I was invited to attend this as I haven’t been a councillor for four
years and things have changed!

We had a good introduction from Peter Sloman, the Chief Executive and
then some overviews by three strategic managers.  Jeremy Thomas, the
Head of Law and Governance gave a useful overview of services and
decision making, including delegation, and there was an excellent
“Freshers Fair” set up for us new councillors where we could meet all
the council services and their staff.

We had a sandwich lunch and then we were given information about legal
rules.  There was useful instruction about the difference between
personal and prejudicial interests and I was interested to note that the
bar for prejudicial interest is now much higher than it used to be.  It
essentially has to be a pecuniary interest.  We also learned about the
difference between pre-disposition and pre-determination.

The last session I attended was about Partnership Working and this is
extremely important in an area with two-tier local government but also
includes lots of other statutory bodies.

I was unable to stay for the session about Scrutiny and Scrutiny
committees as I needed to get back to my day job!