This guide is intended to provide advice to councils, councillors and officers on the operation of overview and scrutiny; we also hope and expect that it will be of use to other stakeholders, including the public. It is written to complement the Government’s statutory scrutiny guidance for councils and combined authorities (published May 2019). Councils are obliged to “have regard to” this statutory guidance (the meaning of this phrase being provided on page 5 of the guidance itself). This guide, produced by CfGS, has no such formal status.
This guide updates and replaces a previous set of Practice Guides published by CfGS in 2014, and CfGS’s original Good Scrutiny Guide from 2006 (published alongside the previous set of Government guidance on scrutiny from the same year).
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