Council's decision-making system ‘not fit for purpose’ leader admits

The current system for scrutinising plans and making decisions at Cambridge City Council is “not fit for purpose” the authority’s leader has admitted. Councillor Mike Davey (Labour) said the city council needs to move on and come up with a new system to improve scrutiny and governance.

However, opposition councillors have raised concerns that they could end up not having as much of a say on council decisions. The city council currently operates a ‘hybrid approach’, which it says is a blend of committee and cabinet systems. Decisions are currently made by executive councillors following a discussion at a relevant committee.

A report presented to the civic affairs meeting this week (May 13) said the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny had raised issues with the city council’s current system, stating that it “lacked collective democratic accountability, is resource heavy, opaque, [and] did not result in improved outcomes” for the council.

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The city council is considering moving to a ‘leader and cabinet’ model, where most final decisions are made by the cabinet, but cross party scrutiny meetings are held to examine any plans. Opposition councillors said they had concerns about current plans to change how the authority is run.

Councillor Karen Young (Liberal Democrat) said: “It reduces the involvement of backbenchers and also the opposition, it is designed to do that. We are being assured that is not the case, but we have no details yet and we do not know exactly how that is going to work out.”

Councillor Naomi Bennett (Green Party) said her group also had concerns about the change. However, Cllr Davey said at this stage the proposal was to work towards implementing a new system, and said opposition councillors will have “considerable opportunity” to contribute to and debate the changes.

He said it had been two years since concerns were raised about the current system and said it was time for the authority to begin ‘moving on’.

Cllr Davey said: “To do nothing means we carry on with a system that is unique in the local government systems across the United Kingdom, so we have to move somewhere.

“It is important for our backbenchers and the opposition to be able to scrutinise what the executive actually does, and at the moment there is no opportunity to do that. It is actually not scrutiny what we do, what happens to an extent, in my view, is people are whipped into performing a certain way.

“In the future under the proposals, depending upon the detail which is yet to be clear, what we would be looking for is the opportunity for scrutiny to actually work effectively, so the backbenchers in our party and the opposition parties are actually properly able to scrutinise what is going on rather than become in essence lobby fodder. That will require us to look at detail and until we approve this we can’t actually get to the detail, all we have got is a system that is not fit for purpose.”

Cllr Young said she agreed change was needed and said the discussion on the topic had so far been friendly, but said her party remained to be convinced at this stage. Cllr Davey said they were “all looking for a better system” and said he wanted “better scrutiny” from backbenchers and opposition councillors as he said it “enhances government rather than diminishes it”. A majority of the committee councillors voted to progress the work on creating a new structure for decision making at the city council.