Dudley Council leader admits scrutiny is not ‘done well’

Councillor Patrick Harley slammed politicians from all sides for not doing a good enough job of examining proposals and decisions.

During a debate at a meeting of the council’s cabinet on October 23, Councillor Harley also laid into members for not attending training sessions to learn more about how to understand council business.

Councillor Harley said: “I don’t think as a council we do scrutiny very well at all, it is still not good enough.

“Sometimes we haven’t got the facts in front of us and sometimes members, from across the political divide, ask questions which aren’t relevant to the subject matter.

“We have done scrutiny well in this authority, the Hall Street issue, the closure of the museum in Stone Street, those two examples were good where it was a cross party thing and we got it right.

“Members were allowed to ask relevant questions, the reports in front of them contained relevant information – everything members needed to make informed decisions."

Councillor Harley went on to say the answer is more training for officers and elected members but then made a startling revelation.

He said: “When we put on training the attendance by elected members from both sides is abysmal.

“I sat through an introduction to the directors a couple of weeks ago, there was hardly any backbenchers at all, that’s shocking.”

He called for an overhaul of the scrutiny process at the council – a review he believes would help to change the course of the authority.

The council has a number of select committees dedicated to scrutinising issues where politicians can question officers and make recommendations to the cabinet.

Councillor Parmjit Sahota said: “It has been more thorough this year: where the issues are is the contents of the information we are given and some of the basics.”

He went on to highlight a meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee on October 22 where important statistics on the performance of the council were only released to members on the day of the meeting.

The cabinet had been discussing a report from the Local Government Association (LGA) which highlighted the importance of scrutiny.

The LGA report said: “Following the election in May 2024 the committees are now chaired by opposition group members.

“There has been some development support for members of the committees in their roles but this will need to be kept under review – this is an important function for the council as effective scrutiny provides critical challenge.”

Councillor Judy Foster, Dudley Labour’s deputy leader said: “I’m really proud of the work my group has done on scrutiny, we made it quite a big part of our input to the LGA review and we recognise that it is overdue for a review – our chairs and vice-chairs are doing really well.”