A decision has almost been made on which seven committees will run Bristol City Council after May next year. Following the next local elections, the council will switch from being run by a directly elected mayor to a series of seven committees, with details still being decided.
A working group of councillors, responsible for designing how the council will be run, has voted to set up seven policy committees. But exactly what policy areas these seven committees will focus on is still unclear.
The group met on Friday, March 31, and were given three suggested models on how to set up the structure of the committees. These were four committees, seven or nine. The group chose seven, but left the details of what they will do up to council staff to consider in detail.
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Green Councillor Jenny Bartle, chair of the working group, said: “It’s finally the committees committee meeting about committees.”
The three models were based on: the current portfolios of the nine cabinet members including the mayor; the four directorates which council staff are organised into; and the seven themes within the council’s corporate strategy, a key document setting out how the council plans to improve public services in the city.
As well as the seven policy committees, several regulatory committees would continue similarly to how they currently operate. These would cover development control, licensing, human resources, public rights of way, and public safety. These play a legal role in areas such as granting planning permission for developments or premises licences for pubs and clubs.
Labour Cllr Marley Bennett said: “You want these committees to have a wide enough focus that they can look thematically at issues. My concern is that if we chose the proposal based on the cabinet portfolios, you would end up with too many committees so councillors would have too many meetings, and that would take away from the quality of input into policy development.
“In addition we should have a policy and resources committee, strategically looking wider than any one individual committee, which could also make decisions about resources and budgeting.”
Green Cllr Heather Mack added: “The corporate themes are adapting and changing depending on what we judge the needs of the city are. And they’ll change so I think the committees should be changing. I also think they’ll change as the political makeup of the council changes because different political values will have different ideas about problems.
“People might have more of a push on economic growth, and others might have more of a push on public health and communities. That is something that will shift as the politics of the council shifts. It’s likely the committees will get changed up every four years or every eight years.”
Most of the working group voted to base the committee structure on the council’s seven themes in the corporate strategy, while two councillors voted to base the structure on the current nine cabinet portfolios. But the whole group agreed that the committees needed to be flexible and avoid encouraging a “silo mentality” in the council.
Previously the council suffered with different departments not communicating well with each other, and still now some people complain that they have to talk to several different council officers from various departments to resolve problems. But the current Labour administration has made improvements in this area, according to Green Cllr Guy Poultney.
He said: “I have to admit that, for all our disagreements, I give the current administration quite a lot of credit for breaking down the silos, because that was something identified as a problem back in 2009. That’s a cultural direction of travel that’s been really challenging for the council and every administration since then has done a really good job of doing that.
“It would be a terrible shame if the committees then re-entrenched that silo mentality. Whichever structure we choose to base the committee system on, the flexibility and collaboration and cross-working is more important than whatever that choice might be.”
One example of cross-department working is public health. Labour Cllr Ellie King, cabinet member for public health and communities, said her work covered many different parts of the council, and she raised concerns about this being lost in a future health policy committee.
She said: “The point of my brief is to feed into most other portfolios. It’s designed to overlap, and if it doesn’t then it’s not doing its job. I’m fearful of public health being submerged into health and not kept separate, because it’s very different. Health and adult social care is a huge brief, it’s the majority of our budget, it’s an enormous responsibility — but it’s not the same as public health, that prevention work, looking at health inequalities.
“I have joint briefings with transport, with housing, with the Local Plan, because you need that feeding in. It’s the point of public health to stick its nose in everyone else’s brief. That’s the value of it. If we lose that, then that preventative work will get lost with adult social care, because that’s enormous and it needs its own dedicated committee in my view.”
The working group could not decide on what areas the seven committees should focus on, disagreeing on various points. In the end, the group chose to leave the details up to Tim O’Gara, head of legal, and Lucy Fleming, head of democratic engagement, who will come back later in the year with a proposed structure of what the seven committees could look like.
Conservative Cllr Geoff Gollop said: “Trying to allocate this now is a recipe for interesting outcomes that might not be what any of us intended. I think it’s something that is better done calmly by those who can think it through rationally, rather than by us.”
The seven committees would likely cover strategy and resources; children and education; economy and skills; environment and energy; health, care and wellbeing; homes and communities; and transport. Each committee would likely have nine seats, spread evenly across political parties to reflect the wider political balance in the council, and they could meet about eight to 10 times a year.
Most of the working group meeting was held in a cordial and jokey manner, apart from a brief row at the start when two Green councillors — who are not on the working group, but asked questions at the beginning of the meeting — were accused of “grandstanding” by Labour. Half an hour is set aside at the start of each meeting for members of the public to ask questions or make statements, known as ‘public forum’.
Green Cllr David Wilcox asked about how the committee-run council will scrutinise transport policy set by the West of England Combined Authority. Partnership working such as this is scheduled to be discussed by the working group later in the year.
Labour Cllr Steve Pearce said: “This is a public forum and elected members have plenty of other avenues with which to pursue these questions. Merely taking advantage of the opportunity of asking a question, because it’s known that a member of the press it present, could be characterised as grandstanding for the public. I, however, will not make such an accusation.”
Then Green Cllr Martin Fodor also began to ask a question, before Cllr Pearce said: “Is this a councillor question or a public question? Why is he sitting on the same table as councillors?”
