Issue - meetings

Cabinet Member Presentation - The Efficacy of using the CAGs Approach in policy development and decision making.

Meeting: 17/01/2023 - Overview & Scrutiny Panel (Item 425)

Cabinet Member Presentation - The Efficacy of using the CAGs Approach in policy development and decision making

This is a presentation by the Leader of Council (NB: The Leader will discuss with the OSP Chair and then confirm if this is going ahead).

Minutes:

Councillor Ashbee, Leader of Council made a presentation at the Panel and made the following points:

 

·  Currently there were four cabinet advisory groups (CAGSs) that included the Fees & Charges CAG, Housing CAG, Local Plan & Local Development Scheme CAG and Climate Emergency CAG;

·  There was cross party membership on all these advisory groups;

·  The main purpose for these sub groups was to consider issues of interest to the Council and when appropriate, forward any recommendations to Cabinet;

·  Each sub group was chaired by the relevant portfolio holder;

·  They met in private working sessions in order to encourage maximum member contributions;

·  CAGs played an important part of sharing information across political groups;

·  This role was different to the role played through a scrutiny review.

 

Members asked questions and made comments as follows:

 

·  Members acknowledged the positive contributions by cabinet advisory groups to the decision process;

·  They further praised the honest debate that went on in the CAG private working sessions;

·  One member requested that independent Members should be added to the CAG membership. Currently they were not on any CAG membership list;

·  Did the Leader of Council feel that the strong leader model as opposed to the committee system was giving Thanet the best decision making process?

·  Could the Health and Wellbeing CAG be re-established?

 

Councillor Ashbee, Chris Blundell, Acting Deputy CEx and Nick Hughes, Committee Services Manager responded to Member comments and questions as follows:

 

·  CAGs provided those Members not on Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet with an opportunity to play a role in the decision making process;

·  There was a need to check why the Health and Wellbeing CAG was stopped. It could have been a resource issue;

·  Independent members fail to get onto the CAGs because these are created using proportional representation rules; In addition, it would be difficult to find a criterion that would be used to select one Independent Member over the other since they were not a political group;

·  The Strong Leader model is a better option than a committee system of governance arrangements. Decisions are made more expeditiously in an executive model of governance than committee model;

·  CAGs were necessary in making the Executive arrangement model work more efficiently;

·  The Leader would consider setting up the Health and Wellbeing CAG, having first looked at what this CAG’s terms of reference would be.

 

Members noted the report.