Cabinets, Committees and Local Government Decision-Making

Cabinets, Committees and Local Government Decision-Making

Prior to the Local Government Act 2000, local authorities all took their policy decisions in two key stages:

(a)   Committee: Detailed policy proposals were scrutinised, debated and voted on by members of specialist committees of councillors covering the relevant subject areas (e.g. education, transport, etc)

(b)   Full Council: Having been decided upon in principle by the relevant committee, a full council meeting had the final say

The LGA 2000 envisaged the replacement of the existing decision-making system by one in which most major decisions would be made by a Cabinet of councillors drawn principally from the members of the largest political grouping on the council. In practice, however, some councils have retained the old system for either of the following reasons:

·      If a formal referendum has been held in a given locality over the introduction of an elected Mayor and Cabinet and local people have rejected this idea, the old-style system might be retained as a “fall-back position”

·      Local authorities covering fewer than 85,000 residents can take advantage of a de minimis model (i.e. a statutory recognition that they are too small to have to change)

The Pre-2000 Model

There has never been a single set model for the internal structure of local authorities. Even before the LGA 2000 introduced a range of options for the future shape of councils – governing their decision-making systems and the relationship between elected councillors and professional officers – in practice, the specific structure of individual authorities often varied widely. Everything from the precise names of committees to the means by which councillors and officers discharged their duties often differed between neighbouring councils – and this has continued in some areas to this day.

            The principal features of the “old-style” council decision-making structure included the following:

·      Chief Officer’s Management Team – A group of senior officers headed by the chief executive that meets once a week or fortnight to discuss policy initiatives that might be put forward for councillors’ consideration at meetings and/or issues that might be relevant to more than one department

·      Where a single political party has a majority on a council, the leader of that grouping will be dubbed the Leader of the Council – and is, in practice, the most powerful councillor

·      Separation of “Service Planning” from “Service Delivery” – Group of directors led by the council’s Chief Executive/Head of the Paid Service responsible for strategic/corporate decisions, while day-to-day departmental decisions taken by “delivery” directors (e.g. chief planning officer, chief education officer, etc)

·      Many decisions delegated to officers and council committees/subcommittees – To enable councils to run effectively they had to, in practice, delegate much decision-making to “subsets” of the council and senior officers, but not individual councillors (e.g. committee chairmen). Delegation not allowed when it comes to setting council tax precepts/considering reports from the Monitoring Officer

·      Scheme of Delegation or Terms of Reference of Committees and Subcommittees – Documents drawn up defining the precise extent of committees’/subcommittees’ powers

·      Standing Orders – Detailed outline of the ways in which meetings of committees/subcommittees should be conducted

·      Committees report to Full Council – Individual committees covering specific departments or issues make their decisions and then report to the full council, which rubber stamps or rejects its committees’ recommendations

The Post-LGA 2000 Model

The local authority structure envisaged by the LGA 2000 is a mixture of pre-existing and new elements.

·      Local authorities’ functions split into executive (service delivery – e.g. education, environment, refuse collection); non-executive (regulatory – e.g. planning permission, building regulations); and scrutiny (examining the performance of executive and non-executive arms)

·      Executive decisions can be delegated to individual councillors, as well as individual officers - Unlike in the past, individual councillors, as well as senior officers, can now have powers of decision delegated to them (so long as they are either the Mayor or a Cabinet member)

·      COMT retained as means of overseeing council’s corporate management in many major local authorities, as is separation of “service planning” and “service delivery”

·      Constitution sets out powers and duties of committees and subcommittees, while Meeting Procedure Rules outline the standing orders for council and committee meetings

·      Primary policy decisions taken by Cabinet – The previous system, under which committees/subcommittees made recommendations and then put them for final approval to the full council has been replaced by one in which the Cabinet takes these executive decisions and they are “reported” back to the full council by the Leader, the Mayor or, if delegated, a Lead Member/Executive Member/Portfolio Holder – i.e. not committee chairmen as before. These Cabinet decisions, and the ones rubber-stamped by the full council, focus on major issues and policies, and are referred to as key decisions

·      The committees themselves are now reduced to a non-executive/scrutiny, rather than policy-making, role: although they are still able to “report” to the full council on their recommendations, the Cabinet and Leader/Mayor now have the final say on the wording of these recommendations

·      A monthly forward plan is now published which outlines all the key decisions due in the coming month’s business

How Does the Post-LGA 2000 Executive/Non-Executive System Operate?

The LGA 2000 envisaged the following alternative executive structures for local authorities:

·      A Leader (appointed by the authority from among the elected councillors) and Cabinet (appointed by the authority and the Leader, predominantly from among the largest elected party grouping)

·      A directly elected Mayor and Cabinet (appointed by the Mayor from among the elected councillors)

·      A directly elected Mayor and Council Manager

The LGA 2000 also envisaged that each local authority should adopt a formal constitution that could be accessed, and fully understood, by members of the public. Unsurprisingly, the final constitutions adopted by most individual authorities – covering everything from a breakdown of departmental responsibilities through details of the members’/councillors’ allowance scheme to outlines of the codes of conduct governing both councillors and officer - have been far from simple. In practice, only one local authority – Stoke City Council – has ever chosen to adopt the Mayor and council manager model. This is in the process of being phased out, to be replaced by one of the other executive arrangements.

Customary Order of Business in Full Council Meetings

1. Agenda for business prepared by the council’s Chief Executive, Secretary or Director of Administration
2. Meeting opens with approval of minutes of previous meeting
3. Questions (usually written down in advance by specific councillors) put to relevant committee chairmen. In councils that adopt an LGA 2000 constitution, questions are put to the elected Mayor, the Leader or relevant Cabinet member
4. Public observers given chance to question committee chairmen (optional)
5. Petitions from electors presented to full council by the local councillors representing the electors in question – actual debates on these issues will be held at relevant later committee meetings
6. Committee reports considered by the full council. Debates often arise at this stage if a matter raised is politically controversial
7. At the above stage, individual councillors with strong objections to a given committee proposal will ask for the matter to be amended or even “referred back” to the committee
8. Notices of Motion from individual councillors (normally tabled in advance) may be put to the meeting. These usually cover issues that are not otherwise formally touched on by the agenda. In the case of post-LGA 2000-style councils, any such notices that impinge on “executive” issues must be referred to the Executive/Cabinet for a final decision

The Committee and Subcommittee System

In both pre- and post-LGA 2000 local authorities there exists a system whereby “subsets” of the council make policy recommendations on a wide range of issues to the full council. The one fundamental difference between the “old-style” and “new-style” system is that, while in the past this was done by individual service committees and subcommittees, in LGA 2000-style councils it is now done by the Executive/Cabinet, which tends to be dominated by the party group led by the Mayor/Leader.

            In old-style councils, there are several different types of committees:

·      Standing/Statutory – i.e. permanent committees set up to discharge a specific function (e.g. planning committees, education committees, environmental services committees)

·      Ad Hoc – these can be given briefs that are directly related to the above, but are set up to consider specific issues in greater detail than is possible on standing committees

·      Area-based – increasingly, these committees are being formed to look at policy governing specific geographical areas under a local authority’s control. They sometimes contain members of the local community alongside councillors, and can even have budgets delegated to them

The Policy and Resources Committee

Although “new-style” local authorities have abolished them, the single most influential committees on many councils remain the policy and resources committees. Introduced under the terms of the Bains Report, policy committees were designed to enshrine the “separation of functions” seen in the officer structure between service delivery and corporate decision-making (i.e. overall council structure and procedure).

            In practice, many councils have gone further than this and extended the remit of this committee to oversee the main budgetary decisions affecting the local authority. Such policy and resources committees are extremely influential:

·      They report back to the full council and recommend, in detail, how the council’s budget should be split up/spent

·      They are the only committees that, in addition to reporting on their own recommendations, are allowed to formally comment on those of other, service, committees

How are Members of Committees/Cabinets Chosen?

Under the old committee-based system, there was traditionally much wrangling between political groups over the exact composition and chairmanship of individual committees. However, for several years now those councils that operate this system have been obliged to apply a principle of proportionality – i.e. ensuring that the composition of committees reflects the overall political complexion of the council. Where no political group has overall control of the authority, standing committees sometimes have no permanent chair: instead, a different chairman or woman is “elected” to serve on a meeting-by-meeting basis. This cannot occur in the case of LGA 2000-style authorities, which have a legal obligation to appoint a Leader and Cabinet.

            In LGA 2000-style councils, however, the committee role is performed by the Executive/Cabinet. Its composition can vary along one of the following lines:

·      If a single political group has overall control of the council, all of the seats on the Executive/Cabinet will normally be taken by members of that same group

·      If control of the council is held by a coalition of groups, the Cabinet will normally be made up of members of those groups on the basis of old-style proportionality

There are several additional quirks that can affect the precise composition of committees/Cabinets:

·      Old-style committees are allowed to co-opt non-councillors to serve on them, either temporarily or on a more ongoing basis. New-style Cabinets are prohibited from doing this (as, in some cases, are the smaller non-executive/scrutiny committees of councillors set up by non-Executive members to scrutinise the Executive/Cabinet and Mayor/Leader)

·      Co-opted members cannot vote - unless they are church representatives sitting on a committee exercising an education-related function (in the case of old-style committees) or are serving on a post-LGA 2000 advisory – as opposed to scrutiny - committee with no delegated powers

·      Until the LGA 2000, Mayors (in authorities like Birmingham City Council that appointed them) and council chairmen/Leaders were treated as ex officio members of all committees beside any they “officially” sat on. This gave them the right to both attend and vote in these committees. The LGA 2000 has removed these voting rights

·      As well as taking account of the need for fair allocations of committee/Cabinet seats on a party political basis, councils must ensure that they avoid any perceived or real conflicts of interest by carefully examining the way they compose committees and subcommittees with related roles. For example, the house committee should have different members to the committee which oversees any council-owned company (DLO/DSO) which might be competing for contracts from the housing department

·      In addition to the committees themselves, councils often order that working parties composed of a mixture of councillors and officers are set up to consider policy options in greater detail than is possible in committee meetings

What Access Can Public and Media Expect to Council Decision-Making?

In the case of the old-style committee system, the following arrangements apply governing public access to relevant councillors and their meetings:

·      Public registers must be kept by authorities listing the names and addresses of all elected councillors and details of the committees on which they serve. Any powers delegated to paid officers must also be listed on these registers

·      Under the 1985 Local Government (Access to Information) Act, the public has the right to attend all full council, committee or subcommittee meetings – unless the information being discussed is confidential or exempt. The former refers to information supplied by government departments or matters whose disclosure is prohibited by Act of Parliament/statute or the courts, while the latter can cover the following: (a) personal and/or commercially sensitive details; (b) matters in the process of being negotiated; and/or (c) issues protected by legal privilege. A decision to exclude the public and media for the duration of a specific “exempt” or “confidential” item must be formally proposed, seconded and voted upon by the members of the relevant committee – and a reason must be given, usually citing the Schedule to the 1985 Act. When such motions fail, the matter concerned must be heard publicly and copies of supporting reports should be instantly circulated to media and public present

·      Copies of agenda papers and all officer/subcommittee reports submitted during the course of the “open” part of the meeting must be made available at meetings – and no matters must be heard at the meeting unless they have been listed on the agenda at least three days beforehand. In exceptional cases, committee and subcommittee chairs – but not full council chairs – can remove this condition

·      All reports presented for public inspection should list any background papers used to help draft them (these can be examined by the public, but they may be charged for copies)

·      While embargoes can sometimes be used by authorities to prevent the media publishing details of something before a certain date, the Department of the Environment has, in the past, advised them against doing so

In the case of post-LGA 2000-style councils, many executive decisions are taken on a day-by-day basis by individual councillors to whom specific responsibilities have been delegated. The council’s new constitution will set out the procedure that has to be followed by that councillor in arriving at his or her decisions.

            However, where executive decisions have been taken by the Cabinet as a whole this will have been at a meeting, as per the pre-existing system. In such circumstances, an adapted form of the previous committee/subcommittee public hearings is used:

·      As many decisions as possible to be taken by the Cabinet/Executive/full council quickly and in private (to avoid wasting time and money)

·      BUT key decisions (i.e. major decisions on the size of the next financial year’s council tax bills, local planning policy, etc) should be taken in public

·      Public awareness of forthcoming “key decisions” to be aided by the publication of a forward plan which looks four months ahead at any given time. Key decisions cannot be taken unless they have been included in a forward plan

When the public and media are granted access to meetings, this is expected to be made available to the following extent:

·      “Reasonable accommodation” should be provided – i.e. sufficient numbers of seats and, wherever possible, press benches. In some cases, particularly when an issue of widespread public concern is to be debated, overflow rooms may have to be provided – if necessary, with access to a PA broadcast or video feed of the proceedings

·      Councils that hold meetings in very small rooms and bar entry on the basis that there is overcrowding are judged to be “acting in bad faith” (Lord Widgery, the former Lord Chief Justice, condemned such practices in his post)

·      Local authorities encouraged to appoint public relations and/or press officers to inform the public and media, as suggested in the Bains Report. However, journalists may also approach individual councillors (particularly committee chairmen or Cabinet members) and chief officers of relevant departments if a technical explanation is needed

·      Authorities prohibited, however, from publishing anything designed to affect public support for a particular political grouping under the Local Government Act 1986

·      Councils later confined to issuing information about their own operations as a local authority – not about local government as a whole

·      Councils must keep separate accounts of how much they spend on publicity

·      Under the terms of the LGA 2000, media now granted the following information rights:

(a)   Three days’ notice of meetings open to the press

(b)   Agendas and minutes of council meetings

(c)   Registers of planning applications

(d)   Records of payments to councillors

(e)   Statutory register of members’ interests

(f)    Copies of local government commissions’/ombudsmen’s reports on complaints of maladministration

(g)   The council’s annual accounts, annual audit (including the rights to inspect certain items), and performance indicators

(h)   Statutory plans, including the Best Value Performance Plan

(i)    General financial information

(j)    The council’s full annual report (including, since the then Department of the Environment stipulated this in the 1990s, comparative data indicating how well individual councils have performed as against similar authorities)

How Do Local Authorities go About Implementing the Changes to Council Composition and Procedure Outlined in the LGA 2000?

LGA 2000-style authorities can only be imposed once a council has been through the following two-stage consultation process:

·      Issuing an explanation of the three different models of executive structure – without steering consultees to vote in a specific way

·      More detailed consultation on a proposed new formal consultation based on whichever model is favoured

New Labour’s hope was that all local authorities would have initiated their consultation processes within six to nine months of the passage of the LGA 2000. In practice, by February 2002 nearly every English council had published its proposals and 80 per cent of them had opted for the Leader and Cabinet model – as opposed to either of the mayoral ones.            In paving the way for a preferred new system of elected Mayors, the Government stipulated that:

·      A referendum for an elected Mayor can be demanded by five per cent of local voters – and the council has to abide by the decision reached in any such referendum

·      However, if an unsuccessful referendum is held, there has to be a gap of five years before the next one is called

·      The Question to appear on such referenda should carry the following wording: “Are you in favour of the proposal for (name of city or borough) to be run in a new way, which includes a mayor, who will be elected by the voters of that (borough, city, county or district), to be in charge of the council’s services and to lead (name of authority) and the community it serves?”

The Growth of Competition in the Provision of Local Services

Under the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s, the role of the council in running local services underwent drastic redefinition. They evolved from being direct providers of services to enablers whose job it was to ensure that those services were provided as efficiently as possible – whether by themselves, satellite companies or the private sector. This philosophy – which has broadly survived until this day – has been aided, chronologically, by the following two principles:

·      Compulsory Competitive Tendering

·      Best Value

Compulsory Competitive Tendering

Introduced by the 1980 Local Government, Planning and Land Act, this was the means by which councils were forced to put services out to tender: i.e. to invite bids from public, voluntary and/or private sectors and judge which was the most cost-effective after receiving all the submissions.

Initially, CCT applied largely to “blue collar” areas of service provision, such as building maintenance and construction work, but was soon extended (by the Local Government Act 1988) to cover refuse collection, cleaning buildings, street cleansing, school catering, etc.

A further extension of the scope of CCT was introduced by the Local Government Act 1992, which included professional and/or support services, such as, ultimately, information technology and public relations.

Councils that wished to continue providing services for themselves were allowed to set up direct labour organisations (DLOs) for construction work etc, and direct service organisations (DSOs) for the other types of function. However, these too had to compete for contracts.

In practice, the CCT system was constrained by the following factors:

·      Exceptions to the need to tender for service provision were granted to smaller councils, notably shire districts, under the de minimis principle

·      Contracting out of corporate and administrative services was eventually given a blanket exemption from CCT

·      The Government was eventually forced to accept advice that the ability to provide a service at a cheap price should not be the only criterion on which contracts should be awarded

·      Professional services within councils (e.g. legal services, etc) introduced in some cases as an alternative to full CCT which involved an element of commercialisation – or as a “first step” prior to the introduction of CCT

Methods used to “Persuade” Councils to Tender to Outside Contractors

The Tories became staunch advocates of the principle of CCT, and over a period of years after the passage of the 1980 Act introduced a series of measures to encourage local authorities to outsource wherever possible:

·      Unlike private contractors, the ability of DLOs/DSOs to contract for work outside their authority’s area was severely restricted – thereby curbing their ability to make profits and efficiency savings

·      DLOs and DSOs obliged to: (a) publish separate accounts to those of their parent local authority; (b) produce an annual report; and (c) make a six per cent return on their capital

·      If a DLO/DSO failed to make the six per cent return, the Secretary of State could intervene and require the CCT process to be run again, thereby effectively depriving the DSO/DLO of its contract at a premature stage. (Officially, this was an attempt to crack down on “anti-competitive behaviour” – i.e. the imposition of conditions by councils designed to put off prospective private contractors)

Though DLOs and DSOs had a hard time fending off competition from the private sector, in practice CCT had some positive knock-on effects for them. In particular, many councils decided to group together a number of DSOs and/or DLOs covering different services under a senior chief officer – known as contract services divisions - thereby giving them a more professional overall management structure and producing some of the economies of scale enjoyed by big private companies. When “support services” like personnel (now human resources), legal and finance departments are run in-house by councils they are regulated by a formal contractual arrangement called a service level agreement (SLA).

Best Value

Just as “capping” has been replaced with “passporting” by New Labour, so too has CCT been superseded by a new buzz-phrase called Best Value. The party’s second local government Green Paper was entitled Modernising Local Government – Improving Local Services through Best Value, and it introduced a new statutory obligation for local authorities “to obtain best value by securing economic, efficient and effective services” –  whether those services were provided by public, private or voluntary sectors.

The Green Paper outlined 12 provisional “principles” underlying best value, and the LGA 1999 that followed it built on this by introducing a set of performance indicators covering areas such as “corporate health” (which contained 18 further indicators covering everything from “customers and the community” to “partnership working”) and “service delivery” (covering actual service standards).

Councils were told they would have to publish a Best Value Performance Plan (BVPP) each year, on March 31, which had to have an annual audit, whose results should be published by June 30.

The issue of Best Value is ultimately monitored by the Audit Commission, whose inspectors grade services on a three-star system, judging it according to three main criteria:

·      Are the council’s aims clear and challenging?

·      Does the service meet its stated aims?

·      How does its performance compare with its aims?

Having decided how many stars a particular service should be given, the inspectors will pose three other questions designed to identify the authority’s scope for improvement in a given area:

·      Does the Best Value review drive improvements?

·      How good is the improvement plan?

·      Will the authority deliver the improvements in practice?

Other Performance Targets

In addition to the Best Value performance indicators (BVPIs) and Audit Commission performance indicators (ACPIs) which they largely replaced, both government and local authorities themselves also judge the quality of their services against several sets of other measures:

·      The Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA), which replaced the Local Government Management Board (LGMB), and the DETR launched a Beacon Councils scheme in 1999 - 42 “beacon” councils were singled-out as examples of best practice in the first year

·      Public Service Agreements (PSAs) introduced by the Government as a means of offering local authorities extra “freedoms” – provided they signed a PSA setting out a package of targets and proved they could achieve them. Of the 20 pilot authorities that signed PSAs in September 2000, few had many any real progress in meeting their targets by January 2002.

·      Citizens’ Charters – many councils producing their own versions of John Major’s vaunted Citizen’s Charter

·      Strong Local Leadership – Quality of Local Services White Paper published in December 2001 suggesting the following universal system of measuring service standards:

(a)   A coherent and integrated system of performance measures

(b)   A national local government PSA

(c)   A streamlining of best value across the board

(d)   New freedoms for authorities which achieved local PSA targets (e.g. the power to borrow and invest; the power to trade and charge for services; the power to decide spending priorities at local level)

(e)   Councils to be grouped into one of four league tables: high-performing, striving, coasting and poor performing)

© James Morrison 2007