Scrutiny Update: Still Listening (Just Not to You)
Since my last blog on the Safer Neighbourhoods & Active Communities Scrutiny Board, a few things have happened.
None of them improve scrutiny.
All of them make it quieter.
🌧️ Weather Warning: Democracy Rescheduled (Public Voice Optional)
The original meeting was cancelled due to poor weather. Fair enough.
Ice is dangerous. Councillors slipping would be unfortunate.
But when the meeting was rescheduled, something else quietly disappeared.
The public voice.
I asked — politely — whether the Chair would use his discretion to allow public participation, particularly given that several agenda items directly overlap with work I (and others) have been deeply involved in.
The response was clear.
No public questions.
No questions via the Chair.
No real-time challenge at all.
Apparently, engagement is something the Council does around scrutiny — not something it tolerates during it.
🎭 Engagement, But Please Don’t Interrupt the Performance
This is where things start to feel a little theatrical.
The agenda is packed with:
- engagement strategies
- community reviews
- co-production language
- partnership rhetoric
And yet, when an actual member of the public asks to speak?
Curtain down.
House lights off.
Audience politely ushered out.
Engagement is clearly encouraged — just not the kind that might ask an awkward follow-up.
🗺️ Community Asset Mapping: Because Someone Has to Decide Who Counts
Since the last blog, it’s become even clearer that Community Asset Mapping isn’t a neutral technical exercise.
Maps don’t just describe reality.
They define it.
If you’re on the map:
- you’re visible
- you’re consulted
- you’re “a partner”
If you’re not:
- you’re informal
- you’re inconvenient
- you’re apparently not an asset
Friends Groups — volunteer-led, independent, occasionally critical — should probably be asking who decides what qualifies as “community value” and whether dissent comes with an expiry date.
Because invisibility by process is still exclusion.
🏘️ Housing, Trust, and the Strategy That Keeps Pretending
Another thing that hasn’t changed since the last blog:
You still cannot rebuild trust with engagement strategies while people are living in unsafe homes.
No number of surveys fixes a broken boiler.
No workshop repairs unsafe electrics.
No infographic replaces basic compliance.
Tenants don’t want to be engaged.
They want their homes fixed.
Scrutiny should be brave enough to say that out loud.
🤔 A Slightly Awkward Question About Scrutiny Independence
Here’s something that’s becoming harder to ignore.
Some members sitting on scrutiny panels are also employed by local MPs’ offices.
That may be entirely legitimate.
But it raises a basic governance question that nobody seems keen to ask:
Should there be declarations of interest?
Scrutiny exists to challenge power — not orbit it.
Declarations aren’t accusations.
They’re transparency.
And when public confidence is already fragile, choosing not to acknowledge potential conflicts isn’t neutral. It’s a decision.
🤝 The Voluntary Sector: Not “The Same Names” — The Same Unanswered Questions
Let’s be clear about something, because this is often deliberately blurred.
Yes, it’s true that the same small cluster of organisations keeps appearing across consultations, engagement exercises and delivery work.
And yes, wider engagement remains demonstrably poor — something the Council’s own reports have acknowledged time and again.
But the organisations named here are not being mentioned simply because they’re familiar faces.
They are being referenced because there are serious, unresolved governance and scrutiny concerns that cannot be brushed aside with warm words about partnership working.
Sandwell Consortium.
BWA.
CBO.
Let’s Dance Again.
These aren’t casual examples. They are organisations that:
- occupy influential positions within engagement and delivery frameworks
- are repeatedly relied upon as intermediaries or representative voices
- and, critically, raise legitimate questions around governance, transparency, safeguarding, mandate, and accountability
This is not about bad faith.
And it is certainly not about attacking the voluntary sector.
It is about scrutiny doing its job.
When organisations with unresolved governance concerns continue to be positioned as trusted conduits for community voice, scrutiny has a duty to pause and ask:
- what assurance has actually been obtained
- what risks are being managed
- and why challenge seems to evaporate once certain names are mentioned
The wider engagement failure — the fact that many voices never make it into the room at all — only makes this more serious, not less.
Because when engagement is already narrow, who gets amplified matters even more.
Communities are not monoliths.
They don’t speak with one voice.
And scrutiny should never pretend that they do.
🌳 Friends Groups: Still Turning Up, Still Uncomfortable
Friends Groups continue to do what they’ve always done:
- look after parks and green spaces
- raise wildlife welfare concerns
- question byelaws and policies
- ask awkward questions
They don’t have comms teams.
They don’t tick neat boxes.
They don’t always clap at the right moments.
Which is precisely why they matter.
Any system that filters out challenge in the name of cohesion isn’t creating harmony — it’s storing up bigger problems for later.
🪑 Final Thought (Because Apparently We Need One)
Scrutiny doesn’t work if:
- the public can’t speak
- challenge is choreographed
- independence is assumed rather than declared
- and engagement only flows one way
You can manage a meeting.
You can curate participation.
You can polish the narrative.
But you can’t build trust that way.
And once trust is gone, no amount of asset mapping will help you find it again.
#Sandwell #SNAC #Scrutiny #PublicVoice #CommunityEngagement #Governance #FriendsGroups #Transparency #HousingCrisis #VoluntarySector #Accountability #LocalDemocracy
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