16/09/2026
Conservative Administration Marks Own Homework!
👀FULL COUNCIL UPDATE – ITEM 11: WHO SCRUTINISES THE ADMINISTRATION?👀
Liberal Democrat councillors voted to note Buckinghamshire Council’s Scrutiny Annual Report for 2025–2026, while raising serious concerns about the politicisation of the scrutiny system.
The report describes scrutiny as “independent”, “cross-party” and “apolitical”. Although the committees include members from different parties, their leadership tells a different story.
When the Conservatives secured a majority of just one councillor, they replaced the existing select committee chairs and installed Conservative chairs across every scrutiny committee.
As Cllr Susan Morgan told Full Council, this allows Conservative scrutiny chairs to “mark the homework” of their own Conservative Cabinet Members.
The former chairs shown in the annual report led the committees for most of the year covered. Their photographs and work appear throughout the document, yet they had no influence over its final content after being removed from their positions.
Cllr Niknam Hussain, drawing on 23 years’ experience as an elected councillor, challenged the claim that the present arrangements are apolitical. Every single scrutiny chair is now drawn from the Conservative administration’s political group. That is not the approach taken by many other councils, where opposition councillors chair some scrutiny committees. It is also not how parliamentary scrutiny is generally expected to operate.
Cllr Niknam Hussain praised the hard work undertaken by committee members and officers. However, meetings containing councillors from several parties do not automatically deliver genuinely independent scrutiny when every chair is controlled by the administration.
Our concerns were supported by Buckinghamshire’s other opposition parties.
Cllr Jonathan Waters thanked members of the Growth, Infrastructure and Housing Select Committee for working constructively across a very broad range of subjects and for continuing to challenge and question where possible.
He also highlighted the underlying constitutional problem: Buckinghamshire’s current rules allow one political group to take every scrutiny chair, including when that group forms the administration being scrutinised.
We voted to note the report because it accurately records a great deal of valuable work by committee members and officers. But noting that work does not mean accepting that the current arrangements provide the independent, cross-party scrutiny described in the report.
Good scrutiny should challenge decisions, test evidence and give residents confidence that those in power are being held properly accountable. It should never be treated as an extension of the administration.
We will continue calling for scrutiny arrangements that distribute leadership more fairly and give opposition councillors a genuine role in holding the Conservative administration to account.
