Agenda item - Chair's Communications

18.1    The Chair provided the following communications:

I’m pleased to say that we have Councillor Williams with us here today who will be able to help inform our discussion of the annual housing complaints report and self-assessment. Councillor Williams has another meeting to attend later on and has requested that we move this item up to be our first item, which I’ve happily agreed to. Obviously, you’re very very busy and we understand that so that’s appreciated. Also, Councillor Taylor is going to attend as well to help inform our discussion of the progress report on budget setting. Councillor Taylor has work commitments and will be joining us virtually. To help Councillor Taylor manage his time as well, I’ve decided to move the budget report up to be the second item. So that’s both of those reports first.

Just to say that earlier this month I was invited to attend a meeting of the Regional Audit Committee Forum, which is basically an exchange meeting for Audit and Standard chairs in the South East. The main topic of discussion was on the changes to internal audit standards, which there was a presentation by Diana Melville of CIPFA and Diana author’s guidance so she’s very authoritative on this matter. It was very helpful to hear that presentation and I think very timely for certainly for myself  and for the consideration today of the new global internal audit standards which is on our agenda. The chief point that I took away from that presentation, just to share with members because you weren’t able to benefit directly from that presentation, was that the global internal audit standards is the responsibility of audit and standards committee and not just the chief auditor. So, I hope we’ve all absorbed the report and that we take our responsibility seriously on this and that we don’t just find ourselves being led by the chief auditor on all of these matters.