23 September 2005
The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is considering proposals to expand the powers of local authority overview and scrutiny committees, so they would be able to hold government departments and private sector providers to account.
At present, the committees have the power to compel only local authority officers and NHS bodies to give evidence to their inquiries.
However, responding to complaints that the ODPM's new Local Area Agreements do not promote real co-operation between all public service providers and fundholders, local government minister Phil Woolas said that one solution could be to broaden the committees' powers.
'I don't see why we can't expand [their role] to oversee scrutiny of other partners on behalf of other citizens,' Woolas told an audience of local authority officers and members at the New Local Government Network seminar.
Jane Martin, executive director of the Centre for Public Scrutiny, agreed on the need to change the statutory powers of scrutiny committees. She told Public Finance: 'At the moment, they only have the power to request that bodies outside local government provide them with information. There's no obligation for them to respond or to be held to account. We need to re-enforce what we might term “external scrutiny”.'
The 2001 Health and Social Care Act gives the overview and scrutiny committees additional powers to hold local NHS providers to account.
Expanding the power to other government departments and external agencies would either entail separate pieces of legislation for each function, or over-arching legislation relating specifically to members of LAAs, Martin said.
PFsep2005
