Concerns have been raised about the county council decision to reduce funding for scrutiny.

As part of the council’s scrutiny function, committees can review decisions and make recommendations to improve council services – as well as scrutinising the county’s health services.

But since April, funding for scrutiny at the county council has been reduced, with the number of scrutiny officers has dropped from two to just one.

At the latest meeting of the county council (May 21), councillors from all parties expressed concern at the impact of the cuts to scrutiny.

Liberal Democrat Cllr Sandy Walkington, who is vice chair of the council’s overview and scrutiny committee, said scrutiny at the county council had been the envy of many other local authorities.

He drew a link between “catastrophes” elsewhere  in local government and the levels of “proper scrutiny”.

He acknowledged that the county council was continuing to conduct statutory scrutiny – but he suggested it was “the other bits that are falling off the potential agenda”.

“I just think it is a complete tragedy," he said.

"I just want everybody in this chamber just to think about this direction of travel – and whether it is wise – and what we can do to reverse it.”

He told councillors they should “be weeping that we are in this position”, and urged them to understand the “dangerous path that we are going down”.

Labour Cllr Tina Bhartwas – fellow vice-chairman of overview and scrutiny committee – echoed the concerns.

She said: “I think this is an area where there is a need to have a rethink about how just utterly vital scrutiny is to the function of this council.”

At the meeting Conservative Chair of overview and scrutiny Cllr David Andrews said he identified with everything that had been said and he suggested that scrutiny was “in more of a challenging place than it has been for a very long time”.

He said that the scrutiny team had “always punched well above weight – and turned out a prodigious amount of work”, but the team – now just a single officer – could not maintain the level of discretionary scrutiny work alongside statutory scrutiny work.

At the meeting, leader of the county council Cllr Richard Roberts suggested that additional resourcing for scrutiny support may be able to be found elsewhere in the county council.

"For an organisation that is currently going through organisational resourcing, where our budget is as pressured as it possibly can be, I would not have thought it was beyond the wit of man or woman to be able to find sufficient resource," he said.

“A half day here, a half day there, a full person here, a half person there – from all of the combined member support – to ensure that the right amount of scrutiny is done.

“But I do ask that members remember that we have, including today, we have a huge amount of publicly facing scrutiny of all that we do.

"As far as I am aware the cabinet panels and cabinet panel process is welcomed and there is a huge amount of resource going into that as well.”