The Monitoring Officer - changing approaches for a new decade?

Agility and speed of movement are qualities that both Monitoring Officers and their organisation will need to cultivate, writes Miranda Carruthers-Watt.

This year, I will be moving on from full-time work to a more portfolio-based approach as I change the pace at which I work. As part of the team recruiting the new Monitoring Officer for my organisation I've been thinking about the role of the Monitoring Officer in this new decade. Traditionally the Monitoring Officer is the guardian of the lawfulness of decision making, ensuring that the authority and its members and officers adhere to high standards of behaviour and conduct.

Local government has been through a complex decade since 2010, austerity has driven the agenda and this has had some surprising results. Organisations have become more, not less, confident of the need to ensure that there is a true localism, that there are clear priorities driving local outcomes. Innovation and transformation have been deployed to make sure that scarce resources are truly targeted to achieve these outcomes. In some cases we have seen a move away from the creeping paternalism of large organisations to a more inclusive, co-operative and co-design approach to service provision and delivery. We are beginning to work with technology and AI and, as well as using Bots to deal with routine issues and transactional improvements, we are applying this to democratic processes of meetings and decision making. In Wales, ministers are publishing plans to ensure that meetings and decisions can be handled in a way that acknowledges our technological capabilities rather than the outdated rules around physical attendance at a single location. We have more joint working with integrated services and most organisations now have two or more bodies responsible for agreeing spending priorities and decisions which impact across organisational and geographical boundaries. Social media has transformed the way that councillors and organisations interact with the public and with each other - the lines between public and private space are now blurred.

Commercial focus in local government has been a response to the decade of austerity with councils looking with new confidence at how they can use the powers and resources they have to the advantage of their citizens. This is driven from both ends of the political spectrum with an emphasis on new mutualism in some areas and on commercial profits in others. This can mean a change of emphasis for Monitoring Officers - and the ability to span the gulf commercial confidence and good governance may need an almost acrobatic leap. The relationship between the three statutory officers - the "Golden Triangle" - becomes even more important at that stage. An effective, strong and challenging working relationship between the Monitoring Officer, the S151 Officer and the Chief Executive is essential to make sure that governance doesn't get lost in the rush to the new. Clear and accurate financial forecasting will be an integral part of new areas of commercial interest and an emphasis on good business cases with clear benefits for local areas will go a long way to dispel criticism attracted already by some local authorities as the increasing use of PWLB to drive commercial property investments becomes standard for many organisations.

It would be naive to ignore the potential conflict between good public outcomes and good commercial outcomes and equally naive not to insist on effective due diligence, and a clear need for financial literacy for senior leaders. Risk, both financial, reputational and political will remain a major concern in this new commercial world. Monitoring Officers are likely to find that their organisations increasingly need to operate through vehicles designed for commercial activity and in addition to the traditional areas of local government law there is a greater need to understand, and operate in, the world of corporate legal and regulatory requirements and the litigation that flows from them. As well as the need for emotional intelligence and integrity, an increasingly complex political and financial landscape means that agility and speed of movement are qualities that both Monitoring Officers and their organisation will need to cultivate. Whilst all the best quotes about success have their roots in daring to fail, that is not always an option in a political arena. C.S Lewis's quote that “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement” is unlikely to cut it at the Ballot Box so the pressure on Monitoring Officers and their Golden Triangle colleagues to be a combination of Mystic Meg and Cicero looks set to continue!

Miranda Carruthers-Watt is City Solicitor at Salford City Council. She can be contacted This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..