Agenda item - Chair's Communications

44.1    The Chair provided the following communications:

I’d like to welcome everyone here to our last committee meeting of the municipal year. In addition to our regular Internal Audit and Counter Fraud and our Standards Update, we have the annual audit plan to consider and approve, and also a new disciplinary policy and an updated whistleblower policy to approve. So not just matters to note today, although those are always important for us to consider.

I was going to say welcome to John Hooton, who I thought would be here. But I don’t see John so that’s not needed.

As members will recall we received the External Auditors annual report on the council’s value for money at our January meeting. I’m keen that we consider progress with implementation of the council’s budget and VFM work at our June meeting. John has agreed this would be good timing as our external auditors will be carrying out their VFM work this May, when they look at financial sustainability, and officers will be able to feed into this and auditors should be able to report back in June with some interim findings and our meeting isn’t until the back end of June. So hopefully that will be possible and I think that it will be useful to hear how progress is going. I’m pleased to say Councillor Taylor will be able to join us at that meeting to help support our discussion of this and  answer any questions that we may have about how that’s going and other matters that are covered by his cabinet agreement. So, I hope members will be agreeable to us including that as an additional item at the next meeting and I think formally we actually have to include that as something suggested at item 54 of on our today.

I’m sure many members will have contributed to the LGA peer review. Councillor Guilmant has shared with me some very well-made points that he raised with the review regarding the presentation of information in committee agendas and committee member development. Both of which I agree need to be strengthened and we’re planning to meet with officers to discuss these suggestions along with the LGA review feedback and we’ve had a chance to look at that. But if other members have got any relevant points to our committee work that they have raised with the LGA that they wish to feed in, then we can consider these in the mix as well.