Resources, Performance & Partnerships Overview & Scrutiny Committee

I don’t really know what to say about the meeting of the Resources, performance etc committee other than can I have two hours of my life back please.

The first part of the meeting consisted of looking at various performance indicators. A third of these indicators have no data and many of the rest are linked with the performance of other agencies, so there was very little to comment on.

We then talked about setting up a working party to look at the events surrounding the potential loss of £27.4 million pounds that Barnet invested in Icelandic banks. Working parties are usually made up of anyone on the committee who is interested in the subject under consideration.

The Chairman announced that the working party would be politically balanced with 3 Tories, 2 Labour and me. Labour were up in arms at this as they felt they should be equally represented. It obviously makes little difference to me as I’m the only Lib Dem on the committee. However the working party is configured the recommendations will have to be accepted by the main committee which has a Tory majority so there is little chance of a critical report getting through anyway.

Will the working party uncover anything we don’t already know? Who knows but it is clear that the narrative that the Tories will stick to regardless is that know one could have known that Icelandic Banks were dodgy and that it is therefore not their fault that we have potentially lost £27.4 million. The point that has already come out is that the leader of the Council did not know that we had money in Icelandic banks until there was a problem despite being the leader of the Council and Chair of the cabinet resources committee which is responsible for the council’s treasury management strategy. When you start stacking up the allowances there should be some stacking up of the responsibilities that go with the job! Clearly not in this case.

Then we moved on to a member’s item from a Labour member concerning the future shape of the council. This is an initiative to look at the structure and organisation of the council. It is due to report in February. The expectation is that it will recommend cuts in staffing. The point of the item was to look at the process that was being used to undertake the review not the actual outcome. The Chairman moved that we delay the item until the report was published. Obviously this will be to late to add anything meaningful to the process and is unlikely to have any effect on the actions the council ultimately takes.

For me the underlying theme in all of this is the lack of value that the administration has for the scrutiny process and worse the feeling that they like it that way as an ineffective scrutiny process does not get in the way of what they want to do. In my opinion effective scrutiny could actually improve the functioning of the council. However the lack of openness in Barnet means that effective scrutiny is a pipe dream.