Issue - meetings

The Committee noted that there had been some non-compliance issues within the Council’s Housing Service, which had led to a lack of governance around contract management, people management and financial controls. The Committee considered a report on a governance review in respect of the Housing service to ascertain how such failures had arisen, to make recommendations to provide a more robust governance framework and an action plan to provide assurance of compliance going forward.

The Monitoring Officer reported that over the past three months, a significant amount of work had been undertaken by a number of officers in respect of various work streams, details of which were set out in the appendix to the report.  Each of the work streams was being monitored via the governance of a newly established strategic project group, comprising of the relevant Director and Head of Service, two of the statutory officers and other specialist officers across the Council.

It was now proposed to establish a further work stream, which would be an internal governance review team, to look at exactly how the Council had got into this position and to make recommendations and an action plan for implementation going forward, so that the Council could be assured that there could be no recurrence of these failures.

The Committee noted that the two existing workstreams were the external investigation team, and the strategic project group.  The new internal governance team would report into a strategic project board comprising the Council's three statutory officers, the relevant director, and also the Leader of the Council and the Chairman of this Committee.  The board would then, in due course, report back to this Committee and ultimately to Full Council with their findings.  At this stage, the Committee was simply being asked to note the report and the work that was ongoing and the framework that had been put in place, and to receive a further report back from the Strategic Project Board in approximately six months, or sooner if that was feasible.

During the debate the Committee heard the following comments:

·      Concerns regarding lack of transparency and public scrutiny, with the first progress report coming a full year after the governance failures had been discovered.  The magnitude of the sums involved demanded immediate public scrutiny. In response to a suggestion that the monthly reports being prepared should be made public, the Monitoring Officer reassured the Committee that transparency was at the heart of the proposals contained in the report which would result ultimately in a report back to this Committee and to full Council at a point when there were some findings to be shared with members. However, there were clearly some sensitivities around this piece of work and there would be some information being fed back to the Project Board, particularly from the external investigation team, which would be sensitive and confidential at this stage and could jeopardise the Council's longer-term position of trying to recover any financial losses that may have been incurred.

·      In response  ...  view the full minutes text for item 52