A NEW-look meeting of West Somerset Council's performance committee took place on Monday in a bid to tighten up the authority's monitoring procedures. Following past criticisms of the way it scrutinised council operations and decisions, the authority has already taken steps to address concerns raised by the Audit Commission. Those steps were further strengthened on Monday when councillors met for the first of what could become quarterly meetings of the committee to discuss a detailed 86-page report on the council's performance. Chairman Cllr Simon Stokes said the aim was to ensure meetings were more focused by sending out performance data to committee members some four weeks before the quarterly meetings. Members would then have plenty of time to digest the information before submitting written questions to corporate director Adrian Dyer to ensure full answers could be given at the time of the meeting. Cllr Stokes said the quarterly meetings would be further supplemented by eight provisional monthly meetings which would only take place if the committee felt strongly about a particular issue. That process will be tested immediately after councillors called for a "single item agenda" meeting to be held next month following revelations about problems within the authority's benefits department. As exclusively revealed in the Free Press earlier this month, a former employee e-mailed staff and councillors to air his concerns about the way the believed the council was being run. He was particularly critical about the recent programme of redundancies and claimed seven key members of staff had been lost within the benefits department alone within the last six months. Cllr Hugh Davies asked what was being done about performance issues affecting the benefits department while Cllr Terry Venner said many of the authority's current performance indicators seemed to infer that "everything was rosy". Mr Dyer said "changes within the section" were not yet reflected within the figures and the committee called for an in-depth report on how staff changes and the introduction of a new computer system had affected the department. Cllr Davies also raised concerns about an apparent drop in performance within the authority's planning department which would adversely affect the amount of grant aid the council would receive in the next financial year from central Government. "We all know why we're in this position - we've let two officers go, one in planning and one in building control and we're dropping performance because of this," Cllr Davies said. Cllr Stokes said the committee would only be happy to move to a set quarterly and eight provisional meeting system if they were confident they were receiving full answers and detailed reports from officers. Councillors suggested future quarterly reports compared West Somerset's performance data with the results of other authorities and called for a member of the committee to be involved in the setting of targets which were used to monitor performance after being told that role currently fell solely to senior officers. "If you set your own targets you'll know how to hit them," Cllr Terry Venner said. Mr Dyer assured the committee the authority's figures were audited each year to ensure they were accurate and said he would investigate ways in which councillors could become more involved in target setting