Your County Assembly Between Elections: Sittings, Committees, Motions

An MCA is in the ward on Saturday and in the chamber on Tuesday. The Tuesday half is the half almost nobody sees, and it is where the decisions are made.

A County Assembly is a legislature. Article 185 of the Constitution gives it legislative authority for the county, the power to approve county plans and policies, and the duty to oversee the county executive. The County Governments Act 2012 and the assembly's own standing orders fill in the machinery.

Who sits in a County Assembly

Elected members, one for each ward. Nominated members, put forward by parties in proportion to their elected seats, to meet the two-thirds gender rule and to represent marginalised groups, persons with disabilities and the youth. A Speaker, elected by the assembly from outside its own membership, who presides. A Clerk, who runs the assembly's administration and is its accounting officer.

A leader of the majority party and a leader of the minority party organise business between them.

A member of the county executive committee cannot be a member of the assembly. That separation is deliberate, and it is the reason the assembly can question the executive at all.

What actually happens in a sitting

Four kinds of business, worth telling apart because they carry very different weight.

Bills. County legislation: the annual finance act, the appropriation act, and substantive laws on trade, health facilities, markets, land rates and everything else devolved. A bill goes through readings, a committee stage and public participation before it can be passed.

Motions. A proposition the assembly votes on. Some motions have legal effect: approving budget estimates, adopting a committee report, requiring the Governor to dismiss an executive committee member. Others are expressions of opinion with no binding force. Always ask which kind you are being shown.

Questions and statements. A member asks a department to account for something, and a committee chair or the leader of the majority brings back the answer. This is the cheapest oversight tool in the building and the most underused.

Petitions. A resident can petition the assembly directly. The assembly must consider the petition and report back. The mechanics are close to the parliamentary process set out in what happens to a petition to Parliament.

The committees are where the work is

Plenary votes. Committees decide what plenary votes on.

Sectoral committees shadow departments: health, agriculture, education, roads, trade, water. They summon chief officers, read departmental reports and produce the reports the whole assembly then adopts or rejects.

The budget and appropriations committee reviews the estimates and recommends changes. The public accounts and investments committee takes the Auditor-General's report on the county and examines it line by line. The county assembly service board runs the assembly itself.

Committee membership is the single most useful thing to know about your MCA. A member on the health committee can summon the county health officer. A member on none of the relevant committees cannot, and has to work through somebody who can.

What oversight looks like when it is working

Money is the test. The assembly approves the estimates, then has to check whether what was approved is what was spent. Where that money comes from and how it is approved is in the county budget cycle.

Three things a functioning assembly does: it debates the Auditor-General's report rather than shelving it, it publishes committee reports, and it holds its sittings in public. Article 196 requires the last one. It also requires the assembly to facilitate public participation in its business, which means a resident can attend and can submit a memorandum on a bill.

The clerk's office is the door. Ask for the order paper, the Hansard and the committee schedule. They are public documents, and an assembly that refuses them is telling you something on its own.

What to do with this before 10 August 2027

You have a full assembly term of information sitting in a records office, and almost nobody uses it.

Find out which committees your MCA sits on. Ask the clerk for the Hansard record of a debate you care about. Read one committee report end to end, on any subject at all, so that you know what a real one looks like and can tell when you are handed a thin one.

Then put the ten budget questions to your MCA and compare the answers against those documents. Most of what people call performance is visible in writing, months before anybody starts campaigning. Related: what the job of an MCA actually is.