Running the council - your role

If Labour is running the council, Labour councillors will have a range of potential roles:

• be appointed as a member of the executive or cabinet, by the Labour Mayor, Leader or Labour Group, depending on the council's constitution.
  
  
• be a member of an overview and scrutiny committee whose responsibilities are to hold the council officers and executive and other agencies to account for the services they provide and to review policy and performance to ensure it improves for the benefit of the local community.
  
  
• be a chair of an overview and scrutiny committee - although it is good practice that where Labour has a majority and runs the executive, minority parties should be given at least some of the scrutiny chairs, to support the independence of this role.
  
  
• be a member or chair of one of the regulatory committees - the planning and development control committee, licensing committee, pensions committee or any appeals committees or panels, for example with responsibility for fostering and adoption, school places appeals etc. These are important quasi-judicial committees governed by specific rules and laws and making crucial decisions on individual cases or developments. Since they should not operate according to party political lines, it should not make a difference whether Labour has a majority or not.
  
  
• be a member or chair of a local neighbourhood or area committee or assembly if your council has such bodies. These forums are usually made up of councillors from that particular locality and may have responsibility for local decisions and some budgets eg for local environmental schemes, parks and community issues. 

Their role is to provide a local forum and seek to involve the local community in decisions on local issues and services. Sometimes they will have a budget for local spend; others would be advisory only, but can influence council decisions in a particular locality. Sometimes the chairs will be drawn from that particular area; other times the administration (the group that forms the council) will provide the chairs so that there is clear accountability for decisions leading back to the council rather than the local councillor.

• be appointed to outside bodies or partnership organisations on which the council is represented, for example local voluntary organisations, regeneration boards, joint committees with other local authorities eg to run waste disposal schemes, the police authority or fire authority. 

It is important for the Labour group and individual councillors to know how the council works with those bodies and whether there are likely to be any conflicts of interest between a role on the council and on the outside body eg if the council makes grants to the organisation, it might not be appropriate for a councillor to be the chair of its management committee. It is also helpful to know the extent of the commitment a councillor would have to make as some representation on outside bodies could involve weekly meetings and major decisions, and others would be only received postal or electronic communications in order to keep the council connected.