Cheshire East to look into officer decision making process and reports
Cheshire East is to look into how it delegates decision-making to officers and how those decisions are reported, following complaints from members of the public and some councillors.
The matter came to a head recently when the controversial decision to close Middlewich Leisure Centre was made by officers under delegated authority.
Some councillors questioned whether officers had the authority to make the closure decision.
Their anger, and that of the public, was compounded by the fact the officer decision record (ODR) was not published, as is legally required, due to an administrative error.
Cllr Chris O'Leary (Sutton, Conservative), attended Thursday's (May 29) meeting of the audit and governance committee at Macclesfield Town Hall as a visiting member, intending to ask that concerns about committee delegations to officers be looked into and reported back.
But committee chair Michael Beanland (Poynton, Conservative), had already asked for details about the report into the ODRs.
Acting monitoring officer Janet Witkowsi told the meeting a number of recommendations had come forward from the corporate peer challenge including looking at decision-making reports and report writing generally.
A review of this was now underway.
She added: "But sitting alongside that, what I said is we need to also obviously do a complete review of the officer decision record, the ODR process, but for me, there was no point in doing that full review until we have the outcome from the audit."
She said once that overall report had been received, 'we will then start a process where we look at and review how officers are making decisions, how they're doing them through both delegated authority from within the constitution, but also delegated authority from committees'.
She continued: "Issues around making sure that it is published, and we have some additional checks and balances on ensuring those are published, that they're all properly recorded in the same place, in the same way, we've got sufficient information on there."
She said it was important the published ODRs were written in a way that members of the public, as well as councillors, could understand the reports and the process.
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