Focusing on What Matters – Planning the Year Ahead

 Yesterday scrutiny councillors took part in their second annual work planning conference.

As with last year’s event, the aim was to prioritise a small number of topics for in depth work.  The key is get the maximum impact by focusing on the issues where scrutiny can make the biggest difference.  This means finding those areas that have widest strategic significance where there is also a reason to be concerned.  The four topics prioritised last year have all been translated into in depth pieces of work that will shortly be making their recommendations to Cabinet.

The conference looked at a shortlist of 20 topics.  This had been compiled from suggestions that came from councillors, council officers, partners agencies and of course the public.  Specifically we have used a recent Swansea Voices Survey to generate a list of public ‘hot topics’ – the top three being road maintenance, streetscene and transport. 

You can see that public concerns are very much in councillors’ minds when making their own suggestions for topics – the scrutiny process is a chance for councillors to translate some of the issues that get repeated in their surgeries and on the doorstep into council wide pieces of work.

After a short presentation councillors debated the different topics in small groups before some dot voting .  We are just collating the results of the group work and the dot voting at the moment and this will go to the Scrutiny programme Committee in a couple of weeks.  Their job will then be to finalise the work programme and decide how each price of work will be carried out.

 Watch this space! 

Here is the full presentation: