Monitoring Officer Report Monitoring Officer Report April 2018 15 structures,” said Sharn Matthews, Executive Director and (non-lawyer) monitoring officer at East Northamptonshire Council told the session. “You can avert so many problems by shaping the process gently, nudging it in the right direction at an early stage rather than it getting to the point where somebody's got a paper ready to go.” Moreover, the slimming down of senior management teams at most councils has meant that even where the monitoring officer has remained at the top table, this has usually meant a far wider remit than just legal and democratic, reducing the amount of time the individual is able to devote to MO duties. As one delegate said: “In order to be high up enough in the organisation to be on the management team, you can't just be a lawyer. You can't just be legal, there might be other additional services [in your role] to have that status sometimes and that reduces the amount of time you've got to give to the monitoring officer role. So people have been either pushed further down the organisation or have had to take on all manner of other things to stay at the same level.” Staying in touch with the decision- making process is an even greater challenge in councils with a dominant ruling party. “I think that having a ‘single party state’ is a huge challenge to good governance. It doesn't make it easy, it makes it, as far as I'm concerned, a lot more difficult,” said one delegate. “Being 'single state' doesn't mean it's a unified party, at all. When you have an opposition, they've got the guns on the outside of their jackets, whereas the opposition in a single party state goes on in smoke-filled rooms, behind closed doors. And getting proper decision making when it's going on elsewhere is so tricky.” In this environment, the pragmatic approach generally agreed by delegates is that while it is unrealistic for most MOs to demand a place at the top table, direct access to the chief executive is important for the role to function effectively. Moreover, the monitoring officer needs to enjoy sufficient status if he or she is to perform the role without fear nor favour. “It is important that the MO is not somebody that can be dictated to,” one delegate said.