Backbench councillors have been tasked with scrutinizing the performance of the local executive, both on its own and in work it undertakes jointly with other organizations.

This scrutiny can cut across organizational boundaries, looking at the effectiveness of council services, their relevance to local needs, the access to these services for particular groups and the implications of mainstream policies and practice for other more specialized services. In terms of drugs services, scrutiny procedure could be used to ask whether treatment services meet the needs of local users, whether they are accessible to men and women equally and to different ethnic groups, and how they might be affected by the reconfiguration of NHS services in the area.

It could be seen as one of the responsibilities of a DAT Chair to trigger this overview and scrutiny function, where appropriate, as a means of ensuring that all the relevant agencies are meeting the needs of the service users whose interests the DAT represents.