Agenda item - Chair's Communications

30.1    The Chair provided the following communications:

“Earlier this month, I attended a webinar provided by Grant Thornton, our external auditors, which was delivered for Audit and Standards chairs. There was a lot of ground covered from the challenges that local authorities continue to experience with austerity through to the national audit backlog, Audit reform and local government reform. As we know, austerity has left council budgets 40% smaller and there is apparently a £3 billion shortfall predicted for 2025. This is nationally. Part of the impact has been the erosion of local governance structures and internal audit capacity, which in turn effects integrity and hampers improvement. Drawing lessons from recent unitarisations, Grant Thornton was keen to stress the considerable capacity and cost challenges authorities faced with local government reform, and how it can take time to realize any financial benefits. Another key point made was the need to increase public accessibility of council financial information, the complexity of which for many people proves impenetrable, and this erodes public trust. It was noted that a number of Audit Annual Report key recommendations issued for improvement in cases of significant weakness has more than doubled since 2021. There was also discussions of the local audit reform green paper published just before Christmas, which includes a proposal to establish a local audit office, this will be an interesting one for us in time to come. Grant Thornton have made a number of insightful recommendations to government seeking greater financial sustainability for local government through multiyear settlements and a more collaborative approach that would assist national mission delivery. This all makes huge sense to me and I’m sure to yourselves, we just need the government to grasp the nettle too. I will ensure that Members receive a link to the slides which also sign-post a number of other useful publications. I hope Members will it find of value.

Internal audit training, just to remind Members that internal audit officers are providing a session on the 11th of February. This is an opportunity for committee members to learn more about the internal audit planning process and to provide input into the 25/26 audit plan. Unfortunately, I am now unable to attend the session myself, but I need to catch up with officers to understand what proposals have been made and their response to them. So, I hope other Members will be able to attend that session.

Members will also be aware the recent government consultations, there have been plenty of them, on the future shape of the standards framework. It will be interesting to see the next steps flowing from this. I myself responded. I'm sure others did as well. As the standard updates report on our agenda mentions, the Monitoring Officer recently consulted me as chair on the extension of David Bradly's appointment as an Independent Member. David has a wealth of experience and remains enthusiastic and committed through his work with us, and I think we're very fortunate to have his support.

We have a number of significant areas before us on the agenda. In particular, we will be reviewing receiving the external audit value for money report, considering changes to contract standing orders, and I've asked officers to share one page summary on that with all members, and we'll be taking that paper again at full Council on Thursday. And it is pretty hard to understand it all. I haven't heard news on whether that summary is yet available, but that would be useful, if not before Thursday, certainly afterwards. We've also got the code of Code of Corporate Governance and Risk Management Framework paper before us, and this proposes adding risk implications to Cabinet reports. Which is a significant addition to documentation. I think, and I've asked if it might be possible for all Members to receive training on risk management. So you know, because we've got a paper before us, I've seen these things plenty of times. But if you're unfamiliar, it's hard to get the best out of it. And if we're going to have the implications reported at Cabinet, then all members need to know how to best engage with that.”