Yesterday the Overview & Scrutiny Business Committee had a presentation from Rhian Foote who is the Consultation Coordinator for the Council.
The presentation, which you can see below, had a couple of purposes. First, the Committee had raised a few questions about Swansea Voices, the Council’s Citizen’s Panel and these were answered very ably. Second, it was a chance to engage with councillors on the emerging consultation and engagement strategy for the Council.
There are some really interesting discussions taking place about what the priorities should be and the best role for a corporate resource given the many activities being undertaken by Council departments as part of their day jobs.
The Committee were keen to explore whether consultation and engagement was able to reach to everyone and in particular whether the Council was able to get feedback from students, young people in general and visitors.
Significantly, the councillors wanted to see if there were better ways of linking overview and scrutiny with other consultation and engagement activity in the Council. In these straightened financial times it is clearly more important than ever that we are joining everything up as much as we can and getting the maximum value from everything we do. Whilst overview & scrutiny councillors already work closely with Swansea Voices to gather evidence for reviews and to pick up public issues and concerns, it was felt that more could be done. To this end the Committee agreed that all of the boards and committees should take a look at all of the consultation and engagement mechanisms relevant to their work to see if they could get extra benefit from them.
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