A decision has been made on which eight policy 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 eight committees, with the details now decided.
The eight committees will be responsible for making major decisions about how the city’s public services are run, with implications from everything to climate action, flood defences and fostering. Each committee will likely have nine councillors from different parties.
The details of what the committees will be called and what they will be responsible for were voted on by the committee model working group. Questions still remain however about how much powers will be spread out away from City Hall and across the city.
Read more: Rehab centre in East Bristol set to close with 25 jobs affected
A children and young people committee will focus on children’s social care, fostering and adoption, supporting families, youth services, pre-school, safeguarding children, schools and education, and domestic violence and abuse.
An economy and skills committee will focus on planning and development, emergency preparations, floods, and apprenticeships and training. An environment and sustainability committee will focus on climate, ecology, waste and recycling, energy, heat networks and City Leap, and air pollution.
A public health and communities committee will focus on events and carnivals, parks and green spaces, libraries, volunteering and community initiatives, democratic engagement, drugs and alcohol services, sports, and obesity.
A housing committee will focus on getting new homes built, major housing developments, social housing and council housing, homelessness, student accommodation, and renters. A health and adult social care committee will focus on caring for the elderly and disabled and adult safeguarding, which forms a huge and increasing part of the council’s budget.
A transport committee will focus on transport policy, transport maintenance, major transport projects, and the harbour. A strategy and resources committee will focus on finance and budgets, culture, and external relations, for example with the government.
Last month the working group decided to have seven policy committees run the council, based on the seven themes of the corporate plan, an overarching document setting out how the council plans to improve public services in Bristol. But current cabinet members raised concerns that this would miss out on public health, and so an eighth committee was added.
Labour councillor Nicola Beech, cabinet member for strategic planning, resilience and floods, said: “From speaking to cabinet members to try and gauge their reflections on how their powers work in practice, they made some really pragmatic suggestions. If we want public health to sit throughout this organisation, [an eighth committee] is a good thing to do.”
Next month the working group will discuss how power might be spread out across Bristol, with some concerns that too much decision making is centralised in City Hall. One option is creating new area committees, which would give local neighbourhoods the powers to make decisions about their own parts of the city. But this might not be brought in until 2025.
Conservative Cllr Geoff Gollop said: “We cannot go into the details of local decision making while we’re trying to totally revamp the way the council works. That has to be a year later. I can see disaster happening if we try and do the two together. We have to get this bit right first.”
