Agenda and minutes

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Scrutiny Committee Public Open Forum ~ Guidance

Our Scrutiny Committee meetings are live streamed and a link to the live stream will be available on the meeting page of the Monmouthshire County Council website

If you would like to share your thoughts on any proposals being discussed by Scrutiny Committees, you can submit your representation in advance via this form

·     Please share your views by uploading a video or audio file (maximum of 4 minutes) or;

·     Please submit a written representation (via Microsoft Word, maximum of 500 words)

You will need to register for a My Monmouthshire account in order to submit the representation or use your log in, if you have registered previously.

The deadline for submitting representations to the Council is 5pm three clear working days in advance of the meeting. 

If representations received exceed 30 minutes, a selection of these based on theme will be shared at the Scrutiny Committee meeting.  All representations received will be made available to councillors prior to the meeting.

If you would like to attend one of our meetings to speak under the Public Open Forum at the meeting, you will need to give three working days’ notice by contacting Scrutiny@monmouthshire.gov.uk .  

The amount of time afforded to each member of the public to speak is at the chair’s discretion, but to enable us to accommodate multiple speakers, we ask that contributions be no longer than 3 minutes. 

If you would like to suggest future topics for scrutiny by one of our Scrutiny Committees, please do so by emailing Scrutiny@monmouthshire.gov.uk

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To scrutinise the self-assessment process to inform Members’ understanding of the Council’s arrangements and identify areas for further scrutiny

Councillor Brocklesby introduced the report and Richard Jones and Hannah Carter delivered a presentation. Councillor Brocklesby, Matthew Gatehouse and Richard Jones answered the members’ questions.

Key points raised by Committee members:

·        Noting that the availability of this report to the public alongside access to a dashboard would have been more useful, and that such coordination should be considered

·        Asking for further information on the process of self-assessment, whether there are stakeholder communication plans, and whether reviews of what has been done take place

·        Whether residents are asked for their views on value for money

·        Asking why the percentage of people who feel they are able to influence decisions is only 40%

·        Noting that some councils put self-assessment to resident groups to ask their views about the impact of the council’s performance on residents – noting the importance and value of feedback from residents and the distinction between residents feeling able to influence decisions and actually engaging in that process

·        Observing that with the report’s focus on outputs, it would have been useful to have more information on the direct benefit of those outcomes to residents e.g. the health benefits from the increased uptake in participation in leisure facilities

·        Asking how the council is using leisure facilities to delay deconditioning, ensure residents avoid urgent hospital care, and improve the mental health and wellbeing of certain groups

·        Asking how we are going to capture and measure the voices of lived experience, whether there can be citizen engagement in service design, and if an early iteration of the report can be sent to the Future Generations Office for review, to see if the right datasets are being captured

·        Noting that it would be useful to have relevant comparisons with other authorities, and that such data would be shown best in a dashboard

·        Asking why there can’t be interim targets now, how the information provided by officers is challenged, and whether the report can be less backward-looking and look more to the future

·        Noting that as a dashboard won’t be interactive for the residents, careful consideration needs to be given to the information we give to residents – it is very important that residents’ experience and feedback be included in this evaluation, and that their feeling of not being involved in the council needs to change

·        Suggesting that it would be useful to have more detail on how decision-making has been affected by strategies and surveys mentioned in the report, such as the Nature Isn’t Neat survey

·        Expressing doubt over the utility of certain surveys e.g. library survey, asking why the 99% of non-users haven’t been asked why they don’t use the library services

·        Proposing that with a need to find better ways to communicate, other information be included in the annual delivery of the council tax bill

·        Noting that sometimes there aren’t objective criteria in order to qualify something as a success e.g. the introduction of the 20mph limits, as Monmouthshire was a pilot scheme, and that the approach to measuring success can  ...  view the full minutes text for item 3.

The LDP Annual Monitoring Report item needs to move back from the next meeting, possibly to January.

Councillor Bond proposed bringing the Financial Strategy, Flood Strategy (Place Committee) and the Council & Community Resilience items forward on the work programme – ACTIONS

21^st June 2023: Ordinary Meeting

17^th July 2023: Special Meeting

·        21^st June 2023: Ordinary Meeting

·        17^th July 2023: Special Meeting

The minutes were confirmed as an accurate record.