Agenda item - Chair's Communications

3.1      The Chair provided the following communications:

Ali McManamon, Corporate Director City Operations, sends her apologies and Chris Wales, Director of IT&D, who will be joining us online, will be on hand for audit questions and in particular IT&D.

Sadly, Georgia Steers, our Counter Fraud lead, has experienced a close family bereavement and is unavailable to present understandably, the Annual Counter Fraud and Counter Fraud Strategy reports will be presented by Mark. I’m sure you’ve been prepping up but are maybe not going to be able to answer every member question and we’ll bear that in mind. I’m sure members will wish to join me in expressing our condolences to Georgia.

I’m pleased to welcome Cllr Jacob Allen, Cabinet Member for Customer Services and Public Realm, who will be available to support our discussion of the Annual Governance Statement and will hopefully help reassure the committee that the improvement actions identified are priorities for the Cabinet.

Members will appreciate that part of the Internal Audit and Counter Fraud Quarter 4 progress report is of a sensitive nature and an exemption category has been applied. Members have just agreed to that exemption, so I will ask members to ensure they do not discuss the part 2 item in open session, we will need to move to into private session in order to discuss that.  I appreciate many members will be unfamiliar with the working of this procedure, and it is the first time in my term as chair we have encountered this and it has been sometime since I’ve sat committee since I’ve had this situation, so I will ask our legal advisor when we get to those items to step us through and make sure we are getting right.

Can I finally say, given the interactions at the last committee, when we consider the standards quarterly report, it is important to remind members that our enquiries remain fairly general about system and process, I know that’s a challenge because we do wish to be able to discuss some of the particular complaints, but we mustn’t stray too far into the specifics of any particular complaint. It’s really not our role and it’s not appropriate.