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Agenda
February 4, 2025 View on council website Watch video of meetingTranscript
Okay, everybody, I'm going to start the meeting. I'm told Councillor Cornher is very much on his way. And I think the same is also true of Mr. Parry, who's going to be joining us remotely. So I'm going to start the meeting. And first of all, welcome to everybody. Hi, Matthew. Hello. Welcome to everybody this evening. Actually, where is there is one other missing? You saw him? He was. I saw him earlier. Okay. All right. I think I'll steam on all the same. So we haven't actually received any apologies this evening. I'm not going to go through everybody in alphabetical order and get them to introduce themselves. What I propose is, as I've said at previous meetings, is when you come to speak, if I call you to speak, please say who you are, say Councillor whatever and where you represent or however you want to describe yourself. I'm also going to suggest this evening, I'm also going to suggest this evening that as it's the case across the council, that increasingly we are using people's first names rather than titles and surnames. If it's all right with members of the committee, and do object if you don't like it, I was going to use people's first names here this evening as well. Yes, go on then. Councillor Graham. Surely this is something for the task and finish group to review and then make recommendations on. Well, I suppose it is, but on the other hand, I like to try and be an innovative chair. Listen, I won't do it if the minority party object. If you object, then do say so. Otherwise, I'm going to use people's first names. I think we'd like a bit more notice to think about it rather than... You would? Yes, thank you. All right, okay, that's fair enough. If that's the case, we will stick with Councillor Graham rather than your first name, et cetera, as we go around, as I call people to speak. Okay, so I'm going to go to the minutes of the meeting, the last meeting. Are the minutes from the last meeting agreed? Agreed. Very good. Are there any declarations of interest from anybody this evening? Anyone want to declare any kind of interest? No? So that brings us straight to item three, the first proper item on the agenda, which is the Democracy Review Progress Report. And I'm going to invite somebody to present it. Is that Mr. Chowdhury? Yes, please. If you'd like to briefly introduce item three, please. Yes, of course, Chair. So, members, the recommendation before you is to note, rather than to determine anything, which is the progress on the items that have been discussed at the task and finish groups. The three areas that the task and finish group meetings have focused on have been to move away from the current arrangements, whereby overview and scrutiny committees review all decisions to be taken by the executive, the introduction of a financial threshold for key decisions, and the reform of the arrangements of the call-in, reform of the arrangements for call-in of executive decisions. So, members, the detail is set out in the report, rather than read those to you. What I will ask you to look at is around the timeline that is set out in the introduction section in paragraph three. That is, that is, that the detail of the constitutional changes to implement the changes that I referenced earlier will be considered by the executive at its meeting on March 3rd, and then for onward consideration by full council on 5th of March. And if the changes are proposed and agreed by full council, the changes will take effect after the 5th of March. So, Chair, a little on the detail of the paper. I'll make it quick if I can. With regards to the scrutiny function operated by the council, it is somewhat unusual, amongst other authorities that operate a cabinet and lead a form of governance, also referred to as an executive form of governance, whereby in this council, all decisions to be considered by the executive are subject to pre-decision scrutiny by the overview and scrutiny committees. That is an unusual provision, but it is an unlawful provision, but it is an unlawful provision, it's been operated for a number of years. The discussion at the task and finish group was to move away from that, and the detail of that proposal will be worked up, and there's a couple of options around how the future arrangements could operate. In summary, the intent is that the existing scrutiny committees continue to operate, but the statutory scrutiny function to call in the decisions of the executive will be exercised by one of those committees, rather than each of the service areas currently covered by the different committees. The overview and scrutiny committees will continue to function, they will have a slightly different remit, whereby they are not just considering 11th hour scrutiny of decisions to be taken by the executive, rather they will look at the forward plan of the council, as well as particular matters that the scrutiny committees intend to look at and develop proposals for executive and, if necessary, for council. In terms of the key decision threshold, again, there isn't a financial threshold in Wandsworth, and some consideration has been given by the task and finish groups around setting a threshold on that. And the accompanying that part of the discussions to the task and finish group, members will have received the research that we produced around the threshold that authorities across London operate as part of that. And then finally, Chair, by way of introduction, with regards to the call-in provision, the council's current provisions on call-in procedure for executive decisions reflects, in effect, the statutory minimum when you operate in a leader and cabinet form of governance. It contains very minimal notice periods in terms of when call-in requests can be exercised. So the intent around that is to revise that and to produce more detailed provisions around the timelines and the category of decisions that council might consider relevant, might consider to be most appropriate, where call-in is exercised. So, Chair, that's by way of introduction. I'm happy to assist with any questions. I also note that Mr. Parry, who is with us now, and he has joined the discussions at the task and finish groups as well. Thank you, Mr. Chowdhury. Just very quickly, Mr. Parry, do you have anything to add in the way of observation on any of that? No, I support entirely what Mr. Chowdhury has already said, Chair. Thank you very much. So, comments, first of all. Councillor Graham. Inevitably. So, this is as a preface to the actual contents of this report. My understanding was, and I did say this in private a week ago, so this will come as no shock, that we had set up the task and finish group in order to come up with recommendations, or at least see if we could come up with recommendations. Those recommendations from the task and finish group, once they've been derived, would then come to this committee as the parent committee, and we would look at what the actual changes to the constitution would be in detail and look at what, line by line, the drafting of those changes would then consist of in order to ensure that we all knew what we were doing and agreeing and it was going to come out of that cross-party process. We have had two online meetings of the task and finish group. We haven't agreed any recommendations. Indeed, the discussion, although it's summarised here that somehow we'd come to a consensus view, was largely that there were lots of other questions we needed to look at, lots of other pieces of the puzzle that needed to be pinned down before we could adequately say what we wanted, a call-in procedure or a key decision to apply to, to know what it would mean, because you have to know how it operates in context. To know what that would be. And so I don't understand why, when there have been no recommendations and no discussion of recommendations at the task and finish group, this has been plucked out of that process by officers and placed back here prematurely, so prematurely that there isn't any detail, and we are now being told that instead of members discussing that in a cross-party way and trying to find agreement, it will be determined by the executive, which, when we had this debate before, it was agreed that the executive is not a committee of this council. It is a one-party group that would be marking its own homework on how it was scrutinised and making the recommendations directly to full council when we have not given it that function in our constitution. The executive has no function to make recommendations on the constitution to the council. So this just seems to me to be going against everything that we'd agreed, jeopardising that potential cross-party agreement that we could reach in order to pluck certain things out in advance and ram them through without any of us getting to see what they would actually involve. And therefore, I'd like some understanding of why we're here right now, why are we having this meeting to discuss these particular points, when that task and finish group has barely begun its work, let alone reached the stage of recommendations. Councillor Appes. Thank you very much. So I'm Councillor Appes, and I'm the member for Shaftesbury and Queenstown, along with two others. Yeah, I just think that we need to bear in mind, like, let's not look the gift horse in the mouth. You know, we actually have a huge opportunity here to have a really good system of scrutiny for both opposition and for majority group members. We've had more discussion on this, probably, and, frankly, more goodwill discussion on this, and we have on many different issues. So, and, you know, if there's a failure to bring recommendations, you know, we must all be part of that. But we do think, actually, on our side, that there were some very clear directions of travel that we can look at and that they can provide a guide for moving forward. But we want to make the most of this opportunity to basically, to actually allow all councillors who are involved in scrutiny, who are all backbenchers, to have an opportunity to look at policymaking, to make sure that we're implementing that, to make sure that we're able to feed into that process. And that will actually be a really positive experience for all of us. I think the other thing is, is this is not one thing that has really struck me through this process, is this is not rocket science. You know, the fact is, is that call-in processes, key decision processes, and breaking the link between scrutiny and executive decisions is really commonplace. There's a common standard of behaviour. It's very easy to look at other councils and how they've progressed this. And actually, we are a complete outlier. And the way that we conduct our business is extremely unusual and unhelpful for moving forward and making sure that all councillors do give their best to developing public policy. The fact is, is that at the moment, we're not. We're just involved in looking at very, you know, decisions which are about to be made, so we can't really have any proper influence on them. So we just end up wobbling in a party political way, which is super unhelpful. And the fact is, is we want to make some progress on that and move that forward. I recognise we're slightly still in an old-fashioned state where we're still making decisions close to the decision, and that is influencing the process. But we would like to move beyond this so that councillors can play their full part in our democracy. Councillor Corner. Thank you, Chair. Look, in terms of the recommendations of this paper, it says that we're only being asked to note the progress on items discussed at the task and finish group. So we might be able to do that this evening. But I don't see, to Councillor Graham's point, that we're any closer to landing at kind of recommendations that we can endorse to the wider council. That's not to say that the conversations we've had so far in the two task and finish groups haven't been helpful. But I think they need to be a lot more in-depth and a lot more definitive in terms of what they're bringing to this committee and, of course, to the wider council. I take Councillor Rapp's point as well. I actually agree with it. But I do think we might need more time before deciding on things would be my input for where we go from here. A few comments on the task and finish group. I think it's a really helpful thing to do to meet in private. But I don't think we've got the support, actually, at the moment, to be an effective task and finish group. What we need is an agenda and options that feed into those meetings so that we know what we're deciding on, what we're rejecting, what we're approving. Now, that doesn't all have to be on officers or the Centre for Governance. That could be councillors doing homework themselves in their own research. That would be something that I would be happy to do, and I'm sure others around this table would be. And then we could actually have a purposeful discussion with clear conclusions that then get discussed at this forum and by the wider council. Instead, we've really got no record of outputs. There is a record of inputs in this paper, but no real record of outputs. So it's not clear to me what exactly we're noting. So whilst I'm happy to note that the task and finish group has progressed things, I would be cautious about recommending changes to how the council operates at this stage. Okay. Councillor Grimston. Thank you, Chair. I've increasingly felt that the whole process, it feels rather like a McGreek picture. There are detailed bits, but there's no sense of how they all fit together. I mean, to give one obvious example, I think we're kind of agreed that one of the challenges that ones would face, one of the areas we don't do terribly well, is cross-departmental thinking. We tend to be very siloed. And at the moment, we have a structure of scrutiny committees that contributes to that because they are organised along the council's departments, they're organised along the portfolios. There's a real opportunity, if we're looking at scrutiny from the basis, that we can move away from scrutiny being organised as inward-looking and focusing on the internal structure of the organisation and move it towards looking at the external issues that directly face our people out there. We're aware, obviously, that, for example, if we're looking at educational achievements of some particular groups of our youngsters, then housing is important in that. Transport is important in that. Social services is clearly very important in that, children's social services particularly. But quite possibly, we might need to look at support for parents in those situations. And I think to be – and similarly, the focus on calling, yeah, okay, calling is an issue that we need to look at. But it's a tiny part of what scrutiny does in most authorities. And, indeed, you can almost argue that if it's got to the stage of needing a call-in, then the scrutiny process has sort of failed because – or the overview side of the scrutiny process has failed because the scrutiny, which is looking ahead, is kind of before the policy agenda. It's designed to shape the policy agenda. So there is no need for it to get very party political. The party politics and the opposition comes at a later stage in the whole process. And so I just feel that we're not – we've lost sight of the big picture here of what are we worried about with Wandsworth. We're worried about being far too inward-looking rather than outward-looking and being far too siloed rather than being cross-departmental. And we're focusing on tiny little details that don't really address those sorts of issues. And so it seems to me – and a disappointment I've had really through this – is that rather getting to grips saying, this is the issue, what might a structure look like that can address this issue, and then coming to the questions we're coming up. We've launched in on the detailed questions without looking at where it all fits together and how it will actually contribute ultimately to us being more aware of the issues that our residents are facing and are likely to face over the next 10 years, say, and what we can be doing to shape those issues rather than simply responding and reacting to them, which sadly I think has been the Wandsworth way for some years. Thank you, Chair. Councillor Hedges from Ballon Ward. Just wanted to raise a point about the introduction. So you talk about – the paper talks about detailed constitutional changes that will be considered in the March meeting. And then further goes on and talks about proposals for the first phase of changes, which is obviously the call-ins and the thresholds. I mean, can we allude that there will be a second phase to this? And if there is a second phase, do we get any transparency on that? Because whatever is agreed in the first phase could potentially have a knock-on impact to the second phase. So some more transparency and shedding some light on that would be really helpful. Thank you. Councillor Ambash, please. Jeremy Ambash, Councillor for West Putney Ward. I wanted to follow what Councillor Grimston was saying, because I've got a lot of sympathy with what Malcolm was saying. And it's probably a question for Mr Parry. As I see it, we're trying to make some changes to free up some capacity in our OSCs so they aren't rammed full with all pre-decision scrutiny of every decision under the sun, big and small. And we can make some changes to move in that direction, to give our OSCs that freedom to be able to choose to look at earlier policy development or whatever by defining call-in, by talking about key decisions and thresholds and the forward plan and changing standing orders in the Constitution. They're all mechanisms. But the other feedback that we've had from the Centre for Policy Studies was that we're in a culture where our OSCs are dominated by party politics and therefore not getting at some of the policy and the service issues. And that's been my experience of my last 11 years on a number of OSCs, but particularly on this Finance Committee. And I just wonder, Mr Parry, in terms of working with other authorities, what's it taken in terms of councillor development, the culture that councillors have established, the leadership of councillors to try and make those changes? Because we can change the call-in procedures and this, that and the other, but we can keep behaving in this rather unproductive way. Can you give us some clues? What was the first steps we need to take to actually bring about some real change rather than just the mechanisms? A direct question there to Mr Parry. I wonder if Mr Parry could respond to that. Thank you. Happy to, Chair. There is no kind of flick of a switch that moves you from one place to another instantly. This is a journey. I think the first thing to do is to kind of rearrange the structure where you have a very tight situation between scrutiny and the executive in the way it scrutinises executive decisions. And there isn't sufficient space and distance between the decision and the scrutiny of decisions to allow it to give it any real input or impact. So that's one thing. The second thing is to try and give members of scrutiny greater say in what it is they see as the priorities for scrutiny to scrutinise. They shouldn't and couldn't and probably would be ineffective to try and scrutinise everything, everything that goes to executive, for example, because everything that goes to executive is not mission critical. It's not important to the residents. It's not important necessarily to the wider council. These are things which are kind of business as usual decisions. And do they do they all need scrutiny? Perhaps. But do they all need to be done by a scrutiny committee? Probably not. That's not the way it's done in most councils. And I have to say, Wandsworth, as we know, is an outlier. It's not the way it's done in most councils. There is a process of rational decision making about what scrutiny decides to scrutinise and what it chooses not to scrutinise. And there is a kind of methodology that sits behind that, which is very much driven by members. And in Wandsworth, it's very much not driven by members in terms of what they scrutinise and when they scrutinise it. It is formulaic. It is process. It's not always impactful and it rarely adds any value. So it's trying to put some light and air into that arena for scrutinise to be able to operate in a much more positive way rather than this tightly constricted way that seems to operate right now. But it's a journey, as I say. They say that, you know, culture eats structure, but sometimes structure can help culture. If you've got the right structure, it can start to lead to better relationships and better approaches to the way things are done and the relationships that develop from that. Thank you, Mr Parry. Councillor Graham. Yes, so first of all, I want to concur with what Councillor Grimston said and think that it actually goes even deeper than what he said because what I was trying to point out is until we've got the other pieces of the puzzle together, even if we've got specific changes on key decisions, if we define them exactly, even if we've got specific changes on call-in procedures and we've defined them exactly, we still won't know what the impact of that is because we don't know, for example, on call-in procedures what decisions are actually going to go to the executive. So you can call in decisions that go to the executive. OK, what decisions are going to the executive? We haven't decided that, so how can we know what we want to call in? It's that kind of question. I'm not doing it to try and cause trouble. It's genuinely, even if you've got it in black and white, you still don't know what it means until you've answered other questions, which, I mean, I think of as prior, but certainly that need to be dealt with together. I also want to agree with what Councillor Cornish said, both in terms of, we recognise that this can be changed. We want it to see some streamlining. We're not against changes to this. But that does have to be done with us all working together, at least to have a chance of setting a cultural change that would actually lead to more cross-party working and more of the things that Councillor Ambash was talking about. Now, he was right, but this paper, the recommendations here are just to note progress. That doesn't endanger that as a, why we're essentially replicating a debate we had before might be a different question. The problem is what's in paragraph 17, which is that after we've finished talking tonight, the next people to look at what actually happens and what that detail will actually be is not us. It would be the executive and it would be the executives making the recommendation to full council. So I've got two questions for Mr. Parry on that. The first one is whether he is aware of any, or certainly whether it's the case that many councils are allowing their executive to determine what the shape of changes to the constitution would be and make those recommendations to councils. And if there are any, presumably the functions allotted to their executive in their constitution allow them to do it, whereas don't. So perhaps you could answer that one first and I'll come back to the second question. Are you happy to answer that, Mr. Parry? Yes, yes, indeed, Chair. Again, two points. I know this wasn't the question you asked me, but I just wanted to reiterate that the purpose of calling, it's not for members to choose what to call in because they don't like it or disagree with it. It's a constitutional release valve or safety valve in a sense that things which are outside policy or policy framework, agreed policy framework, or outside the financial envelope agreed by the council and haven't gone through proper scrutiny, it's then within the gift of scrutiny to call those things in, providing there is the criteria is met and the threshold has met. It's simply that. It's not, therefore, an option to just call in whatever you feel like. Therefore, it's not a question of calling things in before they get to executive. It's usually things are called in after executive. And in terms of authorities, councils, deciding what to recommend to full council, this is usually done by the executive or cabinet and those councils which are cabinet control or cabinet run of a cabinet governance system like you do. It's usually the executive or the cabinet that recommends to full council what those decisions will be. As the executive or cabinet is the senior part of the council, they have the delegated authority from full council as the decision-making forum within the council. It's they who can make virtually most of the decisions within the council. And there's only a few decisions which are reserved matters for council, such as the budget and the election of the leader, etc., the council plan that are reserved for the council as decisions to be made. The rest are decisions to be made by the executive. That's what the law empowers them to do. And whilst in your constitution, you've made other arrangements in law, the executive can still decide that it's they who will recommend to council what it feels are the appropriate recommendations. Now, wisely, the council's cabinet has decided to go through a process like this, which it wants to listen to its members and listen to the views of this committee. And I'm sure we'll take those on board before anything is finally recommended to full council. But that is, in fact, the way cabinet systems run virtually across the land. And I think you'll find that Wandsworth is different rather than the rest of the country's cabinet systems being any different. That's the way it does run. Thank you, Mr. Parry. Just a second. You've got a second question, I think, Councillor Graham. I do. But if I could just come back on that first, because I just want to make sure. Obviously, that is correct in terms of executive decisions. However, my understanding, as I've served under other local authority, is that constitutional changes are not normally regarded as an executive matter, which is why either they go to ad hoc committees or they have general purposes committees. But the second part of my first question was that, given that we have not given that function to our executive, how can the executive then assume that function in March when it doesn't have it? Because it already has it. The constitutional changes can only be made by the council. That is one of its reserved matters, if you like. The constitution is for the council to agree and changes to its constitution is only for the council to agree. But the recommendations to it could come from this committee or it could come from the executive. But it could be that the executive chooses to take on board this committee's recommendations and make its own recommendations to the council. That's not to say it would change anything. But in principle, the executive has significant powers to be able to do these things. They're already there. So, well, I don't understand the response, but I won't prolong that debate. Could I ask you to have a think about it? And we'll come back to you in a minute. Should I ask the second part of my question? Oh, I thought you had done it. No, no, no. I was clarifying the first part. Okay. Well, the second question was a simple one that, given that we're talking about call-in procedures tonight, if it is the executive which will determine the form of the recommendations in March, and that is an executive decision on what to recommend, presumably that decision is subject to call-in. If it's outside the policy framework or financial envelope, yes. But it's unlikely to be. I think you've got an answer to a couple of questions. Have a think about it. We can come back to you in a bit. I'm going to take a few more contributions. I've got, first of all, Councillor Apps, then Councillor Corner, then Councillor Lawless. Thank you very much. I have to say I'm looking forward to working with opposition members on really productive scrutiny. Spent a very good day with Councillor Corner on a school visit recently, where it was good to learn about different policy interests and aspects. So I look forward to more of that continuing. And I do think, I mean, I think there's a fairly few nuts-and-bolts issues, which are things like the key decision threshold, the call-in procedures. We've got some thoughts, actually, which do evolve naturally from the task-and-finish group. But that also, there's far more to this than that. Once we've got those nuts-and-bolts dealt with, there's public involvement. There's looking at select-style scrutiny and how we can make that work. There's looking at full counsel and how we can make that involve the public more. There's lots more for the task-and-finish group to look at if we're so minded. And then to hopefully be more productive in terms of recommendations that we can then push through to be looked at as part of a following course of action. But I wanted to come on to one of those that I think that was very clear from our discussions in the task-and-finish group, which is that the link between scrutiny with executive decisions is unhelpful. It would be best and usual practice if OSE members in Wandsworth were free to be able to exercise independence in how they scrutinize policies so that they can contribute to policymaking. The requirement in the Constitution that all decisions be considered by the executive are pre-scrutinized by the OSE hampers this process. And as I think was alluded to us earlier, also hampers co-production and actual relations, I think, between the two groups to some point. So I think we could therefore say that we believe, we would like it to be noted, that the Constitution should break this link so that scrutiny members then will be free to decide which key decisions they would like to examine in depth, and that will still be possible, but also what other policies they want to look at. And hopefully looking at things further in advance. So when any of us come up with good ideas of how we'd like to see policymaking in the future, that we can actually get that considered at a point where there's still an openness and a readiness to hear those ideas rather than a bit too late, so it just turns into a party political posturing, which is what, to be honest, happens too often now. So that would be something that I'd like to be noted, that I think that's a natural, follows naturally on from some of our task and finish group discussions. Okay, a very clear point that you'd like minuted and noted in the meeting. Okay, in the notes of the meeting. Very good. Councillor Corner. Thank you, Chair. I do agree with the sentiment expressed there with Councillor Routts, and I agree with her that on the recent school visit that we had, I think members of that committee gained huge amounts from engaging with the people who will be affected by the policy, perhaps more so than they would in a public meeting of the committee. I just wanted to respond to a point about there being lots more to look at by the task and finish group. I completely agree. What we do need to see, I think, as a committee is a schedule for that task and finish group so that we can see when the subsequent meetings will be and when we will actually be making proposals to the executive and recommendations to the full council. It's a bit non-committal in paragraph 17 as to whether there will be further meetings of the task and finish group before recommendations are made to full council. And, of course, the fact that the executive are making those recommendations is highly controversial and not something I'm sure I can support. I think a better approach would be for us as a committee tonight to commit to working together collaboratively, as we have done already, to having proposals we can make to the executive and the full council that command cross-party support, and that will ensure that we don't have party political dividing lines emerge in this work, which I think is really important. The other point I'd just like to briefly make is this debate around the linkage of OSC agendas to executive decisions. I think it's a really good idea to have OSCs being able to scrutinize executive decisions effectively and efficiently and also being able to pursue their own work. The thing is that already can happen at the moment. Opposition members of a committee, for example, and, indeed, majority party members of a committee can put their own items on the committee agendas already. So it's not actually clear that we need to do huge amounts of work to change that. Maybe it's more about changing the mindset of councillors. For me, I actually quite like the fact that there is linkage between the executive decisions and OSC agendas because it means that all councillors who are on those committees and are holding the relevant directorates to account are able to see everything that's happening in the council to the level of detail required to really be able to scrutinize it. I think where there is an opportunity is in having cross-party working to design the agendas and work schedules of those committees so that we don't have excessively long agendas, as perhaps we've seen at some committees. So I think there's possibly a task and finish session just in what I've just described. I'd be really happy to work with any colleagues to design that task and finish discussion so that we can have some concrete recommendations to make. I'm not saying that everything I've said has to be agreed upon or else I'm not willing to participate. I want to have that debate with colleagues and maybe work with everyone to come up with some solid proposals that both parties and all members can agree on. Okay. I mean, we've tried very hard in these formal meetings to make sure that these kind of views are being properly minuted in some detail. And you've made a number of suggestions there which I think should be reflected in the minutes regardless of what we agree or don't agree in these discussions. Councillor Lawless. Thank you. Councillor Lawless, Tweeting Broadway Award. As Councillor App says, there's a few things we want noted from our side that we think would be useful to add to the minutes. So it sets out our position and she's mentioned the link between scrutiny and executive decisions. On key decision threshold, we've had a look at page 5 and the appendix was very useful. But we think setting, the council should explore options for setting the threshold at a million pounds of capital and revenue spending. It would bring us into line with most other councils when you take into account inflation considering a lot of the ones that were set were set a while ago now. Yeah, 2001. So yeah, that's one of the things we want noted, please. Councillor Graham. Yeah, well, just on that latter point, the paper itself notes that the most common threshold operated by councils across London is £500,000. And even those that operate a £500,000 threshold allow other criteria to apply on a range of decisions, or most of them do, recognising that some decisions can be below that, but they're less politically sensitive. I mean, there's parallel in some respects to the sort of sensitivity matrix that's applied to procurement that we were looking at. You know, that you can tick various boxes and that there are some things where it's... So, I mean, I would be loath to suggest a level of a million, which is double the norm. And, well, I mean, we haven't set a specific level here, but effectively five times what our, in effect, key decision threshold is. And as I say, I just don't think that it makes any sense to talk about what the figure should be if we haven't decided what the other procedures are. Now, if key decisions are all that are going to go to the executive, for example, then, and that, we'd suddenly go back the other way and we'd say, what are the executive decisions? Well, they're only key decisions. And somehow, they're then saying that everything below a million pounds will either be a delegated decision to officers or it will be a cabinet decision, but we haven't even discussed what the cabinet should decide. And one of the abnormalities of our system that ought to be addressed is the fact that cabinet members have no power in their own right. They only have power operating through the executive. There is some suggestion that the leader in the constitution, that the leader could alter that by a mandate he gives to annual council. None of the previous leaders have done so. And so, therefore, cabinet members in their own right have almost no power at all. Well, I don't think that makes sense. And where I think there is legitimate concern from officers that certain decisions being bound up in the paper process and the committee process, a lot of the pressure on that could be relieved while still having the political oversight by instead of delegating all that to officers, allowing the cabinet member to take it as a cabinet member decision. So it doesn't have to go or wait for an executive meeting. It doesn't have to do any of those things. It's not SO83A. And also, it is then their decision. And then there's some accountability for it as well. Because what we don't want to do is hand over power from elected members to officers. Because actually, you know, the administration, we're not in charge right now, you've been elected to run the council. You ought to be running it. You oughtn't to be, you know, suddenly just handing over a whole swathe of stuff to officers to do, even if those officers are competent and will, you know, take those decisions in good faith. The fact is that some decisions ought to be made with political direction. So that's why I just think that we're... It's really difficult to talk about those details in isolation. And I was wondering, building on what Councillor Conrad said, whether Councillor Apps and others around the table, because we have two members of the executive and, you know, the senior group whip on the other side, whether there'd be some willingness to agree not to put those... Not to put detailed proposals through the executive, but instead to have a further round of discussion where we can see if we can agree something and put it up through a normal means as an actual recommendation of the task and finish group with that space that we don't have right now where we're meeting in private and we can actually, you know, thrash things around without, you know, it being played back on video or clipped on social media or whatever. And see, because I really do feel that there is scope for us to agree, but if we suddenly start plucking bits out and ramming them through via the executive, which we have no representation on, no ability to participate in, and so the first chance that we've got to look at it is when it arrives in full council, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. And it doesn't make a lot of sense to have these two things to be the things that are suddenly pulled out and put through in that way either. So if there's concern that there should be something at least on these two points by March or in time for the annual council, I mean, I would have thought the sensible thing to do is put a set of changes in so they apply to the next committee cycle. In other words, all of those OSCs that are meeting in June and onwards. Well, I actually think we could go further than this in terms of changes we could agree for June. We could get more change in that process, but we need to look at it as a package. So would there be some willingness not to withdraw this paper but just to abandon for the time being the suggestion in paragraph 17 that these two things are going to be plucked out by the executive and determined without any further cross-party discussion? And actually, let's put those back into another meeting of the working group. We're prepared to make our time available to do that on a timetable that suits the executive. And then we can see if we can get some bigger package that actually fits together so everybody understands what it is in place for that OSC cycle that begins in June because we are willing to try to do that. And I think that if we go down this executive path, I think we're just throwing all the goodwill away unnecessarily. OK, Councillor Henderson first. Thank you very much. Councillor Graham Henderson from Hampton Ward. I think it's important we don't lose sight of the main chance and the opportunities which we actually have here. And I certainly welcomed a recent meeting with Councillor Hedges and Councillor de la Seixol on the subject of all. and think this is a very good example of how we can actually work collaboratively on an issue which frankly should not be party political. And that I think is where we should be working towards. There is undoubtedly a question of culture and I do think that the current systems actually mitigate against that cross-party working. It is incredibly adversarial and unnecessarily so. I certainly agree entirely with Mr. Perry's analysis. It really is a question of how do we actually get to where we want to get to from where we currently are. Now in terms of the paper which has been drafted I see that as really identifying a few key issues where hopefully we can achieve broad agreements on. We may have specific differences in terms of some of the detail but I see that as really picking out some key areas where we can actually make progress. Now in terms of actually presenting them to council we can certainly in my mind park them to an extent whilst we consider other fundamental issues. But what this paper is actually trying to do is first of all to stimulate discussion and thought. As you can see it's written in very general terms. It is intended quite deliberately for the opposition to consider what we are our travel our direction of travel etc. in terms of what we would like to see and to have a constructive debate around that. So I think it's important for us to gather some of it like hanging fruit first to identify key areas where there is agreement and then we can move on from there. I mean I have to say I mean I do entirely agree with a lot of you on that and some would say I agree with 100% of what you said Malcolm I'm sure absolutely but I mean I certainly do agree with your analysis particularly across department working pretty much all our departments have operated in silos we're trying to break that down but I certainly agree with you that the current committee structure certainly mitigates against that I actually see that as a much more substantive change and something which I think we should probably come to a bit later I mean I think we need to take people with us as part of that culture change and although I think your analysis is absolutely correct I wouldn't actually want to postpone some significant changes we can make on the basis of mutual agreement this is an important subject I'm not denying that but I think we can actually come back to that on a much more collaborative basis thank you Councillor Aps thank you well I commend Councillor Henderson's remarks I mean I think he's made some excellent points so I won't abhor you all by repeating them but you know I do have sympathy for Councillor Graham's concern about being involved and we're very keen to hear views and it's been really good discussion tonight but the more I've looked at this process the more I've realised that there's a few core changes which are what I call bread and butter changes where there's not that much variation from council to council the main thing is we're very different to where most councils are and I think it's different in approach as well that Councillor Graham's attitude is well nothing can change till everything's agreed whereas I feel it would be better to make some step changes to bring us more into line with normal council processes which are some few basic changes and there actually can be I think where the really interesting discussions are is how we look at for example full council and how that could work in a much more productive way and actually be helpful for the people of Wandsworth how we could look at making sure that the people of Wandsworth have a voice within our systems while making sure that we represent the wide range of our community there's so many interesting things for us to look at and these things when we've all had access to all those tables you know there's not a great deal of variety around those there are some key changes which are pretty fundamental to making progress on these issues to be clear and I can see how it could be interpreted the other way I'm not suggesting that nothing can be agreed until everything is agreed I'm not saying that certain things can't be picked out we don't have to change the format of full council meetings in order to have a different model applying to the OSCs we don't have to even determine the new model for how the executive meeting should function because I think we all agreed that having five minute meetings that are entirely pro forma that serves no real purpose in there so we don't have to have agreed that what we can just look at is what levels of decision there should be who should take each of those decisions what the kind of reporting and documentary requirements are around each some of them don't need any some of them need a bit some of them need more those kind of things just pin those down so it's not trying to agree all of the whole scope it's just agreeing enough of the bits to make sure that we know the implications of what we're doing because as I say if we define key decisions in a certain way when we know that there are statutory safeguards attached to those but we don't know what other safeguards we're creating on other things internally we don't know the impact of what we're doing and look and you all can try to work with us and if you can't reach consensus you can push through what you want anyway you do have the votes so we can't hold you up in that sense and we've got no incentive to do so because then you will just do what you want over any issues or concerns that we express that's why we are trying to come at this in good face so I think I sort of detected some willingness maybe to move away from the implication in paragraph 17 we're not voting on paragraph 17 so that doesn't necessarily need to be settled right now but from our point of view I'm just making it clear that we are willing to take the time to your timetable to get a package of changes where we actually understand what the bits are in place for the OSC cycle starting in June and we'll make time available and I think we could thrash something out and if we can't you can just do what you were going to do anyway so but I think there is an advantage to doing it that way rather than none of us looking at the detail here and then the executive suddenly deciding something and there being a massive route for council about it being imposed and contrary to all of the discussions and process that we've created so far okay we are tending to go round and round in circles a little bit now I will take councillor corner's contribution but I do want to move towards some sort of conclusion to this discussion if I can thank you chair this is a very quick contribution which is just to say that I think that if we want to reduce the extent to which the council is adversarial and that business is approached from a party political divide perspective then we really need to have that reflected in this process I think I obviously completely agree with what Councillor Graham just said can you imagine how good it would be if we had a timetable of task and finish working sessions to the executive timetable we make ourselves available for them we work in general genuine collaboration outside of public meetings and then at the end we could actually have a set of proposals that are basically signed off and approved publicly by both political groups on the council and ideally the independent as well Councillor Grimston so and that would create huge amounts of goodwill and really actually I think precipitate a genuine culture change in the way that meetings of the council one okay what I hear is both sides trying quite hard actually to find some sort of agreement and move forward is how I would interpret the contributions from both sides this evening if I can overstep the role of chair just a tiny bit I wonder if I can move towards a decision which tries to take some of that into account there is a note I think circulated by Councillor Apps and others which is not an amendment to the first item it's yet another element to be noted which I think to use Councillor Henderson's phrase shows the direction of travel that the majority party I think would like to move in and it has no more status than that as I understand it from the minority party point of view you've got no objection to noting this item this document but you do have a kind of uneasiness about paragraph 17 what if in order to show that uneasiness and if you like a direction of travel from your side or at least whatever the opposite of a direction of travel is a kind of slowness to an unwillingness to agree or something like that if you wanted to indicate that what if it were clearly minuted I mean I've gone out of my way as chair of this committee several times to make sure certain items are minuted in detail so that we don't just have a record of decisions we have a record of what was argued from all sides including the minority party for posterity to understand what if the minutes of this meeting note your reservations and concerns about paragraph 17 which is not actually being agreed it's only being noted anyway so that we can move forward on the basis of this item on the agenda and pick up your suggestion Councillor Graham that we have other detailed discussions with more changes in as we go down towards the summer I mean there are other suggestions that I've said ought to be clearly minuted for example Councillor Corners concern for a schedule and if I remember rightly in the task and finish group there was a feeling that while it was all right to meet virtually there was a preference for meeting face to face and perhaps that should be clearly minuted as well as a result of this discussion this evening if we can get that package agreed and minuted this evening is everybody broadly happy with that consensus approach Councillor Graham yes broadly I just want to understand where in that you think what status within that the note circulated by the majority party would have or would that be outside I mean it could be noted as just that's where the majority party currently feels we ought to be going which is fine I actually think this would be very helpful as a starting point for a discussion the discussion that we can continue to have in the task and finish group and I'm not dismissing it and even though I've expressed reservations on the £1 million threshold depending on what the rest of the framework looked like I might be even able to agree to that at some point I have reservations but I'm not setting my face against it so I think it's a question of what status this would have because we don't want to have it ministered that we we've taken a definitive stance on stuff that we don't actually think we can until we know the other pieces are possible as I understand it the note from the majority party is a broad indication of direction of travel it's not a categorical statement of position and indeed could be interpreted as an item for discussion going forward is that accurate we're happy with it on that basis with the caveats move to a decision then on whether we note this document on the basis of what I've just described and the full minute a fulsome minute of the discussion are we happy to note item three this evening all those in favour of note agreed okay anyone against any abstentions okay item three noted we can move on to the next item on the agenda thank you very much everybody for your approach to that matter move on to item item four amendments to standing orders do we have an introduction from Mr. Chowdhury yes we do thank you thank you chair I wonder if we could let Mr. Parry go because he only came for the first item Mr. Parry if you need to get away of course yes but thank you for your contribution this evening thank you chair good evening everyone thank you so thank you chair it's a short report that members you have before you proposing two changes to the council's standing orders the first is with regards to council's questions members will know from how council's questions have operated in recent meetings which hasn't been entirely through consensus and so there is an issue with regards to how standing order 11 A 15 operates namely with regards to the number of supplementaries that the original questioner is entitled to ask the provision states that the questioner shall have priority and historically that is operated to mean that they have priority for the first question but when asked to advise on whether priority could include both questions well that could certainly be read into that standing order so the proposal to members to consider to recommend to council is to clarify that first that provision in the standing order so that the original questioner shall have priority to ask only the first supplementary question and the second matter before you members is with regards to stop notices on planning committee decisions standing order 51D I have to say is rarely used there is an application sorry there is an application reliance on that standing order before next council but it is an unusual provision amongst local authorities where planning applications committees act in a quasi judicial role in determining applications that are presented to them and the proper challenge to their decision is usually through a judicial route it is unusual that those decisions can be subject to a stop notice and asked and be considered by council in order to ask the planning application committee to reconsider the decision because council isn't permitted to make a decision on planning application matters it's one of those matters that Mr. Parry earlier referred to are not within the remit of council they're in fact it's a regulatory function that is specific to planning applications committee so the intent behind this proposed change is to exclude the right to serve a stop notice on planning application committee decisions so that the decisions taken by the planning application committee are final and that the applicant any objectors they are when the decision is made there is finality on that a contributions yes councillor ambash can I just say I hope it's non controversial the first recommendation because my experience from chairing the council is it's been very clear what the tradition is that the person answering the first question has the first priority for supplementary and then it's offered to one of the other party not their party but if there's no one from the other parties that wants to ask the second supplementary there's a bit of a space in the air and it can be someone from the people who've asked the first question to ask the second but on the second question the party that was asked the first doesn't have the priority so I think what Mr. Chowdhury is saying is standing order 11A Roman 15 just really clarifies that it's only the first supplementary question that the person has the priority for it's to run to answer the question it's a quick question on standing order 11A 15 as drafted the proposal is that the member asking the original question she'll have priority to ask the first supplemental question it doesn't actually talk about the second question at all to my understanding so that's just a point I'd like to make and I think it quite it possibly runs counter to what the intention is councillor Graham I think I saw yes so I think we have to I'm coming at this from the context that we've had a series of incidents where a power has been used once by the opposition and then at the very next meeting of general purposes there is a proposal from the monitoring officer to ban it so that happened with the right of reply in a debate it happened in calling special meetings in LSC exercised once in three years used once when a meeting was so jammed with papers that there was no chance to debate it and off the back of that liability was removed stop notice was issued in December first time three and a half years and immediately the next meeting of general purposes now there's an amendment to standing orders to ban it it's not like there's been overuse of these provisions these are powers that were available to the opposition and indeed I understand I haven't been able to verify this but I have been informed that both Councillor Belton and Councillor Cooper exercised the power of stop notice on a number of occasions when the administration and majority group were in opposition we didn't ban it we allowed them to exercise it and for this to come forward with no discussion no warning is part of a pattern and it does seem that when powers that are open to us are legitimately used the first reflex of the administration is to remove it when they themselves were able to use and did use the same powers when they were in opposition I mean I make the obvious point that they won't have this available if they return to opposition but it is a fundamentally undemocratic way to proceed and the fact that so obviously follows that pattern shows that this isn't about shaping a sensible system it isn't about looking to reform and looking at things in the round it's simply vindictive it's you've dared to use a power that you're entitled to so we're going to shut it down and never let you do it again that is how it must appear beyond coincidence that this keeps happening and I would point out as well on the second supplementary point there to be fair it could be said that this change is designed to uphold the conventions and bear in mind that we've had all this stuff about how the constitution is outdated and we ought to change everything but it could be argued that that's trying to uphold the convention at least that has applied and I wouldn't disagree with that but the reason that in this case the leader of the opposition and only the leader of the opposition not others who it's also open to have started to try to exercise the second supplementary is because the answers from a leader of the council were becoming so long that no other member of the opposition got to ask a question we uniquely have the case now that we never get unique for the last 40 odd years that we never get to question four on leaders questions routinely we got to question four five six under the previous administration so the fact is because we get speeches as answers the only way to ensure that there are more questions from the opposition and that we can get more answers has been to try to use it so although there is the defense available that this is just enforcing convention convention was broken by the attempt to talk out questions beyond the third question on the order paper and to make this change without time limiting as should obviously happen the responses to questions seems nonsensical and we've had a situation where council apps and I have some sympathy with there has become quite annoyed that opposition members are reading out questions or giving a statement of what their question is rather than calling out the number on the ballot paper and I agree but that's not here and surely we could come up with a change that could incorporate this but there's been no discussion this has been imposed and as I say it seems entirely vindictive council wraps yeah thanks very much I'll try not to become annoyed so yeah so the reason why I didn't put in lots of other things that no doubt I would love into this is because we were just trying to it was just a matter of restoring custom and practice which had been breached and that we wanted to see restored before we have a look at how we might reshape questions so I thank him for being understanding of that point I think people have different memories I mean the thing is I always speak to Councillor Belton he's got a memory as long as this council practically in fact I think it is as long as this council and he tells me about lots of times when we reached question 3 with previous leaders and he also tells me about times when he said we used to try this and we used to try that but every time the standing orders got changed to stop us from doing that so we didn't do it I don't think this is quite as new as he would the council claims implying but I do understand the point and I wouldn't have wanted to change the notice to planning if it was a recognised and common practice approach but the fact is when I first heard about the call in to the planning I contacted a number of colleagues across councils and said can you tell me how this works I've not come across this yet and they said what are you talking about this doesn't happen in councils you've clearly got something wrong because they had never come across this practice before and the fact is and I understand you know and I think it's perfectly legitimate for the opposition to use tools in the box but the thing is in Wandsworth we've got some very strange shaped tools in that box sometimes and this is one of them and one thing I would say is that it probably featured much less under your administration because you weren't prodigious house builders of new social housing and we've got a really important programme of social housing that we want to deliver for local people so that they get new homes that they can live and enjoy and get them out of temporary accommodation and the fact is that this is just an inappropriate way to politically interfere with decisions that are made by a planning committee which is very careful as Councillor Humphreys would tell you very careful to take independent non-whip decisions and then it just gets thrown into this political kind of climate and then you know when we mess about with it and treat it like a political football and then it just goes back to the planning committee where the same people make presumably the same decision so it's just a matter of delaying something it's extremely unusual I don't think it's really appropriate and a number of colleagues would agree with that I think so much as I understand that it might not be popular because it's removed an ability to do something that you might have enjoyed I think it will be to the benefit of people of Wandsworth that this is no longer in our standing orders Councillor Corner Lawless Lynn Graham okay councillor councillor Lawless thank you so I can't think of a full council meeting since I was elected just over a year ago that hasn't been disrupted and I imagine people watching it over in the public gallery online must be horrified by some of the things that take place and councillor Graham talks about the using the tools available to them which I can understand but I think it'll also be suggested that it's exploiting a bit of a loophole in the standing orders to try and get two supplementaries and as our Prime Minister said we are the party of tool makers not tools so in that spirit that's why we're going to agree to this this is I think it makes it fair I think it makes it clear and like whoever asked the question gets the first supplementary it makes that clear but it also opens it up to scrutiny because it allows someone from the opposite side to get in on the second one if they want okay okay Councillor Graham yeah I said I'd take you yeah well I'd have more sympathy with that if the the answers to the questions weren't taking five ten minutes a pop you know I it's become ridiculous and I think members of the public watching will see the answers as absurd as much as they would if they were concerned about any any protests about the ability to ask questions coming back to Councillor Apps's point she she started to politicize it by saying that we hadn't passed homes I would just gently point out that I think it's around 650 of the homes in the thousand homes program were given planning permission under us so her point about well and a good 550 of them were for social housing when they were passed so that that just isn't the case and the fact is that actually she says that she's not aware of it anywhere else when when Councillor Austin was coming with his text for the stop motion because we hadn't put one in at all bear in mind we weren't in opposition he had a text that he had got from another authority and I had to point out to him that it needed to be adjusted because ours somewhat unusually has to take the form of an amendment even though there was no decision notice to amend that was a debate on our side ours is peculiar but it's not unusual for it to happen on planning elsewhere I don't know how widespread it is but it does happen elsewhere and I would I'd make the last point that this has not been exercised in relation to a regular planning application this has been exercised in relation to a planning application by the council itself and therefore the additional scrutiny that comes from bringing that to full council I don't feel that's unreasonable because members of the planning committee on the administration side although we all understand that formally it is not a whipped committee nevertheless the pressure on them to pass what is an administration scheme and the pressure on them from their group colleagues must be significant regardless of whether it is formally whipped and the public certainly feel that the council approving its own applications without any further scrutiny is odd and I can say that members of the public who have already seen that the council is acting to withdraw this power to have further scrutiny at full council feel that it is an attempt to push things through without that scrutiny and without that focus that they feel given that they are being impacted and their homes are being impacted that they feel they deserve so I don't see why when it's a sparing use that has been used once and in relation to an application that the administration itself is bringing forwards it is wrong to allow that extra scrutiny at full council okay oh all right councillor grimston thanks I should have said councillor grimston west hillward earlier just just briefly on the same theme here might be helpful if we go back and ask ourselves what the function of questions is what we're actually there for in the I mean from my mind it's part of it is eliciting information part of it is to put an alternative view to the administration uh from so the function of opposition uh within that um and some of these questions about a second supplementary uh do go back then to the point that council graham was making that for that to work the person answering the question has to keep in mind what's going on here and rather than it has felt like filibustering uh occasionally very very long answers uh from yeah leader and from and from cabinet members indeed from time to time um and I think in a sense the the change of the constitution again shouldn't be the main thing going on here it should be a reflection among ourselves I actually think it's good for the administration to be challenged on these things it's often say if they're getting caught up if if they're having difficult questions asked by the opposition before an election they may find that they don't get difficult questions asked by the public at an election if they've put right something being raised so it's it's in everybody's interest I think for for uh but maybe particularly in interest of the administration to to uh foster a culture whereby that sort of challenge is available and the way it has worked out and the last council there was very little challenge possible there because the fractiousness between the two groups sitting as an independent uh was was and I don't put that at the door of either group I think both groups were involved in it um but we kind of lost sight I think of of the as we've done many times of the of the public interest in this and again got focused on and and obsessed by our internal squabbles and internal structures so I've no particular problem with the proposal itself here uh but I do have a problem that it could unless there's some cultural change always round about members not speaking over the mayor and repeating questions at great length and not giving very long sermons in in response to that question then we're probably not getting the best out of out of questions from the point of view chair can I just for clarity can I just uh establish there seems to be a difference of attitude to the two component parts of this uh this agenda item the first is the is the questions bit and the other bit is the stop motion bit and there and there is a subtle difference it seems to me between uh attitudes of the committee to to those two uh am I right in thinking that if somebody is objecting to anything in the uh in this agenda item that it is helpful to take the agenda item in two parts is or or do you want it taken all as well I see some nodding in favor of two parts councillor graham I think regardless of whether we vote the same way or differently on each of them it should be taken in two parts because they're entirely different uh proposals um and I just wanted to come back on one thing but I'll be very brief it's all very well to set out that um of the majority of the party set up as the party of tool makers or at least um tool factory owners I think the case was but they're not making tools here they're removing them and that's the problem yeah okay um okay so uh am I in a position to move to a vote then on this um I would like to uh move to a vote then on the first part of it which is the section on questions I think everyone's had a bash at you know I I just wondered if anybody because we have had I've seen emails that have come in what from angry residents about the stop notice and specifically its impact on potential future schemes of scrutiny I just wondered if anybody wanted to respond because I do feel that there is a difference between hauling in um you know a private developers application that has been seen by the committee in a standard way and hauling in the council's own application to itself would it be reasonable if we went straight to a vote on the first part of this agenda item on the questions section can I see can I and I don't know if it's helpful I mean again I don't want to overstep the mark as as chair but a number of people seem to be saying that they were happy with the provision in principle but only if the fractiousness between the two parties were were less of a problem um at full council that I mean that's not coming from everybody but that does seem to be coming from some people is that the case I think we we may have been minded to accept this had it included restrictions on the length of replies to questions but without any restriction on the length of replies it just enables as Councillor Grimson said filibustering so we it's not that we it's not that we're going to death to defend second supplementaries but they should not be removed without wider reform of the question system well I'm happy for that to be minuted at any rate if that's if that's any use to you so I'm inclined to move to a vote then on on the first part of of the agenda item which is the section on um the section on the uh questions and uh and supplementary questions can I see all those in favor of that standing order amendment please okay have we got that yeah are all those against please any abstentions no okay so that's carried uh I I still think that some sort of minute ought to be included about the about the fractiousness of of full council but all the same uh that has been carried and can we move then on to the second proposal now you have you finished all your points on that everybody or is anybody else want to you want one last shot is that the case I I'm just going to repeat would would anyone well I repeat the question repeat the question to whether anyone on the other side would like to respond to that to this not being a stop notice exercised on a regular application but on the council's own application to itself like if this disposal was even limited or amended so that only applied it could only be exercised on the council's own applications I think we might even back it but it it does seem to me to be a important point of principle thank you all right councillor ambash okay can I make a point but um councillor graham's very eloquent in terms of what what what he's pushing but having been for three years on the planning committee and having been briefed that it's a not non-party non-whipped it's a quasi-judicial committee which is my understanding as I don't know all the legalese but it's kind of the decision of the council it doesn't actually make sense to be able to call in and stop that decision because it's not a decision that's not within the council's framework it is within the council's framework so all the court court call in does for the planning committee is it just delays the decision of the planning committee because there is no reason you shouldn't at the political level go in whether the planning application should be accepted or not it just refers it back to the next planning committee so it doesn't make sense to me within the call in procedures to have that apply to the planning committee and as I understand from talking to councillor apps that's the received wisdom for most if not all authorities across london that call in doesn't apply to planning committee decisions okay one last comment then from councillor grimston yes but I've sympathy with both sides of the argument here but I'm not just as with the questions I think the solution doesn't seem or the proposed solution doesn't actually seem to answer the question if all that can happen from this is it goes back to exactly the same group that made the decision in the first place then it's fundamentally very very different from what we're doing with calling of a scrutiny decision or an executive decision where in principle the full council view takes part so on that I'm not sure this I absolutely take councillor graham's point that it's always uncomfortable when the council is giving itself planning permission but that's not the council has to do a load of things for which it needs planning permission from itself and if it were open for whatever reason that every time the council gave itself planning permission I don't know how often that is but it must be very very frequent then it could be called in I just don't see how that solves the question if it's just going back to the same group that took the decision in the first place I think I'm going to move to a vote I think just on a technical technical point what's what's your technical but so this this doesn't force it to go back to the planning committee it just means it has to come to full council and sort of a delay can only ever be over a couple of weeks you've made a technical point and I think it's been challenged but you've made a technical point so can I can I see all those in favour of uh the second set of proposals um in this um in this uh agenda item please all those for okay all those against any abstentions it's been carried okay that brings our discussions to a close this evening can I just congratulate everybody this evening on what was actually quite a good natured discussion on what could have been a very very contentious set of issues um uh serious points that had to be discussed and uh where disagreements had to be aired but nevertheless a good natured discussion I would say thank you for that everybody uh and thank you for your participation this evening your participation this evening your participation this evening your participation this evening your participation this evening
Transcript
Okay, everybody, I'm going to start the meeting. I'm told Councillor Cornher is very much on his way. And I think the same is also true of Mr. Parry, who's going to be joining us remotely. So I'm going to start the meeting. And first of all, welcome to everybody. Hi, Matthew. Hello. Welcome to everybody this evening. Actually, where is there is one other missing? You saw him? He was. I saw him earlier. Okay. All right. I think I'll steam on all the same. So we haven't actually received any apologies this evening. I'm not going to go through everybody in alphabetical order and get them to introduce themselves. What I propose is, as I've said at previous meetings, is when you come to speak, if I call you to speak, please say who you are, say Councillor whatever and where you represent or however you want to describe yourself. I'm also going to suggest this evening, I'm also going to suggest this evening that as it's the case across the council, that increasingly we are using people's first names rather than titles and surnames. If it's all right with members of the committee, and do object if you don't like it, I was going to use people's first names here this evening as well. Yes, go on then. Councillor Graham. Surely this is something for the task and finish group to review and then make recommendations on. Well, I suppose it is, but on the other hand, I like to try and be an innovative chair. Listen, I won't do it if the minority party object. If you object, then do say so. Otherwise, I'm going to use people's first names. I think we'd like a bit more notice to think about it rather than... You would? Yes, thank you. All right, okay, that's fair enough. If that's the case, we will stick with Councillor Graham rather than your first name, et cetera, as we go around, as I call people to speak. Okay, so I'm going to go to the minutes of the meeting, the last meeting. Are the minutes from the last meeting agreed? Agreed. Very good. Are there any declarations of interest from anybody this evening? Anyone want to declare any kind of interest? No? So that brings us straight to item three, the first proper item on the agenda, which is the Democracy Review Progress Report. And I'm going to invite somebody to present it. Is that Mr. Chowdhury? Yes, please. If you'd like to briefly introduce item three, please. Yes, of course, Chair. So, members, the recommendation before you is to note, rather than to determine anything, which is the progress on the items that have been discussed at the task and finish groups. The three areas that the task and finish group meetings have focused on have been to move away from the current arrangements, whereby overview and scrutiny committees review all decisions to be taken by the executive, the introduction of a financial threshold for key decisions, and the reform of the arrangements of the call-in, reform of the arrangements for call-in of executive decisions. So, members, the detail is set out in the report, rather than read those to you. What I will ask you to look at is around the timeline that is set out in the introduction section in paragraph three. That is, that is, that the detail of the constitutional changes to implement the changes that I referenced earlier will be considered by the executive at its meeting on March 3rd, and then for onward consideration by full council on 5th of March. And if the changes are proposed and agreed by full council, the changes will take effect after the 5th of March. So, Chair, a little on the detail of the paper. I'll make it quick if I can. With regards to the scrutiny function operated by the council, it is somewhat unusual, amongst other authorities that operate a cabinet and lead a form of governance, also referred to as an executive form of governance, whereby in this council, all decisions to be considered by the executive are subject to pre-decision scrutiny by the overview and scrutiny committees. That is an unusual provision, but it is an unlawful provision, but it is an unlawful provision, it's been operated for a number of years. The discussion at the task and finish group was to move away from that, and the detail of that proposal will be worked up, and there's a couple of options around how the future arrangements could operate. In summary, the intent is that the existing scrutiny committees continue to operate, but the statutory scrutiny function to call in the decisions of the executive will be exercised by one of those committees, rather than each of the service areas currently covered by the different committees. The overview and scrutiny committees will continue to function, they will have a slightly different remit, whereby they are not just considering 11th hour scrutiny of decisions to be taken by the executive, rather they will look at the forward plan of the council, as well as particular matters that the scrutiny committees intend to look at and develop proposals for executive and, if necessary, for council. In terms of the key decision threshold, again, there isn't a financial threshold in Wandsworth, and some consideration has been given by the task and finish groups around setting a threshold on that. And the accompanying that part of the discussions to the task and finish group, members will have received the research that we produced around the threshold that authorities across London operate as part of that. And then finally, Chair, by way of introduction, with regards to the call-in provision, the council's current provisions on call-in procedure for executive decisions reflects, in effect, the statutory minimum when you operate in a leader and cabinet form of governance. It contains very minimal notice periods in terms of when call-in requests can be exercised. So the intent around that is to revise that and to produce more detailed provisions around the timelines and the category of decisions that council might consider relevant, might consider to be most appropriate, where call-in is exercised. So, Chair, that's by way of introduction. I'm happy to assist with any questions. I also note that Mr. Parry, who is with us now, and he has joined the discussions at the task and finish groups as well. Thank you, Mr. Chowdhury. Just very quickly, Mr. Parry, do you have anything to add in the way of observation on any of that? No, I support entirely what Mr. Chowdhury has already said, Chair. Thank you very much. So, comments, first of all. Councillor Graham. Inevitably. So, this is as a preface to the actual contents of this report. My understanding was, and I did say this in private a week ago, so this will come as no shock, that we had set up the task and finish group in order to come up with recommendations, or at least see if we could come up with recommendations. Those recommendations from the task and finish group, once they've been derived, would then come to this committee as the parent committee, and we would look at what the actual changes to the constitution would be in detail and look at what, line by line, the drafting of those changes would then consist of in order to ensure that we all knew what we were doing and agreeing and it was going to come out of that cross-party process. We have had two online meetings of the task and finish group. We haven't agreed any recommendations. Indeed, the discussion, although it's summarised here that somehow we'd come to a consensus view, was largely that there were lots of other questions we needed to look at, lots of other pieces of the puzzle that needed to be pinned down before we could adequately say what we wanted, a call-in procedure or a key decision to apply to, to know what it would mean, because you have to know how it operates in context. To know what that would be. And so I don't understand why, when there have been no recommendations and no discussion of recommendations at the task and finish group, this has been plucked out of that process by officers and placed back here prematurely, so prematurely that there isn't any detail, and we are now being told that instead of members discussing that in a cross-party way and trying to find agreement, it will be determined by the executive, which, when we had this debate before, it was agreed that the executive is not a committee of this council. It is a one-party group that would be marking its own homework on how it was scrutinised and making the recommendations directly to full council when we have not given it that function in our constitution. The executive has no function to make recommendations on the constitution to the council. So this just seems to me to be going against everything that we'd agreed, jeopardising that potential cross-party agreement that we could reach in order to pluck certain things out in advance and ram them through without any of us getting to see what they would actually involve. And therefore, I'd like some understanding of why we're here right now, why are we having this meeting to discuss these particular points, when that task and finish group has barely begun its work, let alone reached the stage of recommendations. Councillor Appes. Thank you very much. So I'm Councillor Appes, and I'm the member for Shaftesbury and Queenstown, along with two others. Yeah, I just think that we need to bear in mind, like, let's not look the gift horse in the mouth. You know, we actually have a huge opportunity here to have a really good system of scrutiny for both opposition and for majority group members. We've had more discussion on this, probably, and, frankly, more goodwill discussion on this, and we have on many different issues. So, and, you know, if there's a failure to bring recommendations, you know, we must all be part of that. But we do think, actually, on our side, that there were some very clear directions of travel that we can look at and that they can provide a guide for moving forward. But we want to make the most of this opportunity to basically, to actually allow all councillors who are involved in scrutiny, who are all backbenchers, to have an opportunity to look at policymaking, to make sure that we're implementing that, to make sure that we're able to feed into that process. And that will actually be a really positive experience for all of us. I think the other thing is, is this is not one thing that has really struck me through this process, is this is not rocket science. You know, the fact is, is that call-in processes, key decision processes, and breaking the link between scrutiny and executive decisions is really commonplace. There's a common standard of behaviour. It's very easy to look at other councils and how they've progressed this. And actually, we are a complete outlier. And the way that we conduct our business is extremely unusual and unhelpful for moving forward and making sure that all councillors do give their best to developing public policy. The fact is, is that at the moment, we're not. We're just involved in looking at very, you know, decisions which are about to be made, so we can't really have any proper influence on them. So we just end up wobbling in a party political way, which is super unhelpful. And the fact is, is we want to make some progress on that and move that forward. I recognise we're slightly still in an old-fashioned state where we're still making decisions close to the decision, and that is influencing the process. But we would like to move beyond this so that councillors can play their full part in our democracy. Councillor Corner. Thank you, Chair. Look, in terms of the recommendations of this paper, it says that we're only being asked to note the progress on items discussed at the task and finish group. So we might be able to do that this evening. But I don't see, to Councillor Graham's point, that we're any closer to landing at kind of recommendations that we can endorse to the wider council. That's not to say that the conversations we've had so far in the two task and finish groups haven't been helpful. But I think they need to be a lot more in-depth and a lot more definitive in terms of what they're bringing to this committee and, of course, to the wider council. I take Councillor Rapp's point as well. I actually agree with it. But I do think we might need more time before deciding on things would be my input for where we go from here. A few comments on the task and finish group. I think it's a really helpful thing to do to meet in private. But I don't think we've got the support, actually, at the moment, to be an effective task and finish group. What we need is an agenda and options that feed into those meetings so that we know what we're deciding on, what we're rejecting, what we're approving. Now, that doesn't all have to be on officers or the Centre for Governance. That could be councillors doing homework themselves in their own research. That would be something that I would be happy to do, and I'm sure others around this table would be. And then we could actually have a purposeful discussion with clear conclusions that then get discussed at this forum and by the wider council. Instead, we've really got no record of outputs. There is a record of inputs in this paper, but no real record of outputs. So it's not clear to me what exactly we're noting. So whilst I'm happy to note that the task and finish group has progressed things, I would be cautious about recommending changes to how the council operates at this stage. Okay. Councillor Grimston. Thank you, Chair. I've increasingly felt that the whole process, it feels rather like a McGreek picture. There are detailed bits, but there's no sense of how they all fit together. I mean, to give one obvious example, I think we're kind of agreed that one of the challenges that ones would face, one of the areas we don't do terribly well, is cross-departmental thinking. We tend to be very siloed. And at the moment, we have a structure of scrutiny committees that contributes to that because they are organised along the council's departments, they're organised along the portfolios. There's a real opportunity, if we're looking at scrutiny from the basis, that we can move away from scrutiny being organised as inward-looking and focusing on the internal structure of the organisation and move it towards looking at the external issues that directly face our people out there. We're aware, obviously, that, for example, if we're looking at educational achievements of some particular groups of our youngsters, then housing is important in that. Transport is important in that. Social services is clearly very important in that, children's social services particularly. But quite possibly, we might need to look at support for parents in those situations. And I think to be – and similarly, the focus on calling, yeah, okay, calling is an issue that we need to look at. But it's a tiny part of what scrutiny does in most authorities. And, indeed, you can almost argue that if it's got to the stage of needing a call-in, then the scrutiny process has sort of failed because – or the overview side of the scrutiny process has failed because the scrutiny, which is looking ahead, is kind of before the policy agenda. It's designed to shape the policy agenda. So there is no need for it to get very party political. The party politics and the opposition comes at a later stage in the whole process. And so I just feel that we're not – we've lost sight of the big picture here of what are we worried about with Wandsworth. We're worried about being far too inward-looking rather than outward-looking and being far too siloed rather than being cross-departmental. And we're focusing on tiny little details that don't really address those sorts of issues. And so it seems to me – and a disappointment I've had really through this – is that rather getting to grips saying, this is the issue, what might a structure look like that can address this issue, and then coming to the questions we're coming up. We've launched in on the detailed questions without looking at where it all fits together and how it will actually contribute ultimately to us being more aware of the issues that our residents are facing and are likely to face over the next 10 years, say, and what we can be doing to shape those issues rather than simply responding and reacting to them, which sadly I think has been the Wandsworth way for some years. Thank you, Chair. Councillor Hedges from Ballon Ward. Just wanted to raise a point about the introduction. So you talk about – the paper talks about detailed constitutional changes that will be considered in the March meeting. And then further goes on and talks about proposals for the first phase of changes, which is obviously the call-ins and the thresholds. I mean, can we allude that there will be a second phase to this? And if there is a second phase, do we get any transparency on that? Because whatever is agreed in the first phase could potentially have a knock-on impact to the second phase. So some more transparency and shedding some light on that would be really helpful. Thank you. Councillor Ambash, please. Jeremy Ambash, Councillor for West Putney Ward. I wanted to follow what Councillor Grimston was saying, because I've got a lot of sympathy with what Malcolm was saying. And it's probably a question for Mr Parry. As I see it, we're trying to make some changes to free up some capacity in our OSCs so they aren't rammed full with all pre-decision scrutiny of every decision under the sun, big and small. And we can make some changes to move in that direction, to give our OSCs that freedom to be able to choose to look at earlier policy development or whatever by defining call-in, by talking about key decisions and thresholds and the forward plan and changing standing orders in the Constitution. They're all mechanisms. But the other feedback that we've had from the Centre for Policy Studies was that we're in a culture where our OSCs are dominated by party politics and therefore not getting at some of the policy and the service issues. And that's been my experience of my last 11 years on a number of OSCs, but particularly on this Finance Committee. And I just wonder, Mr Parry, in terms of working with other authorities, what's it taken in terms of councillor development, the culture that councillors have established, the leadership of councillors to try and make those changes? Because we can change the call-in procedures and this, that and the other, but we can keep behaving in this rather unproductive way. Can you give us some clues? What was the first steps we need to take to actually bring about some real change rather than just the mechanisms? A direct question there to Mr Parry. I wonder if Mr Parry could respond to that. Thank you. Happy to, Chair. There is no kind of flick of a switch that moves you from one place to another instantly. This is a journey. I think the first thing to do is to kind of rearrange the structure where you have a very tight situation between scrutiny and the executive in the way it scrutinises executive decisions. And there isn't sufficient space and distance between the decision and the scrutiny of decisions to allow it to give it any real input or impact. So that's one thing. The second thing is to try and give members of scrutiny greater say in what it is they see as the priorities for scrutiny to scrutinise. They shouldn't and couldn't and probably would be ineffective to try and scrutinise everything, everything that goes to executive, for example, because everything that goes to executive is not mission critical. It's not important to the residents. It's not important necessarily to the wider council. These are things which are kind of business as usual decisions. And do they do they all need scrutiny? Perhaps. But do they all need to be done by a scrutiny committee? Probably not. That's not the way it's done in most councils. And I have to say, Wandsworth, as we know, is an outlier. It's not the way it's done in most councils. There is a process of rational decision making about what scrutiny decides to scrutinise and what it chooses not to scrutinise. And there is a kind of methodology that sits behind that, which is very much driven by members. And in Wandsworth, it's very much not driven by members in terms of what they scrutinise and when they scrutinise it. It is formulaic. It is process. It's not always impactful and it rarely adds any value. So it's trying to put some light and air into that arena for scrutinise to be able to operate in a much more positive way rather than this tightly constricted way that seems to operate right now. But it's a journey, as I say. They say that, you know, culture eats structure, but sometimes structure can help culture. If you've got the right structure, it can start to lead to better relationships and better approaches to the way things are done and the relationships that develop from that. Thank you, Mr Parry. Councillor Graham. Yes, so first of all, I want to concur with what Councillor Grimston said and think that it actually goes even deeper than what he said because what I was trying to point out is until we've got the other pieces of the puzzle together, even if we've got specific changes on key decisions, if we define them exactly, even if we've got specific changes on call-in procedures and we've defined them exactly, we still won't know what the impact of that is because we don't know, for example, on call-in procedures what decisions are actually going to go to the executive. So you can call in decisions that go to the executive. OK, what decisions are going to the executive? We haven't decided that, so how can we know what we want to call in? It's that kind of question. I'm not doing it to try and cause trouble. It's genuinely, even if you've got it in black and white, you still don't know what it means until you've answered other questions, which, I mean, I think of as prior, but certainly that need to be dealt with together. I also want to agree with what Councillor Cornish said, both in terms of, we recognise that this can be changed. We want it to see some streamlining. We're not against changes to this. But that does have to be done with us all working together, at least to have a chance of setting a cultural change that would actually lead to more cross-party working and more of the things that Councillor Ambash was talking about. Now, he was right, but this paper, the recommendations here are just to note progress. That doesn't endanger that as a, why we're essentially replicating a debate we had before might be a different question. The problem is what's in paragraph 17, which is that after we've finished talking tonight, the next people to look at what actually happens and what that detail will actually be is not us. It would be the executive and it would be the executives making the recommendation to full council. So I've got two questions for Mr. Parry on that. The first one is whether he is aware of any, or certainly whether it's the case that many councils are allowing their executive to determine what the shape of changes to the constitution would be and make those recommendations to councils. And if there are any, presumably the functions allotted to their executive in their constitution allow them to do it, whereas don't. So perhaps you could answer that one first and I'll come back to the second question. Are you happy to answer that, Mr. Parry? Yes, yes, indeed, Chair. Again, two points. I know this wasn't the question you asked me, but I just wanted to reiterate that the purpose of calling, it's not for members to choose what to call in because they don't like it or disagree with it. It's a constitutional release valve or safety valve in a sense that things which are outside policy or policy framework, agreed policy framework, or outside the financial envelope agreed by the council and haven't gone through proper scrutiny, it's then within the gift of scrutiny to call those things in, providing there is the criteria is met and the threshold has met. It's simply that. It's not, therefore, an option to just call in whatever you feel like. Therefore, it's not a question of calling things in before they get to executive. It's usually things are called in after executive. And in terms of authorities, councils, deciding what to recommend to full council, this is usually done by the executive or cabinet and those councils which are cabinet control or cabinet run of a cabinet governance system like you do. It's usually the executive or the cabinet that recommends to full council what those decisions will be. As the executive or cabinet is the senior part of the council, they have the delegated authority from full council as the decision-making forum within the council. It's they who can make virtually most of the decisions within the council. And there's only a few decisions which are reserved matters for council, such as the budget and the election of the leader, etc., the council plan that are reserved for the council as decisions to be made. The rest are decisions to be made by the executive. That's what the law empowers them to do. And whilst in your constitution, you've made other arrangements in law, the executive can still decide that it's they who will recommend to council what it feels are the appropriate recommendations. Now, wisely, the council's cabinet has decided to go through a process like this, which it wants to listen to its members and listen to the views of this committee. And I'm sure we'll take those on board before anything is finally recommended to full council. But that is, in fact, the way cabinet systems run virtually across the land. And I think you'll find that Wandsworth is different rather than the rest of the country's cabinet systems being any different. That's the way it does run. Thank you, Mr. Parry. Just a second. You've got a second question, I think, Councillor Graham. I do. But if I could just come back on that first, because I just want to make sure. Obviously, that is correct in terms of executive decisions. However, my understanding, as I've served under other local authority, is that constitutional changes are not normally regarded as an executive matter, which is why either they go to ad hoc committees or they have general purposes committees. But the second part of my first question was that, given that we have not given that function to our executive, how can the executive then assume that function in March when it doesn't have it? Because it already has it. The constitutional changes can only be made by the council. That is one of its reserved matters, if you like. The constitution is for the council to agree and changes to its constitution is only for the council to agree. But the recommendations to it could come from this committee or it could come from the executive. But it could be that the executive chooses to take on board this committee's recommendations and make its own recommendations to the council. That's not to say it would change anything. But in principle, the executive has significant powers to be able to do these things. They're already there. So, well, I don't understand the response, but I won't prolong that debate. Could I ask you to have a think about it? And we'll come back to you in a minute. Should I ask the second part of my question? Oh, I thought you had done it. No, no, no. I was clarifying the first part. Okay. Well, the second question was a simple one that, given that we're talking about call-in procedures tonight, if it is the executive which will determine the form of the recommendations in March, and that is an executive decision on what to recommend, presumably that decision is subject to call-in. If it's outside the policy framework or financial envelope, yes. But it's unlikely to be. I think you've got an answer to a couple of questions. Have a think about it. We can come back to you in a bit. I'm going to take a few more contributions. I've got, first of all, Councillor Apps, then Councillor Corner, then Councillor Lawless. Thank you very much. I have to say I'm looking forward to working with opposition members on really productive scrutiny. Spent a very good day with Councillor Corner on a school visit recently, where it was good to learn about different policy interests and aspects. So I look forward to more of that continuing. And I do think, I mean, I think there's a fairly few nuts-and-bolts issues, which are things like the key decision threshold, the call-in procedures. We've got some thoughts, actually, which do evolve naturally from the task-and-finish group. But that also, there's far more to this than that. Once we've got those nuts-and-bolts dealt with, there's public involvement. There's looking at select-style scrutiny and how we can make that work. There's looking at full counsel and how we can make that involve the public more. There's lots more for the task-and-finish group to look at if we're so minded. And then to hopefully be more productive in terms of recommendations that we can then push through to be looked at as part of a following course of action. But I wanted to come on to one of those that I think that was very clear from our discussions in the task-and-finish group, which is that the link between scrutiny with executive decisions is unhelpful. It would be best and usual practice if OSE members in Wandsworth were free to be able to exercise independence in how they scrutinize policies so that they can contribute to policymaking. The requirement in the Constitution that all decisions be considered by the executive are pre-scrutinized by the OSE hampers this process. And as I think was alluded to us earlier, also hampers co-production and actual relations, I think, between the two groups to some point. So I think we could therefore say that we believe, we would like it to be noted, that the Constitution should break this link so that scrutiny members then will be free to decide which key decisions they would like to examine in depth, and that will still be possible, but also what other policies they want to look at. And hopefully looking at things further in advance. So when any of us come up with good ideas of how we'd like to see policymaking in the future, that we can actually get that considered at a point where there's still an openness and a readiness to hear those ideas rather than a bit too late, so it just turns into a party political posturing, which is what, to be honest, happens too often now. So that would be something that I'd like to be noted, that I think that's a natural, follows naturally on from some of our task and finish group discussions. Okay, a very clear point that you'd like minuted and noted in the meeting. Okay, in the notes of the meeting. Very good. Councillor Corner. Thank you, Chair. I do agree with the sentiment expressed there with Councillor Routts, and I agree with her that on the recent school visit that we had, I think members of that committee gained huge amounts from engaging with the people who will be affected by the policy, perhaps more so than they would in a public meeting of the committee. I just wanted to respond to a point about there being lots more to look at by the task and finish group. I completely agree. What we do need to see, I think, as a committee is a schedule for that task and finish group so that we can see when the subsequent meetings will be and when we will actually be making proposals to the executive and recommendations to the full council. It's a bit non-committal in paragraph 17 as to whether there will be further meetings of the task and finish group before recommendations are made to full council. And, of course, the fact that the executive are making those recommendations is highly controversial and not something I'm sure I can support. I think a better approach would be for us as a committee tonight to commit to working together collaboratively, as we have done already, to having proposals we can make to the executive and the full council that command cross-party support, and that will ensure that we don't have party political dividing lines emerge in this work, which I think is really important. The other point I'd just like to briefly make is this debate around the linkage of OSC agendas to executive decisions. I think it's a really good idea to have OSCs being able to scrutinize executive decisions effectively and efficiently and also being able to pursue their own work. The thing is that already can happen at the moment. Opposition members of a committee, for example, and, indeed, majority party members of a committee can put their own items on the committee agendas already. So it's not actually clear that we need to do huge amounts of work to change that. Maybe it's more about changing the mindset of councillors. For me, I actually quite like the fact that there is linkage between the executive decisions and OSC agendas because it means that all councillors who are on those committees and are holding the relevant directorates to account are able to see everything that's happening in the council to the level of detail required to really be able to scrutinize it. I think where there is an opportunity is in having cross-party working to design the agendas and work schedules of those committees so that we don't have excessively long agendas, as perhaps we've seen at some committees. So I think there's possibly a task and finish session just in what I've just described. I'd be really happy to work with any colleagues to design that task and finish discussion so that we can have some concrete recommendations to make. I'm not saying that everything I've said has to be agreed upon or else I'm not willing to participate. I want to have that debate with colleagues and maybe work with everyone to come up with some solid proposals that both parties and all members can agree on. Okay. I mean, we've tried very hard in these formal meetings to make sure that these kind of views are being properly minuted in some detail. And you've made a number of suggestions there which I think should be reflected in the minutes regardless of what we agree or don't agree in these discussions. Councillor Lawless. Thank you. Councillor Lawless, Tweeting Broadway Award. As Councillor App says, there's a few things we want noted from our side that we think would be useful to add to the minutes. So it sets out our position and she's mentioned the link between scrutiny and executive decisions. On key decision threshold, we've had a look at page 5 and the appendix was very useful. But we think setting, the council should explore options for setting the threshold at a million pounds of capital and revenue spending. It would bring us into line with most other councils when you take into account inflation considering a lot of the ones that were set were set a while ago now. Yeah, 2001. So yeah, that's one of the things we want noted, please. Councillor Graham. Yeah, well, just on that latter point, the paper itself notes that the most common threshold operated by councils across London is £500,000. And even those that operate a £500,000 threshold allow other criteria to apply on a range of decisions, or most of them do, recognising that some decisions can be below that, but they're less politically sensitive. I mean, there's parallel in some respects to the sort of sensitivity matrix that's applied to procurement that we were looking at. You know, that you can tick various boxes and that there are some things where it's... So, I mean, I would be loath to suggest a level of a million, which is double the norm. And, well, I mean, we haven't set a specific level here, but effectively five times what our, in effect, key decision threshold is. And as I say, I just don't think that it makes any sense to talk about what the figure should be if we haven't decided what the other procedures are. Now, if key decisions are all that are going to go to the executive, for example, then, and that, we'd suddenly go back the other way and we'd say, what are the executive decisions? Well, they're only key decisions. And somehow, they're then saying that everything below a million pounds will either be a delegated decision to officers or it will be a cabinet decision, but we haven't even discussed what the cabinet should decide. And one of the abnormalities of our system that ought to be addressed is the fact that cabinet members have no power in their own right. They only have power operating through the executive. There is some suggestion that the leader in the constitution, that the leader could alter that by a mandate he gives to annual council. None of the previous leaders have done so. And so, therefore, cabinet members in their own right have almost no power at all. Well, I don't think that makes sense. And where I think there is legitimate concern from officers that certain decisions being bound up in the paper process and the committee process, a lot of the pressure on that could be relieved while still having the political oversight by instead of delegating all that to officers, allowing the cabinet member to take it as a cabinet member decision. So it doesn't have to go or wait for an executive meeting. It doesn't have to do any of those things. It's not SO83A. And also, it is then their decision. And then there's some accountability for it as well. Because what we don't want to do is hand over power from elected members to officers. Because actually, you know, the administration, we're not in charge right now, you've been elected to run the council. You ought to be running it. You oughtn't to be, you know, suddenly just handing over a whole swathe of stuff to officers to do, even if those officers are competent and will, you know, take those decisions in good faith. The fact is that some decisions ought to be made with political direction. So that's why I just think that we're... It's really difficult to talk about those details in isolation. And I was wondering, building on what Councillor Conrad said, whether Councillor Apps and others around the table, because we have two members of the executive and, you know, the senior group whip on the other side, whether there'd be some willingness to agree not to put those... Not to put detailed proposals through the executive, but instead to have a further round of discussion where we can see if we can agree something and put it up through a normal means as an actual recommendation of the task and finish group with that space that we don't have right now where we're meeting in private and we can actually, you know, thrash things around without, you know, it being played back on video or clipped on social media or whatever. And see, because I really do feel that there is scope for us to agree, but if we suddenly start plucking bits out and ramming them through via the executive, which we have no representation on, no ability to participate in, and so the first chance that we've got to look at it is when it arrives in full council, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. And it doesn't make a lot of sense to have these two things to be the things that are suddenly pulled out and put through in that way either. So if there's concern that there should be something at least on these two points by March or in time for the annual council, I mean, I would have thought the sensible thing to do is put a set of changes in so they apply to the next committee cycle. In other words, all of those OSCs that are meeting in June and onwards. Well, I actually think we could go further than this in terms of changes we could agree for June. We could get more change in that process, but we need to look at it as a package. So would there be some willingness not to withdraw this paper but just to abandon for the time being the suggestion in paragraph 17 that these two things are going to be plucked out by the executive and determined without any further cross-party discussion? And actually, let's put those back into another meeting of the working group. We're prepared to make our time available to do that on a timetable that suits the executive. And then we can see if we can get some bigger package that actually fits together so everybody understands what it is in place for that OSC cycle that begins in June because we are willing to try to do that. And I think that if we go down this executive path, I think we're just throwing all the goodwill away unnecessarily. OK, Councillor Henderson first. Thank you very much. Councillor Graham Henderson from Hampton Ward. I think it's important we don't lose sight of the main chance and the opportunities which we actually have here. And I certainly welcomed a recent meeting with Councillor Hedges and Councillor de la Seixol on the subject of all. and think this is a very good example of how we can actually work collaboratively on an issue which frankly should not be party political. And that I think is where we should be working towards. There is undoubtedly a question of culture and I do think that the current systems actually mitigate against that cross-party working. It is incredibly adversarial and unnecessarily so. I certainly agree entirely with Mr. Perry's analysis. It really is a question of how do we actually get to where we want to get to from where we currently are. Now in terms of the paper which has been drafted I see that as really identifying a few key issues where hopefully we can achieve broad agreements on. We may have specific differences in terms of some of the detail but I see that as really picking out some key areas where we can actually make progress. Now in terms of actually presenting them to council we can certainly in my mind park them to an extent whilst we consider other fundamental issues. But what this paper is actually trying to do is first of all to stimulate discussion and thought. As you can see it's written in very general terms. It is intended quite deliberately for the opposition to consider what we are our travel our direction of travel etc. in terms of what we would like to see and to have a constructive debate around that. So I think it's important for us to gather some of it like hanging fruit first to identify key areas where there is agreement and then we can move on from there. I mean I have to say I mean I do entirely agree with a lot of you on that and some would say I agree with 100% of what you said Malcolm I'm sure absolutely but I mean I certainly do agree with your analysis particularly across department working pretty much all our departments have operated in silos we're trying to break that down but I certainly agree with you that the current committee structure certainly mitigates against that I actually see that as a much more substantive change and something which I think we should probably come to a bit later I mean I think we need to take people with us as part of that culture change and although I think your analysis is absolutely correct I wouldn't actually want to postpone some significant changes we can make on the basis of mutual agreement this is an important subject I'm not denying that but I think we can actually come back to that on a much more collaborative basis thank you Councillor Aps thank you well I commend Councillor Henderson's remarks I mean I think he's made some excellent points so I won't abhor you all by repeating them but you know I do have sympathy for Councillor Graham's concern about being involved and we're very keen to hear views and it's been really good discussion tonight but the more I've looked at this process the more I've realised that there's a few core changes which are what I call bread and butter changes where there's not that much variation from council to council the main thing is we're very different to where most councils are and I think it's different in approach as well that Councillor Graham's attitude is well nothing can change till everything's agreed whereas I feel it would be better to make some step changes to bring us more into line with normal council processes which are some few basic changes and there actually can be I think where the really interesting discussions are is how we look at for example full council and how that could work in a much more productive way and actually be helpful for the people of Wandsworth how we could look at making sure that the people of Wandsworth have a voice within our systems while making sure that we represent the wide range of our community there's so many interesting things for us to look at and these things when we've all had access to all those tables you know there's not a great deal of variety around those there are some key changes which are pretty fundamental to making progress on these issues to be clear and I can see how it could be interpreted the other way I'm not suggesting that nothing can be agreed until everything is agreed I'm not saying that certain things can't be picked out we don't have to change the format of full council meetings in order to have a different model applying to the OSCs we don't have to even determine the new model for how the executive meeting should function because I think we all agreed that having five minute meetings that are entirely pro forma that serves no real purpose in there so we don't have to have agreed that what we can just look at is what levels of decision there should be who should take each of those decisions what the kind of reporting and documentary requirements are around each some of them don't need any some of them need a bit some of them need more those kind of things just pin those down so it's not trying to agree all of the whole scope it's just agreeing enough of the bits to make sure that we know the implications of what we're doing because as I say if we define key decisions in a certain way when we know that there are statutory safeguards attached to those but we don't know what other safeguards we're creating on other things internally we don't know the impact of what we're doing and look and you all can try to work with us and if you can't reach consensus you can push through what you want anyway you do have the votes so we can't hold you up in that sense and we've got no incentive to do so because then you will just do what you want over any issues or concerns that we express that's why we are trying to come at this in good face so I think I sort of detected some willingness maybe to move away from the implication in paragraph 17 we're not voting on paragraph 17 so that doesn't necessarily need to be settled right now but from our point of view I'm just making it clear that we are willing to take the time to your timetable to get a package of changes where we actually understand what the bits are in place for the OSC cycle starting in June and we'll make time available and I think we could thrash something out and if we can't you can just do what you were going to do anyway so but I think there is an advantage to doing it that way rather than none of us looking at the detail here and then the executive suddenly deciding something and there being a massive route for council about it being imposed and contrary to all of the discussions and process that we've created so far okay we are tending to go round and round in circles a little bit now I will take councillor corner's contribution but I do want to move towards some sort of conclusion to this discussion if I can thank you chair this is a very quick contribution which is just to say that I think that if we want to reduce the extent to which the council is adversarial and that business is approached from a party political divide perspective then we really need to have that reflected in this process I think I obviously completely agree with what Councillor Graham just said can you imagine how good it would be if we had a timetable of task and finish working sessions to the executive timetable we make ourselves available for them we work in general genuine collaboration outside of public meetings and then at the end we could actually have a set of proposals that are basically signed off and approved publicly by both political groups on the council and ideally the independent as well Councillor Grimston so and that would create huge amounts of goodwill and really actually I think precipitate a genuine culture change in the way that meetings of the council one okay what I hear is both sides trying quite hard actually to find some sort of agreement and move forward is how I would interpret the contributions from both sides this evening if I can overstep the role of chair just a tiny bit I wonder if I can move towards a decision which tries to take some of that into account there is a note I think circulated by Councillor Apps and others which is not an amendment to the first item it's yet another element to be noted which I think to use Councillor Henderson's phrase shows the direction of travel that the majority party I think would like to move in and it has no more status than that as I understand it from the minority party point of view you've got no objection to noting this item this document but you do have a kind of uneasiness about paragraph 17 what if in order to show that uneasiness and if you like a direction of travel from your side or at least whatever the opposite of a direction of travel is a kind of slowness to an unwillingness to agree or something like that if you wanted to indicate that what if it were clearly minuted I mean I've gone out of my way as chair of this committee several times to make sure certain items are minuted in detail so that we don't just have a record of decisions we have a record of what was argued from all sides including the minority party for posterity to understand what if the minutes of this meeting note your reservations and concerns about paragraph 17 which is not actually being agreed it's only being noted anyway so that we can move forward on the basis of this item on the agenda and pick up your suggestion Councillor Graham that we have other detailed discussions with more changes in as we go down towards the summer I mean there are other suggestions that I've said ought to be clearly minuted for example Councillor Corners concern for a schedule and if I remember rightly in the task and finish group there was a feeling that while it was all right to meet virtually there was a preference for meeting face to face and perhaps that should be clearly minuted as well as a result of this discussion this evening if we can get that package agreed and minuted this evening is everybody broadly happy with that consensus approach Councillor Graham yes broadly I just want to understand where in that you think what status within that the note circulated by the majority party would have or would that be outside I mean it could be noted as just that's where the majority party currently feels we ought to be going which is fine I actually think this would be very helpful as a starting point for a discussion the discussion that we can continue to have in the task and finish group and I'm not dismissing it and even though I've expressed reservations on the £1 million threshold depending on what the rest of the framework looked like I might be even able to agree to that at some point I have reservations but I'm not setting my face against it so I think it's a question of what status this would have because we don't want to have it ministered that we we've taken a definitive stance on stuff that we don't actually think we can until we know the other pieces are possible as I understand it the note from the majority party is a broad indication of direction of travel it's not a categorical statement of position and indeed could be interpreted as an item for discussion going forward is that accurate we're happy with it on that basis with the caveats move to a decision then on whether we note this document on the basis of what I've just described and the full minute a fulsome minute of the discussion are we happy to note item three this evening all those in favour of note agreed okay anyone against any abstentions okay item three noted we can move on to the next item on the agenda thank you very much everybody for your approach to that matter move on to item item four amendments to standing orders do we have an introduction from Mr. Chowdhury yes we do thank you thank you chair I wonder if we could let Mr. Parry go because he only came for the first item Mr. Parry if you need to get away of course yes but thank you for your contribution this evening thank you chair good evening everyone thank you so thank you chair it's a short report that members you have before you proposing two changes to the council's standing orders the first is with regards to council's questions members will know from how council's questions have operated in recent meetings which hasn't been entirely through consensus and so there is an issue with regards to how standing order 11 A 15 operates namely with regards to the number of supplementaries that the original questioner is entitled to ask the provision states that the questioner shall have priority and historically that is operated to mean that they have priority for the first question but when asked to advise on whether priority could include both questions well that could certainly be read into that standing order so the proposal to members to consider to recommend to council is to clarify that first that provision in the standing order so that the original questioner shall have priority to ask only the first supplementary question and the second matter before you members is with regards to stop notices on planning committee decisions standing order 51D I have to say is rarely used there is an application sorry there is an application reliance on that standing order before next council but it is an unusual provision amongst local authorities where planning applications committees act in a quasi judicial role in determining applications that are presented to them and the proper challenge to their decision is usually through a judicial route it is unusual that those decisions can be subject to a stop notice and asked and be considered by council in order to ask the planning application committee to reconsider the decision because council isn't permitted to make a decision on planning application matters it's one of those matters that Mr. Parry earlier referred to are not within the remit of council they're in fact it's a regulatory function that is specific to planning applications committee so the intent behind this proposed change is to exclude the right to serve a stop notice on planning application committee decisions so that the decisions taken by the planning application committee are final and that the applicant any objectors they are when the decision is made there is finality on that a contributions yes councillor ambash can I just say I hope it's non controversial the first recommendation because my experience from chairing the council is it's been very clear what the tradition is that the person answering the first question has the first priority for supplementary and then it's offered to one of the other party not their party but if there's no one from the other parties that wants to ask the second supplementary there's a bit of a space in the air and it can be someone from the people who've asked the first question to ask the second but on the second question the party that was asked the first doesn't have the priority so I think what Mr. Chowdhury is saying is standing order 11A Roman 15 just really clarifies that it's only the first supplementary question that the person has the priority for it's to run to answer the question it's a quick question on standing order 11A 15 as drafted the proposal is that the member asking the original question she'll have priority to ask the first supplemental question it doesn't actually talk about the second question at all to my understanding so that's just a point I'd like to make and I think it quite it possibly runs counter to what the intention is councillor Graham I think I saw yes so I think we have to I'm coming at this from the context that we've had a series of incidents where a power has been used once by the opposition and then at the very next meeting of general purposes there is a proposal from the monitoring officer to ban it so that happened with the right of reply in a debate it happened in calling special meetings in LSC exercised once in three years used once when a meeting was so jammed with papers that there was no chance to debate it and off the back of that liability was removed stop notice was issued in December first time three and a half years and immediately the next meeting of general purposes now there's an amendment to standing orders to ban it it's not like there's been overuse of these provisions these are powers that were available to the opposition and indeed I understand I haven't been able to verify this but I have been informed that both Councillor Belton and Councillor Cooper exercised the power of stop notice on a number of occasions when the administration and majority group were in opposition we didn't ban it we allowed them to exercise it and for this to come forward with no discussion no warning is part of a pattern and it does seem that when powers that are open to us are legitimately used the first reflex of the administration is to remove it when they themselves were able to use and did use the same powers when they were in opposition I mean I make the obvious point that they won't have this available if they return to opposition but it is a fundamentally undemocratic way to proceed and the fact that so obviously follows that pattern shows that this isn't about shaping a sensible system it isn't about looking to reform and looking at things in the round it's simply vindictive it's you've dared to use a power that you're entitled to so we're going to shut it down and never let you do it again that is how it must appear beyond coincidence that this keeps happening and I would point out as well on the second supplementary point there to be fair it could be said that this change is designed to uphold the conventions and bear in mind that we've had all this stuff about how the constitution is outdated and we ought to change everything but it could be argued that that's trying to uphold the convention at least that has applied and I wouldn't disagree with that but the reason that in this case the leader of the opposition and only the leader of the opposition not others who it's also open to have started to try to exercise the second supplementary is because the answers from a leader of the council were becoming so long that no other member of the opposition got to ask a question we uniquely have the case now that we never get unique for the last 40 odd years that we never get to question four on leaders questions routinely we got to question four five six under the previous administration so the fact is because we get speeches as answers the only way to ensure that there are more questions from the opposition and that we can get more answers has been to try to use it so although there is the defense available that this is just enforcing convention convention was broken by the attempt to talk out questions beyond the third question on the order paper and to make this change without time limiting as should obviously happen the responses to questions seems nonsensical and we've had a situation where council apps and I have some sympathy with there has become quite annoyed that opposition members are reading out questions or giving a statement of what their question is rather than calling out the number on the ballot paper and I agree but that's not here and surely we could come up with a change that could incorporate this but there's been no discussion this has been imposed and as I say it seems entirely vindictive council wraps yeah thanks very much I'll try not to become annoyed so yeah so the reason why I didn't put in lots of other things that no doubt I would love into this is because we were just trying to it was just a matter of restoring custom and practice which had been breached and that we wanted to see restored before we have a look at how we might reshape questions so I thank him for being understanding of that point I think people have different memories I mean the thing is I always speak to Councillor Belton he's got a memory as long as this council practically in fact I think it is as long as this council and he tells me about lots of times when we reached question 3 with previous leaders and he also tells me about times when he said we used to try this and we used to try that but every time the standing orders got changed to stop us from doing that so we didn't do it I don't think this is quite as new as he would the council claims implying but I do understand the point and I wouldn't have wanted to change the notice to planning if it was a recognised and common practice approach but the fact is when I first heard about the call in to the planning I contacted a number of colleagues across councils and said can you tell me how this works I've not come across this yet and they said what are you talking about this doesn't happen in councils you've clearly got something wrong because they had never come across this practice before and the fact is and I understand you know and I think it's perfectly legitimate for the opposition to use tools in the box but the thing is in Wandsworth we've got some very strange shaped tools in that box sometimes and this is one of them and one thing I would say is that it probably featured much less under your administration because you weren't prodigious house builders of new social housing and we've got a really important programme of social housing that we want to deliver for local people so that they get new homes that they can live and enjoy and get them out of temporary accommodation and the fact is that this is just an inappropriate way to politically interfere with decisions that are made by a planning committee which is very careful as Councillor Humphreys would tell you very careful to take independent non-whip decisions and then it just gets thrown into this political kind of climate and then you know when we mess about with it and treat it like a political football and then it just goes back to the planning committee where the same people make presumably the same decision so it's just a matter of delaying something it's extremely unusual I don't think it's really appropriate and a number of colleagues would agree with that I think so much as I understand that it might not be popular because it's removed an ability to do something that you might have enjoyed I think it will be to the benefit of people of Wandsworth that this is no longer in our standing orders Councillor Corner Lawless Lynn Graham okay councillor councillor Lawless thank you so I can't think of a full council meeting since I was elected just over a year ago that hasn't been disrupted and I imagine people watching it over in the public gallery online must be horrified by some of the things that take place and councillor Graham talks about the using the tools available to them which I can understand but I think it'll also be suggested that it's exploiting a bit of a loophole in the standing orders to try and get two supplementaries and as our Prime Minister said we are the party of tool makers not tools so in that spirit that's why we're going to agree to this this is I think it makes it fair I think it makes it clear and like whoever asked the question gets the first supplementary it makes that clear but it also opens it up to scrutiny because it allows someone from the opposite side to get in on the second one if they want okay okay Councillor Graham yeah I said I'd take you yeah well I'd have more sympathy with that if the the answers to the questions weren't taking five ten minutes a pop you know I it's become ridiculous and I think members of the public watching will see the answers as absurd as much as they would if they were concerned about any any protests about the ability to ask questions coming back to Councillor Apps's point she she started to politicize it by saying that we hadn't passed homes I would just gently point out that I think it's around 650 of the homes in the thousand homes program were given planning permission under us so her point about well and a good 550 of them were for social housing when they were passed so that that just isn't the case and the fact is that actually she says that she's not aware of it anywhere else when when Councillor Austin was coming with his text for the stop motion because we hadn't put one in at all bear in mind we weren't in opposition he had a text that he had got from another authority and I had to point out to him that it needed to be adjusted because ours somewhat unusually has to take the form of an amendment even though there was no decision notice to amend that was a debate on our side ours is peculiar but it's not unusual for it to happen on planning elsewhere I don't know how widespread it is but it does happen elsewhere and I would I'd make the last point that this has not been exercised in relation to a regular planning application this has been exercised in relation to a planning application by the council itself and therefore the additional scrutiny that comes from bringing that to full council I don't feel that's unreasonable because members of the planning committee on the administration side although we all understand that formally it is not a whipped committee nevertheless the pressure on them to pass what is an administration scheme and the pressure on them from their group colleagues must be significant regardless of whether it is formally whipped and the public certainly feel that the council approving its own applications without any further scrutiny is odd and I can say that members of the public who have already seen that the council is acting to withdraw this power to have further scrutiny at full council feel that it is an attempt to push things through without that scrutiny and without that focus that they feel given that they are being impacted and their homes are being impacted that they feel they deserve so I don't see why when it's a sparing use that has been used once and in relation to an application that the administration itself is bringing forwards it is wrong to allow that extra scrutiny at full council okay oh all right councillor grimston thanks I should have said councillor grimston west hillward earlier just just briefly on the same theme here might be helpful if we go back and ask ourselves what the function of questions is what we're actually there for in the I mean from my mind it's part of it is eliciting information part of it is to put an alternative view to the administration uh from so the function of opposition uh within that um and some of these questions about a second supplementary uh do go back then to the point that council graham was making that for that to work the person answering the question has to keep in mind what's going on here and rather than it has felt like filibustering uh occasionally very very long answers uh from yeah leader and from and from cabinet members indeed from time to time um and I think in a sense the the change of the constitution again shouldn't be the main thing going on here it should be a reflection among ourselves I actually think it's good for the administration to be challenged on these things it's often say if they're getting caught up if if they're having difficult questions asked by the opposition before an election they may find that they don't get difficult questions asked by the public at an election if they've put right something being raised so it's it's in everybody's interest I think for for uh but maybe particularly in interest of the administration to to uh foster a culture whereby that sort of challenge is available and the way it has worked out and the last council there was very little challenge possible there because the fractiousness between the two groups sitting as an independent uh was was and I don't put that at the door of either group I think both groups were involved in it um but we kind of lost sight I think of of the as we've done many times of the of the public interest in this and again got focused on and and obsessed by our internal squabbles and internal structures so I've no particular problem with the proposal itself here uh but I do have a problem that it could unless there's some cultural change always round about members not speaking over the mayor and repeating questions at great length and not giving very long sermons in in response to that question then we're probably not getting the best out of out of questions from the point of view chair can I just for clarity can I just uh establish there seems to be a difference of attitude to the two component parts of this uh this agenda item the first is the is the questions bit and the other bit is the stop motion bit and there and there is a subtle difference it seems to me between uh attitudes of the committee to to those two uh am I right in thinking that if somebody is objecting to anything in the uh in this agenda item that it is helpful to take the agenda item in two parts is or or do you want it taken all as well I see some nodding in favor of two parts councillor graham I think regardless of whether we vote the same way or differently on each of them it should be taken in two parts because they're entirely different uh proposals um and I just wanted to come back on one thing but I'll be very brief it's all very well to set out that um of the majority of the party set up as the party of tool makers or at least um tool factory owners I think the case was but they're not making tools here they're removing them and that's the problem yeah okay um okay so uh am I in a position to move to a vote then on this um I would like to uh move to a vote then on the first part of it which is the section on questions I think everyone's had a bash at you know I I just wondered if anybody because we have had I've seen emails that have come in what from angry residents about the stop notice and specifically its impact on potential future schemes of scrutiny I just wondered if anybody wanted to respond because I do feel that there is a difference between hauling in um you know a private developers application that has been seen by the committee in a standard way and hauling in the council's own application to itself would it be reasonable if we went straight to a vote on the first part of this agenda item on the questions section can I see can I and I don't know if it's helpful I mean again I don't want to overstep the mark as as chair but a number of people seem to be saying that they were happy with the provision in principle but only if the fractiousness between the two parties were were less of a problem um at full council that I mean that's not coming from everybody but that does seem to be coming from some people is that the case I think we we may have been minded to accept this had it included restrictions on the length of replies to questions but without any restriction on the length of replies it just enables as Councillor Grimson said filibustering so we it's not that we it's not that we're going to death to defend second supplementaries but they should not be removed without wider reform of the question system well I'm happy for that to be minuted at any rate if that's if that's any use to you so I'm inclined to move to a vote then on on the first part of of the agenda item which is the section on um the section on the uh questions and uh and supplementary questions can I see all those in favor of that standing order amendment please okay have we got that yeah are all those against please any abstentions no okay so that's carried uh I I still think that some sort of minute ought to be included about the about the fractiousness of of full council but all the same uh that has been carried and can we move then on to the second proposal now you have you finished all your points on that everybody or is anybody else want to you want one last shot is that the case I I'm just going to repeat would would anyone well I repeat the question repeat the question to whether anyone on the other side would like to respond to that to this not being a stop notice exercised on a regular application but on the council's own application to itself like if this disposal was even limited or amended so that only applied it could only be exercised on the council's own applications I think we might even back it but it it does seem to me to be a important point of principle thank you all right councillor ambash okay can I make a point but um councillor graham's very eloquent in terms of what what what he's pushing but having been for three years on the planning committee and having been briefed that it's a not non-party non-whipped it's a quasi-judicial committee which is my understanding as I don't know all the legalese but it's kind of the decision of the council it doesn't actually make sense to be able to call in and stop that decision because it's not a decision that's not within the council's framework it is within the council's framework so all the court court call in does for the planning committee is it just delays the decision of the planning committee because there is no reason you shouldn't at the political level go in whether the planning application should be accepted or not it just refers it back to the next planning committee so it doesn't make sense to me within the call in procedures to have that apply to the planning committee and as I understand from talking to councillor apps that's the received wisdom for most if not all authorities across london that call in doesn't apply to planning committee decisions okay one last comment then from councillor grimston yes but I've sympathy with both sides of the argument here but I'm not just as with the questions I think the solution doesn't seem or the proposed solution doesn't actually seem to answer the question if all that can happen from this is it goes back to exactly the same group that made the decision in the first place then it's fundamentally very very different from what we're doing with calling of a scrutiny decision or an executive decision where in principle the full council view takes part so on that I'm not sure this I absolutely take councillor graham's point that it's always uncomfortable when the council is giving itself planning permission but that's not the council has to do a load of things for which it needs planning permission from itself and if it were open for whatever reason that every time the council gave itself planning permission I don't know how often that is but it must be very very frequent then it could be called in I just don't see how that solves the question if it's just going back to the same group that took the decision in the first place I think I'm going to move to a vote I think just on a technical technical point what's what's your technical but so this this doesn't force it to go back to the planning committee it just means it has to come to full council and sort of a delay can only ever be over a couple of weeks you've made a technical point and I think it's been challenged but you've made a technical point so can I can I see all those in favour of uh the second set of proposals um in this um in this uh agenda item please all those for okay all those against any abstentions it's been carried okay that brings our discussions to a close this evening can I just congratulate everybody this evening on what was actually quite a good natured discussion on what could have been a very very contentious set of issues um uh serious points that had to be discussed and uh where disagreements had to be aired but nevertheless a good natured discussion I would say thank you for that everybody uh and thank you for your participation this evening you
Summary
The committee noted the Democracy Review Progress Report and agreed to two amendments to the Council's Standing Orders. The first amendment limits Councillors to asking just the first supplementary question after their original question in Council meetings, and the second amendment removes Councillors' ability to 'call-in' planning decisions for further scrutiny by the full Council.
Democracy Review Progress Report
This report was presented to the committee by the Monitoring Officer, Mr Chowdhury, and an independent consultant on local government governance, Mr Parry.1
Mr Parry explained that Wandsworth is unusual in requiring all decisions made by the Executive to be scrutinised by the relevant Overview and Scrutiny Committee, arguing that this practice is:
...not always impactful and it rarely adds any value.
The committee were asked to note the progress made by the Democracy Review Task and Finish Group on proposals to:
- Reduce the number of Executive decisions being scrutinised by Overview and Scrutiny Committees (OSCs).
- Introduce a financial threshold for key decisions.2
- Reform the process for 'calling-in' decisions made by the Executive for further scrutiny.
The minority party Councillors on the committee argued that the discussions in the Task and Finish group were not sufficiently advanced to warrant a formal progress report, and that the timetable for the review should allow time for recommendations from the cross-party Task and Finish Group to be discussed at a future meeting of the General Purposes Committee, before being presented to the Executive and the Full Council.
The majority party Councillors on the committee, who also sit on the Executive, argued that some of the changes being proposed are 'commonplace' in other Councils and should not be controversial, and that the process for determining the detail of the changes should remain the responsibility of the Executive.
A compromise position was reached, whereby the committee noted the report, but the minutes of the meeting also record the minority party's reservations about the proposed process for determining the final details of the changes to the Council's constitution.
The minutes of the meeting also record the majority party's view that the link between OSC agendas and Executive decisions is unhelpful and that:
It would be best and usual practice if OSC members in Wandsworth were free to be able to exercise independence in how they scrutinise policies so that they can contribute to policy making.
Councillor Lawless stated that the majority party would like the key decision threshold to be set at £1,000,000. This is far higher than the £500,000 figure, identified in the Democracy Review Progress Report (Appendix A) as the most common threshold used by Councils across London. The minority party expressed reservations about this figure, given that the details of how other elements of the review would work had yet to be determined.
Amendments to Standing Orders
Questions at Full Council
An amendment to Standing Order 11A 15 was proposed that limits Councillors to asking only the first supplementary question after their original question. The majority party argued that this was necessary to prevent abuse of the Council's Standing Orders, and that it would restore the custom and practice of Full Council meetings. The minority party objected to this change, arguing that it was unnecessary, and that the existing Standing Order simply allows the questioner 'priority' to ask supplementary questions. The minority party noted that this was the latest in a series of changes to the Council's constitution, which have had the effect of reducing their ability to scrutinise the Executive.
The minority party were also critical of the increasing length of the Leader's responses to questions, arguing that these often took the form of speeches, and had the effect of reducing the overall number of questions that could be asked at Full Council. The amendment to Standing Order 11A 15 was put to the vote and was carried.
Planning Stop Notices
The committee discussed a proposed amendment to Standing Order 51D which removes the ability of Councillors to serve a stop notice on planning decisions, which prevents a decision from being implemented, and requires it to be debated by the Full Council.
The majority party argued that this mechanism is unusual in other local authorities, and that it was an inappropriate way for Councillors to interfere with decisions made by the Planning Applications Committee, which, although notionally not 'whipped', is made up exclusively of members of the majority party, and rarely votes against the recommendations of officers.
The majority party also argued that the use of stop notices was only a means of delaying the delivery of new homes and other important projects.
The minority party argued that stop notices were a legitimate means of scrutinising planning decisions, and that they were particularly necessary when the Council itself was the applicant, as was the case when the most recent stop notice was issued, in relation to a proposed development at Ailsa Wharf. The minority party pointed out that the use of stop notices was only possible on a small number of occasions, and that it was a power that had been used by both the majority and minority parties in the past.
The minority party also disputed the claim that the use of stop notices was unusual, and argued that the power existed in other Councils.
The proposed amendment to Standing Order 51D was put to a vote and was carried.
Attendees
- Angela Ireland
- Graeme Henderson
- James Jeffreys
- Jeremy Ambache
- Lynsey Hedges
- Malcolm Grimston
- Matthew Corner
- Peter Graham
- Rex Osborn
- Sara Apps
- Sean Lawless
- Abdus Choudhury
- Fenella Merry
- Sagar Sharma