A survey of council websites to find out how well they promoted the county council elections produced a disappointing result. The survey was carried out by the Society of IT Management. The key questions the survey set out to answer was whether the election figured prominently on the home page, was it possible to find a list of councillors by ward, were procedures for postal voting clearly described and how the results will be published.Only four counties were rated as very good. Cumbria and Wiltshire did best of all with 8 questions answered, followed closely by Norfolk with 7 questions and Lincolnshire 6 questions. Another five counties were rated as satisfactory. Five councils had no information and another 20 were rated as poor.

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The new government must think seriously about a coherent strategy for effective public scrutiny at national, regional and local levels, in order to ensure increasingly complex mechanisms for modern multi-level governance deliver genuine results. A paper published by the Centre for Public Scrutiny argues that today’s governance arrangements, characterised by a complex network of relationships between different tiers of government, are not currently complemented by a coherent system of accountability and scrutiny. It highlights the overlaps and gaps in the relationships between local councils and the centre, between the centre and the region, between regions and the council, between neighbourhoods and town halls and between parishes, districts and counties. There are also more generally difficulties between the national regional and local arms of other service deliverers.The paper visualises a situation where lower tiers of governance scrutinise higher tiers. A local, neighbourhood council may want to scrutinise how the main council executive is planning things and make sure they are taking into account local circumstances and preferences. As part of the local government overview & scrutiny function, the role of backbench ward councillors could be increasingly interpreted as being ‘locality’ scrutineers, challenging all those executive authorities responsible for services in an area and not just the executive of the council.

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