLICE AND CRIME COMMISSIONER for Dyfed-Powys Police is looking for volunteers to join him on a panel set up to scrutinise the quality of policing.”
Quote from the Pembrokeshire Herald story. Here’s an opportunity for you Jacob, and Mike Stoddart to possibly get your hands on your very own SRA without having to bend over while Jamie Adams has his way with you. Everyone knows that force is crying out for a shake up as is PCC.
http://www.pembrokeshire-herald.com/28628/volunteers-wanted-to-monitor-quality-of-policing/
I’d suggest Ryan Dansie starts fixating on the cost of the 33 FOI requests he has submitted via the WhatDoTheyKnow.com website to Pembrokeshire County Council since March this year.
I dread to think the cost involved dealing with these trivial requests to the county’s taxpayers. Averages around 1 a week.
See: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/ryan_dansie
Tim, FOI requests can be made digitally or by post. The digital FOI requests incur no printing or postage costs. So I am already using the cheapest method available.
The council is also able to charge for freedom of information requests. Anyone concerned with the cost of FOI requests can raise this concern with their councillor.
Ryan, I sensed it was the officer hours wasted on compiling the answers to what he sees as your trivial requests – not to mention your scattergun approach – that Tim was getting at.
If you haven’t been charged, such a demand on resources might be used to help make the case for charging in future.
I take on board the feedback about the scattergun approach in relation my FOI requests about car parking charges (don’t think this applies to any of the other ones).
The car parking charge figures I requested were actually released to a later cabinet meeting, so the requests should have been considered excempt from FOI on the basis of being intended for future publication (I certainly was not told that they were going to be published).
I do not personally agree that it was not worth the officer time in getting the rest of the information into the public domain. I assume this is a fraction of the information being requested by councillors (if not then aren’t our 60 councillors scrutinising council decisions or developing policies?)
In any case this is not a like for like comparison with paperless meetings, which is about providing a cheaper alternative to accessing the same information.
Correct Jacob.
It may be seen as accessing information you are entitled to but ultimately you are costing the taxpayers of Pembrokeshire more to achieve what, exactly?
Tim, officers producing information might be seen as a waste of money if you are of the view that the officers can be trusted to do everything right and don’t need the input or scrutiny of councillors or the public.
Obviously there are plenty of people in County Hall who have this view, such as the officers who make the decisions and the councillors who approve what is put in front of them.
I raised questions about the judicial review in respect of residential care home fees with the ‘older persons champion’ and cabinet member for adult services at the that time, David Wildman.
I was surprised to receive a letter from officers that unfortunately raised more questions than answers, which I duly asked.
I received a reply from the then monitoring officer pointing out what a waste of officers’ time this all was and pointing out the number of FOI request I had also made. I was advised to consider carefully before submitting any more.
I am of the view that if the council was more open and transparent, as it claims, and scrutiny was more effective, as it is now trying to be with the new corporate governance arrangements, then a number of FoI requests would be redundant.
I have no option but to pay my share toward this discredited council through council tax and charges for services, we are all entitled to know what they are doing with our money, and how decisions are properly and lawfully made.
WE, the public, are now being encouraged to actively participate, presumably because it is felt that the majority of councillors are not up to the job. We need to understand matters more than are made available to us.
John Hudson in one of his comments above states that the target saving in this “paperless” initiative is £20,000. I presume that this saving is brought about by PCC’s drive to become more competitive and embrace some of the money saving schemes adopted by private industry.
If this is the case perhaps they should look at Rolls Royce as an example. The Guardian recently stated that in their drive to become more competitive they are reducing their senior management by 400.
Surely if this example was followed by PCC then the savings with say 2 senior managers leaving would be £200,000 plus, one director and one assistant director. Which would be a much better deal than the £20,000 cutting out copying would bring, not that I am against a paper use reduction but perhaps some of that could be achieved by shorter reports that are succinct and to the point.
I can remember vividly in my early days in construction the works manager giving orders every two months, get rid of one person from each gang, this was done and as one of those whose task was to measure how much work had been done each week output was never affected by this regular cull.
I am sure that salaries are the biggest portion of PCC’s budget but when times are tight you should not automatically pass on your problems to the public by putting up prices you should aim to become more efficient and that means doing the same work with fewer people.
Private industry learnt this lesson 20 years ago it’s about time the public bodies started learning it as well.
John, very well put. I am also of the view that councillors are falling short in their duties to hold the authority to account and put decisions under due scrutiny. I don’t include all councillors in that obviously but collectively they don’t seem to be having the necessary impact.
It’s unfortunate that concerned citizens such as yourself should feel that they have to pick up the slack and look into the details themselves (on a voluntary basis I might add – I’m sure you have put many more hours into it than you have “wasted” in officers hours).
It’s inconvenient for them to have members of the public putting them under scrutiny but as to the cost of FOI requests I am amazed if our councillors aren’t requesting several times more information than this.
If my average of one FOI request a week is considered to be a big burden on the authority then what does that say about how much information our 60 councillors are requesting?
How can they possibly be coming up with plans and properly assessing the effect of existing decisions unless they are requesting information? I can only assume most of them are relying on what lands on their doorstep in the officer reports and don’t feel that there needs to be any more digging.
In my own work I often need to produce reports and compile data when asked at short notice. It’s inconvenient and interrupts my other work but I realise that it’s crucial that high level decision making is supported by good information. I would be expected to produce the information on the same day too and not have a month to come up with it.
Frankly it’s about time more citizens started seeing it as all of our problem and doing something about it. As you say it’s all of our money that is funding the whole thing. Some in County Hall are obviously still of the mindset that it’s not our place. I assume “Tim” is one of those as he seems to have an axe to grind about it.
The new measures being introduced for members of the public to get involved with the overview and scrutiny process look quite promising. I just hope more people will make use of it and start seeing it as their problem.
HJ, Fishguard, I agree with you to some extent. At the very least the management should be shrinking to the same proportion as front line services and staff are being reduced by.
I’m sure your figure of £200k could easily be found from this. Unfortunately it would still fall massively short from the full savings needed to be found. £52 million over the current year and following two years after that. So I don’t think its an either/or situation and we should consider both to be necessary or our schools and social care are going to bear the brunt of the shortfall. Any savings we can make from overheads which don’t directly impact public services should be welcomed with open arms.
Paul Miller has tried several times to do as you suggested but has been allowed to be blocked by officers. Hopefully next year with a new batch of councillors this will be possible.
Ryan, you refer to the quality of policy-making and the level of scrutiny shown by councillors, where you suggest that most of them: “…are relying on what lands on their doorstep in the officer reports and don’t feel that there needs to be any more digging.”
I think your assessment is fair – that, broadly speaking, the majority of councillors accept and approve what’s put in front of them unquestioningly, and as for the cabinet, to a man.
Having read and commented several times on this post, you’ll realise that these council papers and officers’ reports you refer to are no longer provided to councillors in the delivered physical form you describe.
You will also know that, where your comments here initially focused on the cost benefits of the paperless scheme, my blogpost (and my subsequent comments) merely highlighted what I believe will be a concerning side effect of this digital drive, i.e. the increased likelihood that the information you refer to will go undigested when it has to be sought on a digital device, compared to when the papers were served on a plate.
If more councillors are less exposed to this information, I believe it’s bound to impact their knowledge and awareness, thus, their capacity for scrutiny.
Ryan, I think you might be underestimating the ability of council staff to compile answers to FoI questions. Many are dealt with straight away but are left until the full period allowable, before they are dispatched.
I have yet to see any printed electronic minutes of meetings since this paperless scheme started. Are they not to be produced any more in favour of the spoken webcast?
How can anyone refer and quote from a webcast in a written letter or email?
Is there a transcription service to be provided, at a cost of course!
This would of itself seem to be a retrograde step in the dissemination of information and a restriction or hindrance in the democratic process and the ability to hold people to account.
Perhaps this was the underlying idea by the officers and leading members of the council who are promoting this idea, all in the name of saving a targeted £20k.
It would be interesting to see the names of the councillors who have actively spoken in favour of this in favour of this.
Ryan, I do not share your optimism about the new improved scrutiny.
We have a budget approved by council, for which the cabinet is responsible and should be held to account for its implementation. This was arranged by service budget groupings with dedicated, largely ineffective service scrutiny committees, which did not even cover all services.
The new services scrutiny committee (13 members) now looks at ALL departmental budgets recast from the approved service orientated budgets.
We also have improvement plans, orientated towards service budgets and what intended service outcomes are. There would seem to be no departmental targeted improvements.
I think it would be more effective and a better use of money, staff and other resources, if service budgets and improvement plans were much more closely aligned, costed and reported together in a way whereby outcome monitoring results could be clarified and identified.
Perhaps then, we would not get cabinet merely rubber stamping identified shortfalls in savings approved by council, and leaving it to officers to determine how services are to be cut to achieve the non-achieved savings.
How much does it cost to produce the departmental budget/monitoring information? More or less than the £20k saving in paperless working? I am sure this aspect was carefully considered and reported before the new scrutiny, does anyone know where?
I have just made a mistake and asked where I could get a copy of the council’s constitution.
I have been referred to the version on the council’s website.
Apparently, the council has approved a new constitution that is being translated into Welsh, and that once this is done it will become “operational”.
Yet, somehow the new scrutiny committees are sitting now and “paperless” meetings are the norm, while the old O&S committees are officially described as “defunct”!
These new committees do not feature in the “old” current, still operational, constitution.
What legal authority does the new council-approved, but not yet operational, constitution have?
Perhaps the council’s legal officers are operating their own private version that we know nothing about.
Tim, in terms of wasting public resources, could you enlighten us, without me resorting to FOI, on the cost of officer time in producing all of these PCC press releases?
They seem to be mostly designed to provide publicity and promotion for cabinet members, rather than inform the public on matters of interest.
The frequency of them seem to be increasing and more of them seem to feature photos of cabinet members recently. I do hope our taxes aren’t being used towards pre-election publicity.
I have just had the position on the council’s constitution clarified. This is the Bible that sets out how the council runs itself, and is the only single document that we on the outside can refer to regarding the responsibilities, duties and legal authorities of councillors, officers and incidentally our rights.
Apparently, the situation is:-
The council’s website published “old” constitution is currently in force and is the legal authority for the governance of the council.
To this must be added the new arrangements for O&S committees as approved by the council on 14 July 2016, which replace the arrangements set out in the published Constitution (if you knew or cared about it).
The new constitution was approved by the Council on 7 July 2016, (excluding of course the subsequently approved new O&S arrangements). This will not become operational until the Welsh translation version is also available which will also have to incorporate the translated new O&S arrangements.
As the approved, but not yet operational, constitution states, one of its purposes is to enable citizens, councillors and officers to understand how the authority operates.
Council did not set a deadline for the publication of its new improved constitution, and hence its effective operative date.
I am not sure if the new paperless meeting arrangements will be incorporated in the new constitution.
There’s more than £150,000 still to be repaid over controversial grants scheme, and PCC is cutting the paper agenda to save money, surely there are bigger savings to be made.
Yes there are, but as the council (both officers and councillors) cannot identify or prioritise options, then they have bought in a PWC “blueprint” to do it for them.
The proposed new culture and leisure department reconfiguration is one such PWC preferred and recommended “new way of working”.
We are now being run by external consultants who direct, with the unquestioning support of unelected officers, our supine “leadership” of elected representatives who have no ideas (and no money) as to how the county should be run.
This leadership inherited a programme under the direction of the former Chief Executive. Did anyone bother to examine what this was?
We have seen how the 21st Century Schools programme (devised by the CEOs of PCC and the college, backed by Welsh Government) has worked out.
Incidentally does anyone know what this programme will cost us in future years? Projects are already being pared down to fit higher than anticipated tender costs. So much for the state of the art education facilities that we were promised.