Author: Ed Hammond
Scrutiny and the cost of living
Scrutiny and the cost of living Although the cost of living crisis is dominating political conversation this week – especially in light of the rise of the energy price cap – for us in local government this is a crisis that has been going on for years now. For more than a decade councils have […]
Chief executive’s update: 23 September 2022
With national politics restarting this week after the Queen’s funeral, there is plenty in the new PM’s inbox – and plenty for those of us in local government to think about as the autumn approaches. Levelling Up At the moment we at CfGS are thinking a lot about levelling up. In the trade press in […]
Reviewing council constitutions
A bit later in the autumn we will be producing a guide to the drafting and revision of effective council constitutions, funded by the LGA. In carrying out this work we’re get to get the insights of members and officers who work with constitutional issues regularly to get their views. Council constitutions are, as a […]
Electoral reviews: offering support
Before the pandemic, we and the Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE) embarked on a project looking at the way that councils (and councillors) engage with electoral reviews. This project is now concluding – it will result in the publication of our research, and amendments by the LGBCE to their guidance to councils on […]
Post-pandemic scrutiny and policymaking
A few weeks ago we published a paper exploring how scrutiny in local authorities can play an active part in helping councils to learn lessons from the pandemic, and to use those lessons to deal with current and forthcoming challenges. This has two areas of focus – looking back (debriefing, and learning lessons, from the […]
Governance risk and resilience
In March last year (2021) we published the “Governance risk and resilience” – a set of material designed to support people working in councils (and in other parts of the public sector too) to understand some of the behaviours and challenges that can lead to weakness in the corporate governance framework. Since then we have […]
Our annual survey
We have now published our annual survey of overview and scrutiny in local government – the definitive picture of scrutiny’s effectiveness in the first year post-pandemic. You can read a summary of the key findings here – https://www.cfgs.org.uk/resource/what-makes-for-effective-scrutiny-excerpt-from-the-cfgs-annual-survey-2021 . The full report can be read here – https://www.cfgs.org.uk/resource/cfgs-annual-survey-2021-22. The findings are perhaps unsurprising – reflecting […]
Chief Executive’s update: on health scrutiny, and levelling up
It’s been a busy summer – although nobody really expects August to be a period of “downtime” any more. We head into the autumn with a new Prime Minister and hence some uncertainty over the future of some key national policies with an impact on local government and, by extension, scrutiny. Health scrutiny The first […]
Health and Care Act: implementation update
Next week, clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) will cease to be, and in their place new statutory Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) will come into being – taking responsibility for the design and delivery of health and care services across a wide geographic footprint. While these changes have been a long time coming it is important not […]
Senior Governance Consultant: secondment/fixed term contract
The Centre for Governance and Scrutiny is looking for an experienced governance professional to join the team, on secondment or a fixed term contract, for six months – on either a full time or part time basis. This is an exciting time to be working at CfGS. As well as being at the centre of […]