Opposition councillors said that they had been kept in the dark about a number of key licensing matters since Brighton and Hove City Council set up its cabinet two years ago.
They no longer received the formerly routine and regular details of enforcement action taken against cabbies, for example, or information about premises licences reviews.
Complaints about a “lack of transparency” linked to the switch from decision-making by committees to decision-making by cabinet have prompted a U-turn from the council.
One councillor said that it was important, not least because the Licensing Committee was a statutory committee – one that the law required the council to have.
The Licensing Act says that the council, as a licensing authority, must appoint 10 to 15 members to the committee and those members are required to take certain decisions.
At Hove Town Hall on Thursday 18 June, the committee met for the first time since last November – to discuss just one brief four-page report. The meeting lasted less than 10 minutes.
Green councillor Ollie Sykes took the opportunity to ask why members were receiving so little information.
He said that a meeting scheduled to take place in February had been cancelled because of a “lack of agenda items”.
Councillor Sykes said: “We no longer seem to be considering important regulatory matters that previously came to this committee such as updates on hackney carriage and private hire enforcement and monitoring, what’s happening in reviews and appeals concerning licensed premises – last seen in March 2023 – and not least the licensing authority’s annual report which we haven’t seen since June 2024.”
Later, he said: “I asked the question at the meeting today about what’s happened to these reports.
“Our concern is that this is another example of the difficulty even councillors have accessing information and a general lack of openness in this administration. We look forward to getting some answers.”
Independent councillor Samer Bagaeen said: “We cannot have a statutory committee meeting without a single item on the agenda when it has not met since November 2025.
“It’s not acceptable and careless on behalf of this administration which is not taking this seriously. Something is going on.”
Conservative councillor Ivan Lyons said: “We are still awaiting the 2025 annual report and there has been no hackney carriage and private hire enforcement report since October 2022 or any update on recent appeals.
“We may be in the last throes of this Labour administration but businesses and daily lives continue.”
The council said that the reports were no longer part of the committee’s work on the advice of officials.
We have an Opposition? Quelle surprise! They’ve kept pretty quiet until now. Why were they not demanding these reports years ago? The Cabinet closed shop system stinks. It unlawfully excludes elected Councillors from information they have a right to. On this basis alone, the cabinet system should be challenged and overturned. Just because there is a similar mechanism at national govt level does not mean it works as a mechanism at local govt level. Residents expect their elected Councillors to have unrestricted access to all council information when they have an issue they go to their local Councillor about.
Not liking a cabinet system is one thing, but there’s nothing unlawful, Tracy. It’s the standard structure of most councils in the UK, not just central government.
Residents also expect ward councillors personally deal with every issue that lands in their inbox, whilst that’s often passed onto council officers best placed. That would be an argument to improve knowledge of how a council works, especially when expectations doesn’t match reality.
Benjamin, you are right that around 80% of English councils operate a cabinet system, so it is not unusual in itself. But the cabinet system being common does not mean every council operates it in the same way, and that is rather the point.
On scrutiny committee chairs specifically, nationally recognised good practice, cited by Parliament’s own scrutiny committee and the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny, is that scrutiny committee chairs should be drawn from opposition parties where numbers permit. In Wales this is a legal requirement. At combined authority level it is required by statute. Brighton and Hove has three scrutiny committees, all chaired by Labour councillors. That is lawful but it falls below the standard that Parliament itself has endorsed and that many other cabinet system councils choose to follow voluntarily.
The broader concern is not that the cabinet system exists here. It is that a series of changes introduced since May 2024 have, taken together, reduced the flow of information to councillors and residents. Reports that used to reach the licensing committee were quietly removed without a committee decision. Key figures in scrutiny papers are redacted from opposition members. The FOI team is under pressure to agree exemptions it would not otherwise apply. The annual report comparing conduct complaints with other councils has been discontinued and the rules have been changed to make it less likely complaints will be investigated. None of these things is unlawful. Each one, individually, might have a defensible explanation. Together they do start to look like a pattern.
The council leader has previously cited the LGA peer review as evidence the new system is working well. The full report – published on the LGA website rather than the Councils – describes the cabinet model as providing an opportunity for improvement rather than confirming it has been achieved. It also explicitly recommends the council consider whether further work is needed to ensure opposition parties do not feel excluded from decision making through the scrutiny process. That recommendation would be unnecessary if the current arrangements were working as they should.
The real test should be whether local residents and their elected representatives think it is working effectively. The only people who appear to think it is are those in the Labour leadership.
Licensing has nothing whatsoever to do with the cabinet system and their decisions.
However as a former councillor and a member of the Licensing Committee for 8 years I find it odd that the press article states “ The council said: “The requirement to bring reports to committee were changed in 2023 following discussions with council officers and were not formally included in the committee work programme.”
Why was that a decision taken by officers, surely it should have been brought to the committee for discussion and not something officers or even chairs should make.