Scrutiny Without the Minutes: Bring Your Own Accountability

If you enjoy live political theatre, the Safer Neighbourhoods & Active Communities Scrutiny Board meets this Thursday at 6pm.
You can watch it live here:
👉 https://civico.net/sandwell/23298-Safer-Neighbourhoods-and-Active-Communities-Scrutiny-Board

Popcorn optional.
Context not provided.

Because you know you’re in for a strong night of scrutiny when the agenda asks councillors to approve minutes they haven’t been given.

Welcome to Sandwell, where transparency is very much a concept rather than a document.

🪑 Schrödinger’s Minutes: Both Passed and Unseen

Let’s start with the basics.

Minutes are meant to be:

• the public record
• the accountability trail
• the thing residents read to understand what was asked, challenged, or quietly avoided

So asking members to confirm minutes that haven’t been published is… ambitious.

The minutes of the previous meeting are:

• not in the agenda pack
• not embedded
• not available to the public

Yet they sit there confidently, waiting to be approved.

Apparently, scrutiny now operates on a “trust us, it happened” model.

Which is efficient, I suppose — if your aim is to minimise scrutiny.

🏘️ The New Neighbourhood Working Model: One Year On, No Risks Found

The headline item of the night is the New Neighbourhood Working Model – One Year On.

This is the framework that decides:

• how communities are “engaged”
• which priorities get traction
• how funding flows through wards and towns
• and, quietly, who counts

We’re told engagement is now:

• more targeted
• more purposeful
• more community-led

All very reassuring — until you notice what’s missing.

There’s no data on:

• how many unique residents were engaged
• how many were the same people turning up again
• whether engagement widened at all

But don’t worry. The report confidently assures us there are “no specific risks”.

None.
Zero.
Apparently, redesigning engagement structures, funding routes and decision-making at ward level is a completely risk-free activity.

Who knew?

🗺️ Ward Profiles: Maps That Decide Who Exists

A central feature of the new model is Ward Profiles.

They list:

• community organisations
• local assets
• local priorities

Which sounds harmless — until you remember that:

• what gets listed gets noticed
• what isn’t listed quietly disappears

There’s no explanation of:

• who decides what goes on the profile
• how errors are corrected
• how exclusions are challenged

So while this isn’t officially an “asset map”, it walks like one, quacks like one, and will almost certainly be treated like one.

Friends Groups — volunteer-run, independent, occasionally inconvenient — should be paying close attention.

Because invisibility by spreadsheet is still exclusion.

🤝 The Voluntary Sector: Not Familiar Faces, Unanswered Questions

This is usually the point where critics get accused of “always naming the same organisations”.

So let’s be precise.

Yes, Sandwell relies on a very small pool of organisations for engagement and consultation.
And yes, wider engagement has been shown — repeatedly — to be poor.

But the reason certain organisations keep being mentioned isn’t familiarity.

It’s because there are serious, unresolved governance and scrutiny concerns that haven’t magically disappeared.

Sandwell Consortium.
BWA.
CBO.
Let’s Dance Again.

These are organisations that:

• occupy influential positions in engagement and delivery
• are treated as conduits for “community voice”
• and raise legitimate questions around governance, transparency, safeguarding and accountability

This isn’t an attack on the voluntary sector.
It’s what scrutiny is meant to do.

Especially when engagement is already narrow, who gets amplified matters even more.

Communities aren’t monoliths.
And scrutiny shouldn’t pretend they are.

🌳 Friends Groups: Still Here, Still Inconvenient

Friends Groups continue to:

• look after parks and green spaces
• raise wildlife welfare concerns
• question byelaws and policies
• turn up when things get uncomfortable

They don’t have comms teams.
They don’t tick neat boxes.
They don’t always clap at the right moments.

Which makes them invaluable.

Any engagement model that slowly sidelines Friends Groups in favour of “preferred partners” isn’t building cohesion — it’s dismantling local accountability.

🏛️ Heritage, Archives, and the Magical Volunteer Calculator

The Heritage Assets and Archives report introduces another classic feature of modern governance:
The unexplained volunteer contribution.

We’re told volunteers contributed £28,500.

How was that calculated?
Hours? Rates? Guesswork? A strong feeling?

No explanation is offered.

Meanwhile, we’re told a future archive facility could cost £20 million, despite comparable councils delivering similar facilities for a fraction of that.

Either Sandwell’s archives are:

• exceptionally large
• exceptionally special
• or heading for an exceptionally expensive feasibility study

Time — and consultants — will tell.

📋 Scrutiny Work Programme: Curated, Not Challenging

The Scrutiny Work Programme was shaped through engagement events involving senior officers, executive members and partners.

Which is… an interesting way to ensure independent scrutiny.

Consultation relied heavily on:

• social media
• internal channels

So if you don’t already know how the system works, you’re unlikely to shape what scrutiny looks at.

Scrutiny, it seems, is something you’re invited into — not something you naturally participate in.

🔒 Close the Doors, Lower the Lights

After restricting public participation and failing to publish minutes, the agenda proposes excluding the public and press for the final item.

Which is legally permissible, of course.

But when exclusion follows exclusion, transparency starts to feel less like a principle and more like an inconvenience.

🪑 Final Thought

Scrutiny without minutes.
Engagement without evidence.
Risk-free reforms.
Asset maps that aren’t called asset maps.

You can manage a meeting.
You can curate participation.
You can approve minutes nobody’s seen.

But you can’t build trust like that.

And once trust is gone, no amount of neighbourhood branding will bring it back.

#Sandwell #SNAC #Scrutiny #LocalDemocracy #CommunityEngagement #Governance #FriendsGroups #Transparency #VoluntarySector #Accountability