Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

The Minister has just hit the nail on the head: overview and scrutiny committees do not overview and scrutinise officers as individuals; they carry out overview and scrutiny of the functions of the authority. The individual officers are called to give evidence, quite rightly, because of their positions in the authority. The authority will perhaps scrutinise benefit payments, but it does not decide as a policy to scrutinise the officer who is in charge of benefit payments. If the proposal was that the petition should be able to call for scrutiny of a particular area, that would be an entirely different matter.