-
As someone who has spent a year working on one of these panels, it's many people, one hat. There is, very rarely, some double hat wearing but it's usually to cover an absence between related departments.
As for environmental health. Yes local authorities do that, but it's a pretty small part of their function as a whole. Children's social care is probably the largest part and that won't account for a full half of it. There's still a lot of people left and, despite the mounting pressures and demands, they're still acheiving a lot. Mind you, we need to avoid losing any more people and resources because there's pretty much no more redundancy left in the system.
Yeah. I get it.
But it will be people with many hats on rather than many people with one hat on making decisions here.
Local govt is responsible for environmental health. Not much budget around for that.
I'm all for streamlining and making things efficient, and making data flow better and to the right departments to make decisions/do something. However, I don't think there are many people left to do anything.