Agenda item

Public Questions and Petitions

To receive any questions or petitions from members of the public.

Minutes:

5.1

The Committee received questions from 3 members of the public, prior to the meeting.

 

5.2

Nigel Slack

 

 

Question 1

Page 8 Para 5.3

 

This wording allowed for the Policy Committees to choose not to utilise the local experience and expertise of residents and community groups by making this a matter of flexibility. It would, in my opinion, be better to encourage the use of these resident skills (as well as experts from beyond the city) rather than providing get out clauses. Could 5.3 be rewritten along the following lines?

5.3 The Policy Committees will be expected to involve citizens in their decision making in ways that best suit the circumstances and the issue under consideration... etc.

The details of the resident involvement to be specified as early as possible in the process.

 

In response to question 1, the Chair (Councillor Julie Grocutt) commended this suggestion to the committee for their consideration as it was within its power to make amendments to recommendations. She said that it seemed that such an ‘expectation’ would be entirely within the spirit of the report, as long as the Council aren’t losing sight of the idea that such engagement should be proportionate and tailored to the issue at hand.

 

Question 2

Page 9 Para 6.2.6 Recommendations

Recommendation 4         

 

I am concerned that not all questions to be raised at a Policy Committee Meeting will connect to the agenda but will still be integral to that committee’s role. I have been known to bring issues to Cabinet that are emerging issues and therefore not yet on their radar. The limit expressed in recommendation 4 would prohibit this and raise obstacles to residents raising new issues with a Policy Committee.

How can this omission be addressed without involving a further step in the question process?

 

In response to question 2, The Chair explained the processes outlined in this report added up to a system which would route people to Full Council if they wanted to submit a petition or question about an issue which is not already on a committee agenda. The Chair had raised a query about this and, without pre-empting the committee’s discussion, the Chair thought the Committee should ask officers to look at how we allow these issues to go directly to whichever committee would be decision-maker on the matter at hand. However, the measures which are designed to keep public questions and petitions focused and efficient were also welcome. It was a balancing act and the committee may want to explore this, and perhaps ask officers to do a bit more work on it.

 

Question 3  

Page 10 Para 6.2.6 Recommendations

Recommendation 11

 

The inclusion of the expectation of electronic recording of Councillor votes is welcome, something I have been pushing for since the introduction of the new audio-visual system, and a vital component in the transparency and accountability of the Modern Committee Structure. Will Council undertake to progress this to, at least, the point where all the Policy Committees as well as Full Council use this facility?

 

In response to question 3, the Chair explained that all Policy Committees and Full Council, as well as every other formal committee of the Council, are covered by the recommendation. The Chair expected that the clause about the ‘availability of facilities’ may mean that coverage may not be complete at first, and may remain limited for some meetings which, for example, won’t take place in the Council Chamber. The Chair said that she expected officers to prioritise these key meetings as the Council brought the system online.

 

Question 4  

Page 10 Para 6.2.6 Recommendations

Recommendations 12 j & k

         

I welcome these recommendations but would ask, who will choose and monitor the participants in this initiative to ensure inclusiveness and avoid Party Political bias?

 

In response to question 4, The Chair stated the Committee haven’t designed this much detail for any of the individual elements of the ‘toolkit’ at this point, partly because they were conscious of pre-empting Involve’s work. Nevertheless, the committee will note these concerns.

 

Question 5  

Page12 Para 6.4 Leadership

Para 6.4.2 The Lord Mayor's Role       

 

How will the issue of the Lord Mayor's casting vote be addressed in terms of proportionality?

Perhaps exclude the Lord Mayor from ordinary votes at Council (changing the maximum number of votes available to 83 instead of 84) and only to be exercised at the point of a tied vote resulting from abstentions or absences?

 

In response to question 5, The Chair explained the Chair of every local authority meeting has a normal vote as a councillor, and a second or casting vote that may be exercised where there is an equality of votes under the Local Government Act 1972, Schedule 2, Section 39 (2). When the Lord Mayor chairs full council, they are entitled to this second or casting vote in that limited and specific circumstance.

 

The Chair stated that in the late 1980s, the Mayor of Bradford’s use of his second or casting vote in a hung council in favour of his own party’s policies was challenged before the courts. The Court said that it did not think that the power to give a second or casting vote was fettered by any implied restriction that it should be exercised without regard to any party-political considerations, nor by any inter-party agreement on the rotation of the lord mayoralty that it would not be used politically.

 

Question 6  

Page 13 Para 6.4.4 Recommendations

Recommendation 27 j               

 

How will the pre-meetings in this recommendation be prevented from becoming de Facto decision-making meetings, in private?

 

In response to question 6, The Chair confirmed that in the new system, no formal decisions can be made by councillors unless they are meeting as part of a formally constituted committee, subject to both proportionality rules and the access to information procedure rules (which ensure that the meetings will be announced, conducted in public, and materials published). Informal meetings behind closed doors cannot take decisions. It was explained that it was going to be a critical part of the new environment that councillors and officers involved in every committee spend far more time doing their jobs in private in the run up to each committee meeting than they could ever spend in a committee meeting. It was important that the Council don’t allow a kind of blanket suspicion to settle over this important machinery of government. It is a significant change for the Council that the recommendations referred to mean that members from all political Groups will now be in the room when these pre-meetings take place.

 

Question 7  

Page 19 Para 6.10 Scrutiny

 

Currently SCC has a Councillor that is the city's 'Heritage Champion' in the form of Cllr Mike Drabble. Will such roles be carried over into the Committee System and what expectation of consultation or exercise of soft power & influence will be available to such champions?

 

In response to question 7, The Chair mentioned this was something the committee had not yet given their attention to. The Chair thanked Mr Slack for raising it, and asked officers to cover it in their next report.

 

Question 8  

Page 19 Para 6.10.3 & 4 Scrutiny 'Call Ins'

 

The committee’s inability to make a decision on this matter at the January 25th Meeting baffles me. It suggests to me and many others in the community that either, Councillors do not trust their own party members to represent the party's views within committees at development and pre-scrutiny stages, or they are looking for some means of creating mischief within the decision making of committees on which they do not serve.

I would be happy with an option to create a 'minority report' expressing dissent publicly within the committee and offering the opportunity for such a report to be used as the basis for a consideration for review by S&R or full Council.

I would be even more impressed to see a 'public call-in' facility, provided this is bounded by appropriate frameworks to prevent repetitious or vexatious actions.

 

In response to question 8, The Chair thanked Mr Slack for these comments, and overall, for his detailed consideration of the work it was doing today.

 

5.3

Woll Newall

 

 

Question 1

 

The current proposed design for the new committee system fails to follow a number of the design principles agreed to by this committee, and even some of the Principles that you highlighted as the 5 most important Strategic Aims.

As one example: Strategic Aim D: "Listen to everyone. Have the voice of residents at the heart of our decisions."

 

You agreed that this should one of the 5 most important Principles to influence your design of the new system, but in the proposed new system design, the voice of citizens can in no way be said to be at the heart of decision-making, as it has been largely ignored or put to one side as an afterthought.

 

Indeed, throughout the design process, this committee appears to have had difficulty listening to those very voices.

 

Only, finally, in the latest report published for today's meeting is there mention of an as-yet undefined idea that stakeholders and citizens may be invited occasionally to give their input from the outside, not 'the heart'.

 

Some of the other design principles have also not been followed, or even explicitly broken against the advice you received from national experts.

 

How and when will this committee check its proposed design for the new system against the Design Principles it created, and publicly review why it failed to follow some of them?

 

In response to Mr Newall’s question, the Chair recognised the Council was asking for trust and patience from Mr Newall in the way these recommendations are being worked up, with the technical detail of processes and structures coming first and the ‘ways of working’ - including public participation and engagement aspects – emerging later.

 

It was mentioned that the Committee saw that it would need to work this way well in advance, so since the Autumn its public reports have been consistent in describing how this would play out.

 

While the Committee was able to get on with designing the ‘what’ straight away through the Inquiry process last year, the Committee needed to allow time for both their own listening exercise and then, after Christmas, more detailed work with the help of the Council’s partner Involve, to properly design plans for how we build the voice of residents into this system.

 

The Chair mentioned that these questions contained many statements as well as questions, so she would permit herself one longer answer, as follows:

 

As the Chair understood, any system which only considers citizens’ voices at committee meetings when decisions are due to be made – and not at any previous point – would indeed be a bit of a bolt-on. That is why the Council will continue with the plan as it has emerged over recent months, for Involve to help the Council to improve the way it involves people not just at the end-point when councillors are making decisions, but all the way along the journey from the germination of an idea through testing, refinement and development into final recommendations. The Council needed to get the committee-system part right, but the full answer to the call from residents to put their voices at the heart of the Councils’ decisions means we must also foster a much greater and wider cultural change here at the Council, amongst all officers and councillors, which may take some years to realise. Recommendations 2 and 8 committed the Council to this long-term work.

 

The Chair added that a review against the principles which the Committee have been using to guide its decisions so far will be fundamental to the six-month review which this report discusses at section 6.14, starting in November 2022. Members have been committed to this since they agreed this publicly at their meeting on 30 November 2021.

 

5.4

Ruth Hubbard

 

 

Question 1

The main report on the agenda didn’t appear until sometime on Friday and does not meet the “five clear working days” constitutional requirement for consideration at this meeting. According to the constitution the chair therefore needs to make the case for special circumstances if the report is to be taken and this needs to be minuted.  I raise this as the same thing also happened at last Governance Committee and was not addressed.  Obviously the late appearance of reports prevents proper examination and absorbing of reports by members of the public - where there is a clear public interest - and for public questions.  I have had insufficient time to absorb, think about and properly prepare my public questions for today.

 

In response to question 1, The Chair stated that it was regrettable that the papers were issued ‘to follow’ and this is not how the Council liked to do business.  The Chair had accepted officers’ apologies, and understood they took time out over the weekend to meet with Ms Hubbard, in an attempt to help. The Chair said she was moderately sympathetic to officers in this, and it may happen again, the scale of the task the Committee was attempting to complete was very challenging in the timescales available.

 

The Chair added her thanks to officers for their hard work when supporting the Committee to date.

 

The Chair explained the requirement for five clear working days’ notice, was for an item to appear on a published agenda. A report was to be made available for public inspection at the same time it was made available for members of the committee, and this report was. However, the Chair was happy to minute explicitly her judgement to proceed given the enormous urgency and degree of public interest in the issue, to say nothing of the legal deadline at the May 2022 AGM by which the constitutional detail must be agreed.

 

Question 2

 

Last Governance committee I reported a clear factual inaccuracy in the main report presented.  This was not addressed in the answer by the chair nor was the factual inaccuracy corrected.  This is misleading, please can the factual inaccuracy be corrected?

 

 

In response to question 2, The Chair stated she was  keen for the committee to focus on decisions about the future of governance arrangements, but would concede that this was arguably one of several reasons for the creation of Overview and Scrutiny. But it is not misleading to say that this was the crux of the matter. The report was also right to say that the legal requirement for the new Policy Committees to have seats on them from every Group on the Council including, the opposition is very new and important.

 

The Chair mentioned that Ms Hubbard stated in a previous question, that it was always possible to have different parties in the cabinet, but that there had been a choice locally not to do this. It was added that Ms Hubbard viewed this had contributed to a democratic deficit in Sheffield.

The Chair stood by the original report on this matter. If Ms Hubbard was saying there should have been opposition seats on the Cabinet in Sheffield, this was simply not realistic. There is a difference between something being legally possible and something being a practical possibility. Even coalitions and co-operatives do not give cabinet seats to opposition party members except in the most vanishingly rare of circumstances. This is true nationwide. In the Chair’s view it would be misleading to suggest that any council, including Sheffield City Council, would realistically have done otherwise.

Question 3

 

The main report on today’s agenda appears to have been ‘signed off’ as having no equality implications.  Yet the recognition of city inequalities and the need to take account of these and embed them in new governance arrangements is one of the central governance issues articulated strongly - and consistently reported on - from the conversations with 20k citizens across Sheffield. This issue was also echoed in the (comparatively minuscule) consultation undertaken by officers with members of the public and stakeholders. These issues are not a narrow concern and are evident elsewhere e.g. governance considerations are arguably central to the Race Equality Commission interim findings.  Yet the proposals to date have pretty much nothing to say or propose on these and for operationalising in a new constitution.  Does the committee agree that there are a whole range of equality considerations and implications for its new governance arrangements that are not identified and remain unaddressed, that this is a key weakness in work to date, and that it is necessary to address these?

 

In response to question 3, The Chair welcomed this question and commented as the transition to a committee system represented a significant opportunity to ensure that equality, diversity and inclusion were solidly embedded in its decision making and that we challenge ourselves and officers to tackle inequalities and consider the implications for all protected characteristics in the decisions made.

 

There will be a full Equality Impact Assessment presented at the Committee’s next meeting, highlighting the implications of the proposed new system and this will form part of the advice to Full Council on the final proposals.

 

Further, there was an opportunity to ensure that all the proposed Committees in the new governance system show real leadership on EDI in their ways of working – including championing the city’s Equality Objectives, ensuring that any implications and proposed mitigations for communities are fully considered and published in all decisions.

 

Question 4

 

One example - that also includes considerable equality considerations - is in arrangements for public questions.  Proposals on a citizen right to participate in this very basic way, common to almost all councils, appear to be introducing more conditionality and hoops to jump rather than making PQs more accessible. The idea of having, say, three questions and being required to attend in person at maybe three different committees (or at full council) is profoundly discriminatory as well as impractical,  An in-person requirement to attend is, alone, discriminatory - with travel costs, disability, employment, caring responsibilities, likely ongoing shielding for the most vulnerable, the nature of public speaking and much more all working against a stated commitment to participation, the exercise of citizen rights and for accountability. And any new stipulation that questions are submitted in advance in writing should at least bring a greater requirement for actual and better answers too - and this has not been particularly evident during the covid period of questions required in advance.  Will the Governance Committee rethink public question proposals in line with its stated principles?  (I make the usual offer of help with this as others would too, I am sure.)

 

In response to question 4, The Chair agreed the Committee needed to continue to consider the appropriate mechanisms for public questions at Council and Committee meetings, both in today’s paper and probably at future meetings of this committee. As the Chair had already mentioned, she thought there was more work to do on this matter.

 

The Chair stated it did seem important that questions are heard at whichever committee has the authority to make decisions on the matter, but the proposal in the report allows questioners to opt to go to Full Council if they prefer not to go to a committee. There was currently a facility for officers to read out questions if people are not able to attend, and Officers had just finished installing equipment which it was hoped was going to allow for remote attendance of the public for questions.

 

Question 5

 

In the work on design principles the Committee appeared to fail to recognise and understand that just about all the input by stakeholders and members of the public in its consultation was an attempt to enable (and require) the Committee to be clear so that clear and specific outcomes - no more and no less - would be identified, articulated, measurable, realistic, practical and so on.  But this committee decided to reduce and remove all this work and, once again, we are left with a set of principles that are bland and vague and linked to no clear, measurable and so on, outcomes by which it will call itself to account and that citizens can also be clear about.  For work going forward, and for continuous improvement, this is a problem.  Not setting clear outcomes leaves the council open and weak. It leaves great gaps and contradictions  between vague and contestable principles and their operationalisation in governance arrangements and practices. It gives the impression of more of the same, a commitment to actual change questionable, and does not serve to build confidence or trust.  At no point has the committee - unlike in almost all other council projects - established any clear targets, outcomes framework, performance indicators or similar, against which to measure its progress, and change.  

 

Will the committee ensure that a clear outcomes framework with real and measurable targets and indicators is at least provisionally outlined to take to full council and for its ongoing work monitoring and reviewing change? (There is much from the earlier small consultation work that can be used to assist this and again, as usual, we offer help.).

 

Can this include a clear articulation of areas where this committee might feel it has not yet begun or only just begun to scratch the surface, and that will need further attention?

 

In response to question 5, The Chair explained the final set of principles agreed by the Council in November 2021 were refined through engagement with stakeholders and the public. The final redraft addressed concerns from Councillors – which were absolutely echoed at the public, virtual event at which this was discussed – that the language was becoming too technical and jargony to remain meaningful for most people to make sense of, or indeed to respect.

 

The version which had been developed up to that point remains a matter of public record as it was in the papers on 30 November 2021, and as she said at the time the Committee  will be able to refer back to that when undertaking its review later this year, but the version in appendix 2 of today’s report remains the final, agreed version.

 

The Chair agreed that, when the review is carried out later this year, the Council should be clear about what qualitative and quantitative evidence it was able to present against each design principle. The Chair also thought it was not a bad idea to put in the committee’s next report, a section about the next steps for continued development after May 2022.

 

Question 6

 

One of the areas of inconsistency and contradiction is in stated commitments to meaningful collaboration, participation and influence - even a mention of co-design - and the work of this committee, where the processes followed and the tangible proposals have not reflected that stated commitment.  As yet I see no key changes that have actually operationalised any of the key items that citizens and communities have presented consistently over the last two years in respect of core governance system change.  Will the governance committee, in working forward, at least now model some of its stated aspirations and see the job of monitoring governance change as a joint venture?  I do not mean more of the same with heavily managed, extractive, pretty standard ‘consultations’ that are not trusted by participants nor seen to be taken on board by the council.  I am proposing, once again, proper arrangements for a genuine joint venture in monitoring and reviewing ongoing governance change and that can actually demonstrate the council's stated commitment in its actual practice.

 

 

In response to question 6, The Chair did not agree with Ms Hubbard’s main point – instead saying it had been evident to her that the listening the Committee had been doing had influenced its decisions throughout. The Chair referred back to an earlier question discussing how the design principles which will be key in a concrete way to the review process, were heavily shaped by the public and stakeholders, and gave as another example the list of ideas in the ‘toolkit’ which had come directly from discussions with real people over the past months and years.

 

The report explicitly states that the Council will “actively seek and use feedback from residents, stakeholders, councillors and officers”. This is not buried in the detail of the report, it is in one of the two main recommendations at the top of this report.

 

The Chair repeated that the Committee was not yet finished designing this system – Involve was yet to report back next month and the Council plan to work with them well beyond that initial report too.

 

The Chair thanked Ms Hubbard for her careful consideration of these reports and her detailed questions. The Chair added the Committee will continue to listen to It’s Our City and to work with Ms Hubbard and Mr Newall over the coming months and years, and that her continued challenge to the Council is always welcome in Sheffield’s vibrant democratic environment. The Chair was confident that the committee system which the Council was working their way towards designing, was informed directly by the public and stakeholders, and this report sets out, in good faith, the Council’s intention to keep continuously improving by doing so over the coming months and years.