Issue - meetings

The Committee is asked to decide on the membership of their task groups and to agree their representatives on external groups outside of the Committee.

The Joint Committee (Runnymede) agreed:

(i)            To defer this report until the September meeting following further feedback and development of what external groups and the Joint Committee might achieve.

Reasons:  

(i)    The Committee felt that the function of Task Groups need to be evaluated to ensure they were fully effective.

(ii)   Both councils are currently focussing on improving their partnership working and it was felt that this might have an impact on whether Task Groups were needed.

The Partnership Committee Officer introduced the report which outlined the task groups that had been established by the Joint Committee in previous years and asked the Committee to agree on the membership of these task groups and other external groups for the year 2019/20.

The officer continued that whilst it was customary to agree on these task groups and external group memberships at the first meeting of the municipal year, feedback from councillors along with the changing landscape of partnership working within both councils (as mention in points 2.16-2.18 of the report) meant that there had been questions raised prior to the Committee about whether the task group format was still an appropriate one for the Committee to adopt when focussing on certain important issues.

The Chairman proposed that this report was deferred as he felt that members would benefit from evaluating task groups more fully and exploring other possible options.

Committee members were keen to have input on issues such as parking but agreed that the method by which this should happen should be reviewed. It was suggested that the Chairman should raise this issue with other Local and Joint Committee Chairmen to explore how other committees address these issues prior to the report being brought back to Committee.

The Joint Committee (Runnymede) agreed:

(i)            To defer this report until the September meeting following further feedback and development of what external groups and the Joint Committee might achieve.

Reasons: 

(i)    The Committee felt that the function of Task Groups need to be evaluated to ensure they were fully effective.

(ii)   Both councils are currently focussing on improving their partnership working and it was felt that this might have an impact on whether Task Groups were needed.