PLANS to slash the number of council watchdog committees in half have been criticised by opposition councillors.

Oxford City Council wants to merge its two scrutiny committees into one as part of a review of how decisions are made and monitored.

Opposition councillors said it would hit scrutiny – but the council hopes it will let backbenchers examine a wider range of issues.

The review will also stop members of its ruling city executive board (CEB) making key decisions alone, such as on debt write-offs. Instead, decisions could be made by officers or by the board as a whole.

Although decisions were made by a single councillor, meetings still had to be set up for people to make their views known.

Currently, issues to be decided by the board are considered by one of two scrutiny committees, which both meet every month.

The communities and partnerships scrutiny committee and the value and performance scrutiny committtee are now set to merge. The new committee would meet once a month.

Communities and partnerships Liberal Democrat member Graham Jones hit out.

He said: “It does seem to me to diminish the influence that individual ward councillors have in challenging the executive and looking at issues which affect people in their areas. The system we have at the moment does work well. I think the proposals will effectively halve the number of councillors and double the workload.”

The Greens called for an end to single-member decisions and a return to a previous system, where committees representing city areas made decisions. Deputy leader Craig Simmons added: “Reducing the number of committees limits the engagement of opposition members.

“We got half of what we wanted – the disappointment is that the single member decisions are now to be made by officers or CEB.

“So, though there will be some debate, opposition members are excluded.”

But deputy Labour council leader Ed Turner branded the scrutiny committees “talking shops” that only looked at CEB matters.

He said: “What we’re hoping is that the work of scrutiny can become a bit more proactive and that if there’s a particular area they want to look at then a sub-group can be formed.”

Oxford is the only district council in the county to have single-member decisions and Mr Turner backed the bid to axe them.

He said: “They were set up as a way of getting some of the non-controversial stuff through in an expeditious yet still democratic way. However, arranging the meetings has proved quite difficult and the process didn’t actually save any time or money, so now we’re going to have more regular CEB meetings and officers will make some decisions.”

He said there had been broad agreement among party leaders over the changes.

Mr Turner said: “At the end of the day the Labour group could have said ‘this is what we’re going to do’, but that’s not our style, we want to take the others with us.”

Lib Dem leader Jean Fooks told a recent council meeting while she supported the review overall, she was concerned about cutting the number of committees and giving some decisions to officers.

Also under the proposals – which will go before the full council later this year – members of the public attending full council meetings will be able to speak before the items they are interested in and get an immediate response. Currently, all public statements take place in one agenda item at the start of the meeting.

Oxfordshire County Council also operates single-member decision making.