• READING the letter (Scrutiny is essential for local democracy, March 11), one could be under the impression that in the last 12 months all scrutiny activities and scrutiny committee meetings have been suspended.

Despite the global pandemic, the secondment of council officers to the emergency response, and the difficulties of having meetings online (that requires more officers to attend and deal with the technical issues of broadcasting the meeting), resources and corporate performances scrutiny committee met five times, housing scrutiny committee met five times, culture & environment scrutiny committee met four times, children school & families scrutiny committee met three times, health & adult social care scrutiny committee met twice, and the special Covid oversight panel (set up with the same powers of a scrutiny committee to look at the decision made by cabinet in response to the pandemic) met 11 times.

These are 30 meetings in total, the same number of regular meetings that scrutiny committees have in a 12-month period (six meetings each for five committees).

Indeed they met with a reduced agenda and a limited number of papers, given that many officers were deployed to the emergency response in Camden and across London.

Nonetheless committee chairs could ask for additional papers whenever a meeting was scheduled (at the last resource committee we discussed the Community Investment Programme annual report) and individual councillors had the opportunity to call-in decisions (and they did it).

This is far more than other councils, that in the letter are described as having restarted regular meetings, while – like Westminster – they only have a single item on the agenda: the verbal report from the relevant cabinet member.

It was difficult to find a balance between the response to the emergency and the normal work of the council, but we did manage to maintain the vital function of scrutiny and all the democratic functions of the council (including planning, licensing and audit) despite the enormous pressures on our staff. And we all must be grateful to officers for their excellent work in these difficult circumstances.

Like for the 1 per cent rise for NHS workers, the Tories (but in this case also the Lib Dems, the Greens and one loose councillor from Somers Town, who did not sign the letter on behalf of the Labour group), on one hand are publicly praising the work of officers, while on the other they are undermining the vital work that they are doing.

Asking for the CIP scrutiny panel and for other scrutiny committees to restart meeting regularly means that the council should call back the 30 officers that are at the moment deployed to the economic department to support the grant scheme for our local businesses, in order for them to prepare the papers necessary for those committees.

As much as I agree that scrutiny is important for our democracy, I believe with the ancient saying, that “primum vivere, deinde philosophari”: it would be short-sighted and extremely dangerous, in order to have an additional meeting of a scrutiny committee, to stop the vital work of officers who are supporting our communities affected by the pandemic, setting up vaccination centres, deploying test-and-trace.

CLLR LAZZARO PIETRAGNOLI
Labour Chief Whip