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ITEM CC10

COUNTY COUNCIL – 9 SEPTEMBER 2003

MEETING DATES 2004/2005

Report by Assistant Chief Executive & Monitoring Officer

Introduction

1. The draft schedule of proposed dates for meetings in the 2004/2005 Council Year is set out in Annex 1.(download as .xls file). The proposed dates have been the subject of consultation with all members of the Council and the County Council Management Team. The draft schedule has also been considered by the Scrutiny Co-ordinating Group. Comments made in response are noted in the report. Subject thereto the proposed dates are commended to the Council for adoption, so that production of the official Council diary can go ahead and other practical arrangements made for the booking of accommodation, etc.
2. The report also sets out some minor consequential adjustments, mainly affecting meetings of the Executive, in the latter part of the current Council year.

Specific Points for 2004/005

3. The proposed dates seek to give effect to the various rules set out in the Constitution, and generally follow the pattern established over the first two years of the Council’s new structure. There are some particular points to note:

1. The Council meeting dates are as fixed by the Council Procedure Rules, subject to two exceptions which will require minor amendment of the Rules:

• The February (budget) meeting in 2005 is shown on the second Tuesday of that month, reflecting the adjustment implemented this year (and already proposed for 2004 in the Executive’s 29 April Maximising our Resources report) to allow for the timing of the Local Government Finance Settlement.
• An ordinary meeting of the Council will take place on the first Tuesday in April 2005 – this reflects the pattern in previous years but is not at present provided for in an election year in the Procedure Rules.

b. The Executive is shown as meeting on the first and third Tuesday of the month (instead of every alternate week). As at present, if there is a conflict with a full Council meeting date, the Executive will meet on the morning of the following day. It is proposed that this should also be reflected in a minor amendment of the relevant Rules.

c. There are six scheduled meetings through the year for each scrutiny committee. These are organised in cycles running between meetings of the full Council, so as to facilitate scrutiny consideration of any matter requiring reference to a particular Council meeting (mainly, Budget and Policy Framework items.) An attempt has been made to even out these cycles but a degree of bunching cannot be avoided.

d. Council committees are arranged evenly throughout the year according to their respective established frequencies.

4. Few comments have been received on the draft timetable. The Scrutiny Co-ordinating Group made the suggestion that the Chairs and Deputy Chairs of the Scrutiny Committees should be expressly consulted on the pattern of proposed dates for their Committees’ meetings in future years, and this will be written into the procedure so that any comments on their part can be taken into account at a formative stage in the process.
5. A specific suggestion has been made by one member that one of the Executive meetings shown on 21 December 2004 and 4 January 2005 should be deleted as the intervention of Christmas and the New Year mean that there is effectively much less than a fortnight’s gap between them. This option is of course open to the Executive, but officers suggest that it would be prudent to retain both dates in the timetable against the possibility that both will be needed.

Minor Adjustments in 2003/04

6. As well as the revised Council meeting date in February 2004 referred to in 3(a) above, the Executive’s 29 April Maximising our Resources report proposed:

• an additional meeting of the Corporate Governance Scrutiny Committee in January to enable it to give an overall view of the Executive’s budget proposals following the respective Scrutiny Committees’ consideration of the proposals for specific budget areas in November/December; and
• consequential adjustments in the pattern of Executive meetings in January designed to enable the Executive to finalise the budget proposals for submission to the Council, taking into account all the Scrutiny Committee comments.

	Current	Proposed
Executive	6 January 2004	14 January 2004 (2 pm)
Corporate Governance	-	20 January 2004 (10 am)
Executive	20 January 2004	27 January 2004 (2 pm)
Council	3 February 2004	10 February 2004 (10.30 am)
Executive	30 March 2004	Cancelled

7. The Council is RECOMMENDED to:

C J IMPEY
Assistant Chief Executive & Monitoring Officer

Background Papers: Nil

Contact Officer: Dan Lack, Tel: Oxford 810169

August 2003

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