Finance scrutiny in local government is crucial to transparency and robust decision-making, and has rarely been more important than currently. Balancing cost pressures, overspend and local budgets with ever-decreasing central government funding and ever-increasing service demands mean that the scrutiny lens is imperative to ensure local authorities’ financial probity. Recent cautionary examples underline the necessity for monitoring and scrutiny officers to understand the scrutiny function’s role in delivering this.
This course is aimed at:
- Monitoring Officers who want to gain a better understanding of this area of scrutiny; and
- Overview and Scrutiny Officers who support scrutiny members and want to gain a better understanding of how to fulfil their own scrutiny officer role in addition to their scrutiny member support role.
The course will cover:
How financial scrutiny fits into the Overview and Scrutiny landscape.
The relationship with the Audit Committee and accountants.
Good governance, financial and risk management.
The legislative and CIPFA framework.
The challenges often encountered.
Examples from which learning can be extracted.
Consultant
Artemis has over six years’ experience in local government, and has been the Statutory Scrutiny Officer and Head of Scrutiny at authorities in London and beyond.
Artemis is a qualified solicitor who trained at HSF, and also has an academic background, having lectured in law as a Visiting Lecturer at SOAS. She has significant international experience, including at an NGO in Jordan, in international law firms, and as a lawyer at the United Nations in Geneva. Since her time in the Environmental Practice Team within the Litigation Department of a US law firm in Washington, D.C. and discovering the US “Government in the Sunshine” Act 1976, Artemis has been passionate about transparency and accountability, including about what she terms scrutiny’s role in bringing local government into the sunshine.
Artemis was a member of the London Scrutiny Network Steering Committee (2018 – 2019) and successfully completed the ADSO Diploma in Local Democracy with a specialism in scrutiny.
Related training
09:30 - 14:45
Online
