Transcript

Thank you. Agenda pack is always available via modgov. If I invite anyone to speak, if you can clearly state who you are for the benefit of anyone listening, please use the microphones provided. If you are wishing to speak online, if you can raise your hand and we'll come to you as quickly as we can. Audio is recorded for this meeting and the meeting is being broadcast in the usual ways. Right. So I'll start the meeting with apologies for absence. So I've got a little list here. So our independent member Lindy is joining us online. Councillor Lee Baker has sent his apologies. Councillor Mike Caswell is attending online. I understand Mike says his internet connection may drop at some point. And Councillor Andy Sully is unfortunately not very well. But he is online. Thank you. And Nicola Hicks is on holiday. Yes. Yes. Perfect. Okay. So I move on to the minutes of the previous committee meeting from 28th of March, which feels like a lifetime ago. So just a reminder to all members item 13, the Broad Prevention in Somerset Council item was discussed in closed session. So if you wish to refer to that, please can you let me know and we'll have to consider going back into closed session to discuss that. Okay. So any matters of accuracy from the minutes, first of all? No. Everyone happy? Any matters arising from the minutes which aren't covered elsewhere on the agenda? Welcome. Good morning. There we are. Thank you. There was a matter arising that I've actually discussed with you regarding the confidential session. Hopefully we can carry on that correspondence and move that forward. I won't. Yeah, that's that's fine. Okay. You've got my reply. Yes, you've got we had a response from officers. I haven't seen your response to that response yet. Thank you. But that's fine. We'll pick up that conversation. Sorry, we're speaking in cryptic language for everyone else. Simon, my apologies. I forgot to give you Big Father High's apologies for the meeting. My apologies. Habib did tell me he wasn't going to be here actually. That's that's my bad as well. Any other matters arising from the minutes? No. Do we need a formal proposer and seconder for the minutes? Yeah. Simon proposed. Mandy second is. All those in favour? Yeah. Happy. Any abstentions? I should have formally welcomed Councillor Rosemary Woods to Audit Committee. So good morning Rosemary and welcome to Audit. It's lovely to have you aboard. We welcome your input and hopefully through the day if there's anything that you want us to to clarify because there's lots of acronyms and whatnot through audit then please just raise your hand and we'll sort that out for you. Thank you for that. Just say I didn't indicate whether about the minutes being accurate because I think I left part of the way through the meeting although I was there at the start online. That's fine Rosemary. I understand that. Thank you. Okay. Right so we move on to item 3 which is declarations of interest. Usual. Rosemary? I noticed that somebody had declared that they got a County Council pension which I have as well. Also on item 12 I'd like to just to declare an interest so I won't take part in it because I had some personal input to that so I won't at this stage take part in item 12. No that's fine Rosemary. I welcome your declarations. Any other declarations of interest? No. Perfect. Thank you. Moving on to public question time. I've not been notified of any public questions. Is that correct? Perfect. Right so moving on to agenda item 5 which is the external audit findings report and conclusion. So that's Somerset. So hand over to Barry Morris. Good morning Barry. Morning chair. Morning councillors. So sorry that you don't have an updated audit findings report here today. The position is that we have been going through the accounts. We did say that we would need to represent them if there were material errors that we identified. We have identified material errors which are being processed through the accounts. Disappointingly our audit work is still ongoing. The quality of evidence and the underlying quality of those accounts is just not sufficient for us to be able to conclude on our work and indeed we were discussing with officers whether a set of accounts should be presented to this committee but when we undertook some high-level review we still identified some errors and amendments that had not been processed. Therefore we did not have confidence nor did officers that those accounts should be presented to this committee. Our audit work is ongoing. I'll let officers explain the position from their perspective. I'm not prepared to make a commitment at this time as to when the audit will be concluded because it depends on appropriate resources being made available to provide the evidence that we require but I can confirm it won't be in June. I have to take any questions. Thanks for your transparency there Barry. So if I ask for a response from officers as to why we are where we are if that's okay. Ben. Yeah good morning Tess. I'm Ben Bryant, Head of Corporate Finance. So as Barry said we we're not presenting final accounts and also didn't want to bring a set of accounts asking for a further delegated authority as we did last time. Just as Barry said the quality of the statement of accounts that we had at the time for presenting it to this committee we didn't have that assurance over. So the work that we need to do next is to do it right and bring it back in terms of a quality set of balance set of statement of accounts. Grant Thornton clearly have been trying to manage this extended audit as well as other work. So Grant Thornton need to come off of this audit now and deliver some of the other work that they've got to do. That gives us the time during June for me to put together some more internal experience resource to work alongside the team that we've got at the moment going back through some of those fundamental issues that keep occurring predominantly around property valuations, depreciation, accounting treatments on those as well as then going through some of the final audit queries trying to commit to by the end of June hopefully when the auditors can re-engage at that type of time that we then have done that pre-audit work by doing it ourselves so that we actually give a more reasoned set of statements back to the auditors to go through hopefully stopping some of that backwards and forwards which is the stop-start state of the audit that we keep going through at the moment. The other part of this is my focus on the 23/24 close down of accounts and this is now having an impact on being able to close down the accounts for there. So also during June I need to take a position of when do we take the south sunset opening balances to load into Dynamics 365 our finance system to enable us to then close down this year's set of accounts and I've got meetings next week with various officers to say at which point in this set of statements do we take in a short position that we'll be loading probably realistically going we know all the findings are on top of there but then we will then do prior period adjustments in the following year but they're 23/24 accounts for that but at least it will enable us to move forward to produce start to produce a set of statements for 23/24 and you've got some of the papers today on the approach to that. So I just wanted to recognise this isn't where we wanted to be or expected to be and it is quite disappointing and frustrating both for us and for the auditors but it's better that we do this in the right manner than try and rush something through hence the decision not to present something today. I just sort of wanted to put on record as well just that thanks to Barry and his team particularly Beth and George it's been quite a collaborative and ongoing process here and they've been working really hard with us on that so just make that comment as well happy to take any further questions. Yeah I'll open up to questions I've got mandate and I think Simon wanted to come in. Thank you firstly thank you for the honesty and for me as I've voiced numerous times in audit committees I'd rather they came right first time than be bouncing forward and back so I know it's disappointing I know many have worked hard but there's just a couple of questions arising if I may so firstly this is one set of accounts we we have managed to get through numerous sets of accounts I know we wanted a clean sheet so we're nearly there tantalisingly close I think we are so my questions are there are obviously some issues here when you talk about misstatements so the first question is will the member of staff or members of staff will there be conversations taking place i.e to try and avoid those those challenges moving forward and secondly in the event that you decide to put the opening balance forward can that be amended in the event that something then comes forward because the accounts are closed. I assume those questions are to Ben yeah. Yeah so we're relying on external resource production of this one of the the things that we're suffering for is the loss of staff and legacy knowledge from South Somerset going into this unitary part of what I was describing was that we have well-experienced staff still remaining in our accounting team and that's the resource I'm now putting in place to work alongside that external resource in the property plant and equipment example what was the original balance what are the valuations how have you processed them what are the journals what are the entries into the reserves and all that sort of stuff that actually is where the auditors have started to unpick some of the way that we treated some of that in in the rush to produce the statements so that we have that assurance before we're giving that to the auditors and therefore I'm confident in the experience that we've got in the team moving forward I think it's where we're out of that lack of knowledge and the way that we're processing things in terms of the resource we're using your second point in terms of we will have to put in a position which allows us to close it means that we'll have to do something called a prior period adjustment so we will then have a list of audit findings for things that we haven't then adjusted for in the position that we brought forward and we will have to disclose that and correct that as we produce the statements even if they're not in our final closed down accounts as such we will then have to process those entries after we've almost got the benefit of time here in that we're not we're not meeting the end of May deadline clearly for the 23 24 so then by the time we produce the statements for 23 24 we'll be able to process those and put those through the accounts as we get to the barrier so you put your finger up there so barry wants to come in so I'll bring barry and I think did you want to come in to ask the questions I'm no sorry thanks just to pick up on what Ben was saying there so when he refers to a prior period adjustment I think what we'll be able to do then is when we close the audit we'll just make adjustments to the opening balance position if required so because it will still be within the statement of accounts and because we haven't given opinion on South Somerset District Council there won't be a need to do a formal prior period adjustment we'll be able to just wash that up in the closing statements for South Somerset District Council and then we'll the council can then make those amendments in the opening brought forward balances for Somerset Council so it won't appear as a formal prior period adjustment as you might need which you might think but again that's just a that's just a technical clarification thanks barry and so I had a couple of questions for you so having been a veteran of a more than one sunset audit I still have the scars of the PPE verification are we are we had the conversation yet about the valuation of property plant and equipment are we a sort of valuation that everyone's comfortable with or is that a whole can of worms that's yet to be opened for this year so chair we are we've we've done a lot of work on the property plant and value valuations those are where our queries have arisen so again we have been challenging as you would expect back to the valuer to make sure that they process things correctly from a valuation perspective I think one of the challenges that we've had is that also then the subsequent accounting treatment of those amendments or those valuation changes have not been done have not been processed correctly so that's what Ben was saying is they're having to go back and unpick because we've identified that the way that some of the adjustments that have been put through and the valuation changes have been put through have not been processed correctly so that that's part of the challenge and that's why one of the reasons we didn't have confidence in those accounts coming to the council today perfect so I suppose the sort of issues we're having here in terms of the loss of organizational memory are likely to plague us in the future particularly as we we come to the first Somerset council audit which I know isn't the subject of today but it's something that that we'll talk about when we come to the audit plan in a minute but I do have some concerns that we need to to get better at managing the transfer of people in and out of the organization obviously we're going to be losing quite a lot of organizational memory at some point and we need to be able to manage these issues the organization still has to function regardless of of the personnel so I'm a little bit concerned that we need to sort of pick up some of these lessons and make sure that we're not repeating them ad infinitum so that's one for the team probably to address when we come to the audit plan in a minute so if there are no other questions on this item I was going to propose moving on Rosemary did you want to ask a question? Because of where I've referenced things I've got somewhat lost you were talking about the value of properties yes now how does that square if you're selling off properties with whether there's still a debt on those properties because we seem to be selling off properties without clearing any debts so this this is about the valuation of the properties that we held at the end of the accounting period so the end of 2023 yeah March 2023 so at that point we hadn't sold off any any particular property so the question about how how the council deals with the sale of its commercial properties isn't necessarily one for this particular audit there's a wider question in terms of the probity and and the best way of doing that but in terms of what this audit is trying to achieve it's trying to work out the value of the assets that the council held at the end of March 2023 does that make sense? I apologize for that no sorry you don't have to apologize it's there's no there's no problem in you asking any question you know the only problem comes if I get the answer wrong then Barry puts his hand up and corrects me so can we move on or has anyone got any final questions on this audit? No okay I think we need to know where we are I think we would like regular updates I suppose the the final question is is there any risk that we end up using the backstop when it comes to this? There's a lot of smirking going on here at this point. So chair the we are looking at every option that may be available to us in relation to this and the think plan b or c or d or wherever we're up to at the moment in the alphabet is still to get these accounts finalized and completed. It's a great question about the backstop there has been an event that occurred recently which has put the backstop date in the 30th September and the significant doubt we we do expect there to be a backstop in the future but it won't be the end of September. That said I really really don't want to be here talking about some set district council in September but we may be. Jason yeah obviously the dissolution of parliament has thrown the backstop up into a bit of an issue nationally should we say as in the legislation hasn't been passed which is a bit of a thing but as Barry said yeah we are committed on both sides of the council and the auditors to get this one done it you know how shall I describe it it's the troublesome child of the audit we this committee has done you will see in the later report we've done nine sets of accounts in the last year this is the final one to get over the line it's disappointing where we are and we you know both sides yeah and not happy about that but we will get it right and it will take it a couple of months to kind of get there and get that back to you but I don't think we'll see just drag on I think we're both committed to get this done because it's really important for the opening balances for Somerset council and how we rely on that and having that clean sweep across the board of all the audits done. Okay I'll move on so moving on to item six which is the external auditors indicative audit plan for sunset council 23 24. How about Barry and Grace? Thank you chair so I'll hand over to Grace to take you through the detail but just to confirm why the title says an indicative audit plan the reason it says indicative is because we've undertaken a lot of our planning work but some of that still remains outstanding we think that we've identified all of the significant risks and other risk areas within the council but by bringing it as an indicative plan that enables us to come back and say if there's any further issues that we've identified as a result of finalizing that planning work it is a new council it does introduce new risks for a whole number of reasons and I'll let Grace take you through those. Thank you Barry. Yes this is our audit plan for the 23 24 year so this outlines our strategy and our significant risks for both the financial statements and the value for money work that we undertake so as Barry said this is indicative due to a number of planning items still being outstanding. An example of this is the group scoping so we haven't been able to scope the group accounts yet so we probably won't be able to do that until we receive the draft accounts based on the materiality levels and obviously the structure of the group which is still being formalized and that's the same as well for the materiality level that we've set and so we've based this on the prior year accounts just a total of all of the legacy councils but obviously that is likely to change significantly once we receive the the draft accounts we will revisit that. The significant risks are outlined within the report there are seven significant risks on the financial statements a number of these you'll be used to seeing in previous years and relate to the valuation of property that we've discussed valuation of pension and management override of controls there are however two specific risks and for this audit due to the new council and the new system being implemented and these are outlined on page eight so we have a risk around the accounting for local government reorganization so thus looking at the opening balance position and checking the accounting is appropriate and then also reviewing the new system implementation of Microsoft dynamics and the general ledger. The provisional timetable for the audit at the moment is receipt of the draft accounts by the end of September and then they'll come in the first week of October and we are working closely with Jason and Ben on this and obviously based on the things we've already discussed so south Somerset audit loss of key staff and obviously the new system we are keeping in touch frequently and keeping track of that progress to see that we're still on track. In terms of the value for money work and this is obviously an evolving piece of work and something that we keep under review and throughout the year and you may remember from our previous report that there were a number of key recommendations and significant weaknesses so these would all be followed up as part of our 23 24 work as well. I wasn't proposing to go through any more of the detail but happy to take any questions if they are. Okay so to open up first to members. Mandy and then Gwill. Okay Gwill you can go first. Thanks for that. Where's the bus? Right yeah this is my first time on the committee as a formal member so forgive me if I'm a little bit naive or asking questions that I should know better but it occurs to me that the one that stood out was in relation to the management override control management override of controls. Now one of the things that struck me when the financial when the financial emergency was declared last autumn was that we introduced a system whereby all transactions had to be entered onto the system and you know you had to place an order on the system and then it would go through which I thought was a bit for such a large public organization I thought that was strange and we did our audit training the other day and I did query this and Alistair said that yes we we should have been a bit tighter on this. So I'm now moving on to one I want to make sure that this audit plan will actually drill into that and make sure that all the people who are supposed to be entering payable order orders onto the system do so properly and I think there was a hint that actually anybody can do it rather than it going through us through an accounts department. Clearly if you have an accounts department where people do this as their day job then the chances of errors are much lower than if you ask every officer to enter all the details of an order this is what we used to do in natural England it was an absolute nightmare you had to sort of work your way through a 20-page powerpoint in order to place an order and this was a responsibility of everybody and everybody hated it we should have had a much better system anyway so and that's where I think mistakes will be made and this leads me into sort of page 44 and about unusual transactions and I was querying it and I've seen from the notes an unusual transaction is non-routine unusual due to their size or nature and that therefore occur infrequently so they will stick out and I guess they're relatively easy to sort of look at and then I started thinking about the Bulgarian case that's just gone to court about how these people were able to siphon off millions of pounds from the DWP simply by setting up a recurring set within an existing system hiding in plain sight and nobody saw it and I just wondered if we if we actually analysed not only the unusual transactions which are the ones that are fairly obvious but actually whether we notice what you might call what would turn out to be unusual activity in in apparently day-to-day stuff sorry there's a sort of there's a bit of a jumble there but I hope you can catch my drift so I'm assuming that was directed to Barry uh yes please yeah I mean it it's part of the audit plan I just wanted to check that mind that will a my understanding of how things are working or proposed to work was correct but also that the audit plan does cover those sort of risks okay so thank you councillor so through chair um when we refer to management override of controls in terms of the audit plan that's basically responding to the um mandatory uh review that we need to take at all organisations whether it be public sector or private sector the international standards of auditing expects us to review the controls that are in place so what that involves us doing is looking at the control environment both the manual controls that are in place as well as the automatic controls that are in place and the it controls that are in place and we use our it audit specialists to to review the it environment to make sure that those controls are operating effectively um what we then do is um we not sort of stress test we look at the control environment and then we look at where is there opportunities for management to override that control environment so we assume as you say large organisation there will be lots of controls in place but we assume that management would always be trying to circumvent those controls to manipulate the financial reporting we're auditors we're suspicious that's what we do we trust no one um so that's why and then we use all of the transactions we put into um a process called inflow and that analyses all of the transactions that are undertaken by the council and then what we do is we look at the number of routines to identify so we'll we'll identify targeted tests so um a great example would be has jason processed any journals because we wouldn't expect him to or the other senior officers done it who we wouldn't normally expect to now the reason we do that is because jason would be in the position to manipulate the final outcome um because that's that's what he might want to do um we may we may also be in a position whereby we're looking at other unusual transactions so are there lots of transactions of the same value with the same reference um so those will get picked up and we would then investigate to say well actually those look a little bit unusual um in the old days uh we also look used to look at journals processed at the weekends but in the world of flexible working that's not so much of a risk anymore um particularly for working on the south sunset water um so those are the sorts of things that we will be looking at and as regards the particular control environment around purchase orders and making sure that people are putting in the purchase orders properly and following that process we won't go into that level of detail that may be something that internal audit would look at but that's that's too low a level of detail for us to get to to test those controls um so again that that may be something that that colleagues in internal audit would do but that wouldn't give us material assurance because that's where we're focusing our our testing at that higher level thanks group um mandy thank you just a couple questions if i may so and if i look at page 58 which is our risks of significant value for money weaknesses um i'm just looking down the list on the right the relevant legacy councils and sort of understandably there's nothing there for mend it um because they used different auditors so my my question was will those issues for mend it appear in another paper somewhere because obviously you are our auditors now uh how will that roll forward um and the same vein if we look um along we're looking at the general funds near mark reserves i'm just trying to understand why scc is the only council there and why all of them wouldn't be there um my second question relates to page 59 and again ombudsman's investigations why only Somerset county council i'm just trying to gauge on some of them there's districts and on some there's just county councils so i'm just trying to work out why um and my last question was actually around the escalation policy on page 74 um there's a detailed escalation policy there which i've printed out for future reference um and there is a lot of detail about what happens if items need escalating but what i sort of haven't got a full sense of if what if the tables are turned and we need to escalate something as a council with an auditor so you put a lot of our escalation process i didn't see much about the reverse okay thank you so um coming to the value for money queries first so those two pages 58 and 59 are an extract of the um auditor's annual report and um you'll remember when we presented that back in january we spent quite a lot of time trying to identify which council it related to so that's why some of the issues only relate to Somerset county council some of them relate to the district council and some of them relate to Somerset council going forward so what we will be doing as part of this year's value for money work is looking at the progress that has been made in addressing those issues as far as they impact upon Somerset council in uh 23 24 in terms of the mendip issues um jason can you remind me has the annual auditors been issued by benson young so we've had the sign off the accounts but i'm struggling to remember seeing the final report picking up the value for money stuff actually i think we've had a draft but i don't think they finalized it actually so that we need to get them to complete that yeah so any any issues that they've identified we will incorporate and consider as far as they impact um around Somerset council um our value for money work on the council is due to commence in the next few weeks um so it should start um within the the latter part of June and again what we will be doing is focusing around um the key risk that you're facing now so what we're doing here is we're just reporting those issues that we've had previously we will then do a detailed risk analysis and read and detailed um planning uh for the 23 24 accounts um for for Somerset council as you would expect counselor um we've been in regular dialogue with jason and colleagues around the emerging financial situation so we have a lot of information already and we've made a number of um inquiries already and gathering evidence around the transformation plan and the baseline assessments and all that sort of thing to try and get that information and i've had a conversation with my social care colleagues um within the firm um just to try and get them to come in and do some work as well because obviously that's a critical area um of challenge for the counseling in terms of the overspends on the budget so we're bringing all that together to look at the the value for money risks for the council so that when we get to the end of this value from any program you will have an assessment of how the new council is performing and the areas where it needs to to focus in terms of the escalation policy at the end you're right it is very council focused so one of the things that we're doing is um really trying to highlight and address the fact that there are backstops in a number of organizations now unlike the council and your district councils and the county council before there are a number of councils that have not produced accounts for a number of years and they consistently miss those statutory deadlines so what we're doing is we're trying to bring out and trying to up the game and up the public reporting saying no we expect you to comply with the statutory deadline um now previously with all the councils um that formed sunset council we haven't had an issue with that those accounts have been produced um at least on on time and that's enabled the audit to progress now we know already that Jason and colleagues aren't going to produce the accounts for tomorrow we've been discussing that for a number of months so that deadline's missed so in certain ways we're not going to be deploying the escalation policy here in the way that it's sort of written because we know that you're not planning to produce those accounts till the end of September should you get to the end of September that's when we'll start to consider the escalation policy now in terms of what happens about if you're not happy with the performance of the auditors should an almost impossible event like that ever happen then your main route is to go back through PSAA and they have a complaints policy so Grant Thornton has a complaints policy that you would you would follow to say actually we're not happy with the work that Barry and the team has undertaken there is an independent partner that would undertake a review of that and see whether or not they uphold that complaint and then would take action and remove me from the audit and do all sorts of nasty things um they don't uphold that complaint they would then communicate back to you and then you have the right to go to PSAA who are the contracting authority and say actually we don't think the work is is appropriate PSAA will then consider it and you also have the right to apply to the ICAW to say that you think our work is deficient in which case the regulator would come along and have a look at our work thank you just to respond I think it's a shame really because really to me escalation should come before you head down a complaints process so I would hope that that would happen and also the Ernst & Young I do hope that doesn't drop off the edge and I'm pleased to hear that if there are issues there that they will flow through I suppose what we need to ensure is that that comes the Ernst & Young end position comes to us in a timely manner to get it into this year's plan thank you chair thanks Mandy any other questions no if not I just had one it was actually on the escalation policy as well Barry so although we we've got the formal steps set out here I assume that you'd communicate with the chair and vice chair if you did have concerns at any point because I think like you we don't like surprises so once it gets to step four and it's coming to audit committee you know that's that's almost too late for us we need to be knowing much much sooner if there are concerns so I would just urge you to communicate with us at the soonest if you did did have a major concern about these things I know you you would because we've had those sorts of conversations but just to flag that although this is what the policy says we're doing something in excess of what the policy says it's a it's a really it's a really valid point again that's sort of tried to cover step four but you're right that we would try and bring that in much earlier in the process and uh if I can just confirm you are absolutely right complaints is the end of the process I would hope that any escalation would have happened before then and again the relationship that we have for your senior finance team and the chief executive is very good and if there are any concerns we would expect that to be raised and similarly um the chair of the committee could come to us and discuss any concerns at any point um before we go down that complaint route so you're absolutely right thank you the only other thing I wanted to raise was um although the LGR risks are in in here um we don't address the transformation risks is that because that's falling into the sort of next financial year into four five rather than three four so we will be considering transformation risks as part of the this this order for 23 24 yeah thank you okay um everyone happy to move on yep thank you um for the update barry and grace um so moving on to item seven which is the joint auditors um annual report says that the management responses so if members recall um we had a set of uh management responses which came to committee several months ago we asked for more clarity we asked them to be beefed up i think um if memory serves so um this is the beefed up version so i've got shan hello shan welcome to the audit committee um are you going to present the report yes thank you perfect over to you hi for those of you that don't know me my name's shan kenny um my substantive role is a finance business partner and i was previously supporting children's families and education but at the moment i'm an interim financial governance lead um and i've predominantly been working on action plans around independent reviews of which the grant faunton um auditors annual report is considered to be one of those and also on the sit for financial management code so the report today um presents an update on progress um the original report included management responses but what we've been working on over the last few weeks on a couple of months is developing an actual action plan that sits beneath those key recommendations and improvement recommendations that were um presented in the report this report today um in appendix um a includes the actions that relate to the seven key recommendations there were also six improvement recommendations our focus has been on the key recommendations because they provide um significant risk um we will then be looking at the improvement recommendations and making sure that we have a series of actions underneath um all of those six improvement recommendations so for now this report focuses on 25 actions in relation to the key the seven key recommendations each action has a due date and an owner and this there are six actions that have already been completed all of the remaining actions remain on track to be achieved and at the moment there are no overdue actions one action has been closed following the council's agreed commercial investment property disposal strategy which has meant that the um they one of the actions that sit below that key recommendation is no longer relevant or appropriate and the progress is presented in appendix a the um recommendation of this paper is for audit committee to note the progress against the actions and i wasn't planning to go through the report in any more detail but happy to take any questions um did you want to come in jason yeah just to add a couple of things i hope members find the format in appendix very helpful it's a piece of software that we've got that we're using for performance but we're also now using it to track actions like this and also we'll be using it for risks as well i think the format hopefully is really clear in terms of who you're expecting to do what by when and how far they've got with the progress so if this kind of ticks the box in terms of that style of presentation so i think it's better than what we've had before because it's on a system nobody can forget to do anything that was one of our concerns which is why chan's been picking up all of these across all the reviews we've done to bring them all into one place we've had quite a lot of actions across the piece it'd be very easy for some of those to slip through the net this using this software means they can't um so if members like that we will use that more and more you'll see over the course of the sort of future periods as it were mandy i don't like it i love it as simon cowell would say i've been watching i second mandy's joy for the format i've been watching too much britain's got talent this week um so yeah so firstly i forgot to say on the last report thank you thank you for the covering reports we haven't had them before i think it's really helpful certainly when reading through 340 pages it gives that break and gets your head into you know this is what this next report's about and certainly for any of the public that might enjoy reading audit papers i think it flows much better so thank you for that i think that's really helpful um i thought it was a really great table actually because it said it all very clearly without using too many words um so i think that was really helpful um just a couple of comments on it that i was surprised to see um nearly all the due dates a lot of them were set at 31st of march 2025 i.e as late as they could be um always concerns me when everything's at the end of the year because i would expect some to be aiming perhaps for mid-year or end of year so quite often with something like this that people tend to just go to the last possible date and then hopefully deliver better than that um the other thing i was slightly surprised to see was the adult transformation program at embedding it at 90 percent yet children's was at 20 percent and i was just really interested to see that disparity between the adults delivery of it and the children's and i'd really like some to understand i suppose at some point a little bit more about that bearing in mind there are sort of two real pressure errors it just felt a disparity between between the two have you got the detail on that one shan yeah so um in terms of the end day um i agree and actually the approach that we took when i met with all of the senior responsible officers because this is their pro it's not mine you know i i've coordinated it and met with them but we we did talk about the end date for these and because it's an annual report um we felt that even though some of these actions actually might go beyond the 31st of march like achieving the transformation program for children's services is a three-year transformation program so to deliver that which is part of the action is actually beyond this but it's trying to cover the actions from grant faunton's recommendations and then ultimately we'll have another annual auditor report to see the progress up until the end of this financial year and then we'll have a new set of recommendations for the following financial year there are some that were brought forward because it was more sensible for those dates to to be achieved or more appropriate for those dates we achieved earlier um we can we can uh challenge ourselves on those dates and i can go back to senior responsible officers and say why not sooner um but working through we did look at it on an individual basis we didn't just plug the end date in and work from there so there is some logic behind those dates um in terms of the difference between adults and children's so with the embedding and delivering adults transformation program mel um uh felt that the actual um adults governance structure around their transformation program was far more embedded in the wider organization's transformation program and that the governance and the reporting into the transformation board is quite clearly defined and has already been running for this the last financial year so she felt quite strongly that it was embedded and the forecast for delivery around her the adults transformation program is good at the moment um so she felt that to embed the action around embedding and delivering the transformation program was quite well um mature it was quite mature in terms of over the last year if we think about this recommendation it goes back to 22 23 financial year um so during 23 24 mel feels that there's been a lot of work and that that is almost 100 there um in terms of conversation with claire winter and richard selwyn they've had to do a refresh of their transformation program and their governance arrangements so they felt that they weren't as embedded because we did have a conversation about why the difference between children's and adults so because of their refresh during 23 24 they set up a new governance structure and new governance arrangements for their transformation delivery and that is now embedded in the council's transformation delivery but they've only had one or two meetings so it's not mature yet and they wanted to kind of rest that during this financial year and see you know hopefully that will work and it will now feel like it's part of the council's transformation board and transformation delivery um so that was the difference um between i guess it's the maturity and the kind of the children's services refresh made it quite different thank you for that really great answer but not only that for me validates the figures we've got in front of us so thank you i've got a little queue simon so i've got nine norman gwen quill and then yourself okay thank you yeah just to echo a comment appendix a great um i'd like to ask a question about the microsoft dynamics side of it the kr six stroke one continue uh to develop financial processes relating in databases um and the data within the financial system is accurate and complete i'm glad to see there's a 31st of july there for the finish of it but does that mean that um there have been some gremlins in the accuracy and you need to modify the system or you know what is it there it just raised the question in my mind um so for me it's the recording and validating of it so we're assured that the interfaces are up and working this was one of my biggest pain points coming through go live was the interfaces act like people but they're done on an automation bit and there's less eyes then on it because you rely on it going through the system in an automated manner so um my target for this week next week with with the we've got a a internal system support thing that's a mix of it and finance officers um is to have an interface dashboard not only does it tell us the success of an interface hosting but actually going right back to that interface catalog which is what are we expecting to receive into dynamics did we receive it was the information in there complete then the success of it posting into the system and then into the reconciliation side are we expecting on our budget monitoring or any outputs and for me i haven't quite got that whole throughput of evidence on an easy to see dashboard we know they're posting and we error handle the where they don't but they don't work and we resolve them but i just want to be much more proactive being able to see it and if a file never received from a subsystem we should know that instantly rather than react to because we didn't create something at the end of it so that's what i'm focusing on in terms of that finding well thank you mr chairman um yes i was interested at the progress bar because um perhaps in my naivety i wondered whether these were all being handled as a project with milestones that were being met um over time but i think the answer we just had from shan seems to indicate that some of the judgments are subjective from the project owners which which is all right um but i just wondered about the level of detail and if you take the adult services transformation program as an example um i wondered if it's appropriate for that scrutiny committee to be over across the detail of that in specifics or does all this just evolve back onto this committee because clearly you know if it wanting to sound rude or anything like that i mean if the officer's judgment is all fine and dandy actually the reality might be slightly different and i was just wondering if there were project plans with defined milestones in that gives you a much better handle on what's going on rather than a feel that everything's going okay so you're essentially asking for what assurance we can get that the that the program the detail behind all of these figures is actually being looked at by the appropriate scrutiny committee is that appropriate shan sorry as well and um in terms of the subjectiveness of it all my role is to not just type into the system what the senior responsible officer is saying is the update so also behind this i've asked for evidence of why they feel it's at 90 percent 20 percent 40 percent and in the system which is really a really clever system i've been able to attach documents and related evidence to um kind of back where the the owner feels subjectively that they are and if uh so the conversation is more about my challenge of the owner to ask them about why they feel that they're at that particular level in terms of my role as a financial governance and kind of my scrutiny of those actions in the future the idea is is that the owners will access the system themselves and update their progress but i or somebody will have a role to scrutinize that so it's a good question as to where the officer scrutiny is i think that's within jason's team within finance to challenge whether that financial governance and that financial scrutiny is there but also where does that sit with members um the way the system works is that at some point in the future the plan is to have um risk and other related actions all linked in the system it's got the ability to do that we just haven't set that up yet and ideally um if adult scrutiny is looking at a problem the system should be able to pull in all the actions that relate to that problem all the risks that relate to that problem and the conversation can be about the actual issue and what's being done to uh change that or mitigate against any risks not have independent reports so the scrutiny committee won't necessarily just get a finance report and then another meeting get a risk report and then another meeting get a transformation report the the subject matter will bring all those things together through the system so the scrutiny should be better in terms of the reports that are being received will bring all those things together the this report as well alongside all the other action plans on the independent reviews are going to go to the performance risk and budget board which liz chairs and that board will get more detail behind these action plans so behind these there's um a kind of a more sophisticated and fuller report that can come out the system with notes attached and they can then look at the system and look at the documentation and scrutinize the progress in that position so that's a board's role the prb board's role in looking at those and they'll get quarterly reports to be able to do that so that's the kind of governance around the activity that we've set up um yeah of course quill um thanks that's very very interesting very reassuring i mean i think that slightly bothered me is that you've got different levels with cracks in between and it's making sure that all the cracks are covered or at least have a safety net um what you've just articulated means the level of detail that has to go into the system at the outset is quite high you actually i mean hello asking hello uh what you're asking is a number and i'll get back sorry can we ask whoever's online with their microphone when you finish recording please hang up or press thank you okay right sorry we'll carry on oh yeah i'll start again um what i'm saying is that the in order for the system to get out what you want quite a lot of detailed information has to go in at the start which are which i'm assuming is down to a level of business planning at the outset for you know if you say this is what we're trying to do and this is what it will entail these are the various milestones and then of course you can read the system as you say is much more sophisticated than previous management systems we'll be able to extract that data and actually say well this is objectively where we are against those particular targets um is that a new thing and and and how well versed or trained are managers for putting this kind of information in because there's always the old adage about junk in junk out i think what you said sounds really excellent and particularly the level of detail that can be drawn out but i think i'd like assurance that everybody is able is capable of using it properly so we get out of it what we need i mean in terms of the system user friendliness i was given access and had an hour session with somebody who's already quite familiar with the system and can set up rapport and but that hour session was to enable me to be an administrator not just a user so it was relatively easy for me to become an administrator of the system um and set up these action plans ideally in the future once an independent review comes in and you and and service will receive the recommendations the findings the recommendations and and will start to build its own action plan if it if it agrees that it's going to go ahead and work on those recommendations the at the moment but this is in a plethora of places some spreadsheets some word documents and powerpoints that information with good governance should be input somewhere um so at the moment it's in lots of different places and the ability and the efficiency around then connecting all of those things is hard work and so every time for example mel needs to produce something for a scrutiny that will bring in our risk and her action plans and our transformation program she's got to draw that from lots of different systems the input has already happened but in a spreadsheet or in a powerpoint deck or something equivalent to that if the input is done at the source at the point of where the independent review is received the recommendations are agreed there there needs to be an action plan and the input happens then the efficiency is further down the line where then you don't have to try and bring all these different reports together and retype things i started doing this in a in an excel spreadsheet and i was trying to add links to the spreadsheet and it started to crash it couldn't cope with it i there were different documents and different sharepoint sites i couldn't bring them all together i managed to do everything that i'd been spending months doing on a spreadsheet into this system in a matter of weeks just by trans translating that information into here and having those quick conversations with the senior responsible officers ultimately because they don't have access to the system at the moment we need to set them up but once they have access to that system there'll be trigger emails they can click on a link they go in they update their progress bar and they update the notes if they want to they can add documents that are already present somewhere else and they can link it with a related to to another risk so the efficiency the overall process i think is more efficient the input is still probably at the same level but easier done and then ultimately linked together at the end of the process thanks shan um simon thank you chair i suppose i'm leading on from will and mandy said to an extent um in so much as that with these targets if i look at the children's and the adults one what worries me is how the percentages aren't decided upon and that there is a lot of subjective opinion as to how well somebody's doing and that could be a manager being complacent thinking we're there or nearly there or personalities of managers so some might be more challenging of themselves and i'd like to think that we never got to a hundred percent on some of these targets because that would mean we're not continually reviewing and um checking that we have embedded something say we've embedded something is relying on those managers um doing their job properly but also it's um are those managers the best people to judge or challenge that something is happening within their area so i think the prb's role with liz as the chair is to oversee those um are those challenges uh realistic um ultimately grant thornstone will be coming in looking at their previous report and looking for evidence around progress and there they will be making conclusions and findings around progress but also around whether this is something that needs to a slight change in the kind of view or the actions or the recommendations that need to be made even if it's along the same line of the transformation program it might be with a slightly different lens and looking at where the next set of recommendations and actions will need to happen so this will be um validated on an annual basis through grant faunton's auditors annual report and the progress will need to be evidence hopefully already in the system because we'll be collecting the evidence as we go thanks um one second liz um is the plan for us to receive any further updates on this report will we get this report coming back to us in future or will this format just be used to be used for for other types of report along this this line what's where do we take this from from here i think that's up to you as the committee um i'm i it's all in the system so if you want to report it's very easy to spit out the appendix and give you an update yeah so at what frequency do members wish to see this report simon's at every meeting are we talking about i've added that to my work program question for the end share we can have the conversation now if you want how frequently do you want to see it if it's hitting the button and it's not having the rest then sure it should come back each meeting pardon me if you don't have it regularly you are three months behind the curve to picking up on an on an issue my view would be it should come to each of our meetings so that we can have a comparator with the previous uh state of play so we know where we actually are as opposed to where we would like to be in three months time and not know about it for three months that's fair enough that's fair enough i've got liz to come in unless you want to come specifically on the question in terms of the comparator is it possible to sort of use different colors for month one progress and then the next report comes in with a yellow to say where where it's moved on just to help us rather than sort of trying to compare two things and see if they've moved but shall have to look into that simon about that and um check with him but every time i've asked him a question can it do this can't do that he keeps saying yes to me so um i'm assuming that that is possible yeah i mean it's just so make it easier for us to see what's moved and what hasn't moved all right so simon's colorblind so we might have to go back to square one okay okay well i i think there's a big thumbs up to the style of report um i think it visually it helps us to to track these sorts of issues and progress across the organization um i just asked jason a moment ago about um kr 7.2 which is about procurement waivers coming to audit committee regularly so these are any items which have been procured outside of the council's normal processes so where we've not gone out to tender etc and i'm assured that we will be getting a report coming to committee just in case committee members are concerned about that but i'm going to come to liz he's been very patient thanks i'm quite happy to be patient at this stage chair because i think seeing this first report it's just the beginning of i won't call it a revolution but it's going to be a very different way that we will be reported to as members and i thank sharn and all her colleagues for the work particularly simon for the work that they've done in the early stages of this i also want to reassure you that regarding the performance risk and budget board that the chief executive duncan sharky is very much involved and has been a really keen driver of that piece of work of setting up that board and if things go exactly as we hope and plan when you see on this report at the top of appendix there you see generated on the 16th of may when risk is in the same software and risks are then exported to go into committee reports i've asked that the generated date be included so that every time we're seeing risks in a committee paper we know the date on which those risks were correct and relevant and that we understand that things can change and that officers obviously will be able to get in and work with what will be a very dynamic system and jason will as time goes on he'll explain budget monitoring as well as risk monitoring particularly the strategic risks and the performance monitoring will start to come together in quarterly reports so the first meeting of the prb board that i chaired was very much about process and framework once we get all of that in place then it becomes a proper challenge board and we can really have a look at where things are going well and where they're not so good and on on adults and children something that's been really interesting to me so i'll share with you is my colleague counselor heather shearer of course did a period of time as lead member on adults and is now on children families and education and she said to me so this is informal feedback she said to me although adults is a bigger spend she sees children's as much more complex that there are far more threads of work and that it is very much more complex and less predictable so i thought that was one of the most useful pieces of feedback i've had from a colleague and i i think actually we should share it more widely than than just order because although it's a small amount of money it's less predictable and more complex thanks liz um manny have you got a burning question on this issue because i'd quite like to move on if we can that board list just started which is really good they're looking at risk i'm just wondering when it's established further down the line if our chair has time i wouldn't mind actually him being able to have access to that board just to report back how it's going i think that'd be useful you'd be very welcome especially if you bring cake might be pushing it right um shan thank you so much for uh for your report there i think members have overwhelmingly given the the style of a thumbs up um i think the the answers you've given today have been very uh full and robust and thank you for your clarity okay right moving on to item eight which is the progress report on the internal audit plan uh so morning alistair thank you chairman yeah so this is the 23 24 internal audit plan update before i do give an update on this just going back to the previous agenda item so you may think back to march when you approved the 24 25 internal audit plan we did take a lot of information into account pulling that plan together and it does cover those external audit recommendations so we are looking at contract management we are looking at adult social care we are looking at the dsg deficit management plan during 24 25 so you should get some additional independent assurance from the work that we're doing but i'll just highlight that okay so moving on to this paper in question then so this is 23 24 audit plan update and it will be my final update for the 23 24 audit plan any outstanding work i will just depend onto the progress update reports for 24 25 to save different reports coming to you so agenda page 90 gives you an overview of the plan and the purpose of this report for you is to make sure that you can see what work we're delivering where we are with the audit plan and for me to highlight any changes to that audit plan and bring to your attention any significant governance risk or control matters that have been highlighted through our work and so any audits where we give limited or no assurance i will bring those to your attention that highlights that governance and controls could be improved agenda page 91 there is one thing i do need to bring to your attention as required under the internal auditing standards i need to comment if there's any resource implications for us to deliver our plan i have got two members of staff that are leaving we are in a recruitment process at the moment so i'm looking to make sure that that impact is minimal but it does mean there might be some slippage in delivering of the work but in terms of the extent of that i don't know but as i said because we're recruiting at the moment i expect it to be minimal agenda page 93 gives you an overview of the internal audit recommendations that have been summarized throughout the year in terms of 23 24 and it shows where they are against each director obviously we'll be looking to update and amend this dashboard in line with the new structure you can click on the link as members of the committee that will take you through to the detailed dashboard and the individual recommendations themselves and the latest progress updates that we've had one thing i would like to comment on this is around health and safety obviously we did a health and safety governance review earlier in 23 24 and i have had quite a lot of information from the health and safety lead on the progress that's being made but given this is a strategic risk on the risk register on the next agenda item of health and safety it might be something that you want to consider as an agenda item in its own right just to have an update and to get yourselves your own assurance around governance and how those risks are being mitigated and moving forward in terms of the authority agenda page 94 highlights no additional changes to the 23 24 audit plan moving on to the significant findings i just need to bring to your attention agenda page 96 this highlights the whistleblowing policy and awareness i won't go into the details on this because i think it's quite self-explanatory there in the report and you've also got the link to take you through to the final version of the report as well again for the clarity of the new members of the audit committee wherever we do give limited or no assurance we will endeavor to schedule in a follow-up audit to make sure those recommendations are implemented and give independent oversight to those recommendations so agenda page 97 does highlight where we've conducted a follow-up audit around school condition surveys highlighting that those recommendations are predominantly have been completed and implemented there is one priority one recommendation that was almost complete and if you do read the description there on page 97 that something was supposed to happen from the first of april i understand from the beginning of may that has started so that recommendation should now be shown as complete and moved on agenda page 98 through to agenda page 105 just shows the complete summary of the internal audit plan and where we are with it what i do need to bring to your attention is on agenda page 103 so there was a homes england capital funding grant piece of work that we did now this was on behalf of homes england it's there highlighted as an advisory in the grants basically we're undertaking the testing for homes england and given the feedback that we give to them they will then produce a report that is sent out to the authority that report has been sent out and they've made two recommendations that must be implemented before the end of august so we've added those recommendations to the tracking database and we will do some work around making sure those recommendations are implemented as they are a requirement by homes england around the grant funding so we will work with the service to make sure as i say those recommendations are implemented and the evidence is forwarded onto homes england to show that that has been done in terms of work outstanding you can see that on agenda page 100 and 101 those are the audits that will append to the top of the 24 25 audit plan going forward and they will be clearly marked as 23 24 the status of these audits has moved on since i wrote this report so hopefully there will be some more updates and we can wrap that work up as soon as possible happy to take any questions from members of the committee okay simon thank you chair uh yeah page 93 i was slightly concerned by the number of uh that was still outstanding um 91 days plus there were 48 still outstanding sorry the screen's gone it's too long and the 48 still outstanding 91 plus days um which is always a concern there's anything that's three months over this uh needs attention as far as i normally suggest to you all right thank you um completely agree with you on that um one of the things we will try and do is through the restructure of the organization is make sure the offices are assigned to the recommendations if they are leaving the organization the appropriate other offices are assigned oversight of them obviously there's a lot of change going on in Somerset council at the moment and we are conscious of whether audit recommendations are still applicable and managing risk if services and things are changing but also making sure there's good oversight of them so one of the things we will be talking about and as shan has mentioned with pentana it is a software system that was used by Sedgemoor district council historically and when we did audit services for Sedgemoor all our recommendations were uploaded to pentana and monitored through that so that will be something we'll be looking at to see if that is going to be a way forward just to make sure there is still good oversight because from my point of view any audit recommendations assigned to an officer should be in their one-to-one monitoring framework thank you thank you alistair um thank you for the reassurance what i'm i'm looking for is the is clarity that yes there's been some turnover of staff yes there will be new officers uh allocated to to to the various projects um but i still see 91 days and 48 items that are overdue and i don't need the reassurance that those 91 day plus are being looked at as a matter of urgency rather than i don't want to see in the next quarterly report that's left up to any other number um and but you know we've still got some of the others not yet due um and and within due within 30 days one one to 30 days overdue i don't want to see those numbers all those numbers rising and it's we need to be confident that those numbers are under control and being worked at and likewise the number of open priority one actions as well um we can't see the um the spread of um which priority actions are are in which um time period so we don't know if it's a load of the priority one actions are just overdue or if if those priority actions have been waiting for some time so i think if we've gone to the trouble of of saying that actually these are these are the top things we ought to be working on and to resolve these governance issues then we need to make sure that that they're being prioritized in the organization so um what assurance can we have around around that alistair i know that um the statutory officer's board has been discussed around recommendation tracking the process at the moment so you're clear on it we do take a report of course a report to dmt's where relevant showing the outstanding recommendations some directorates have assigned a coordinator to help track and push recommendations and get updates from officers we are designing an escalation process as well to give more oversight and clarity to it and i know the ceo is keen to make sure that um these are picked up and are included and people are challenged if they're not implementing them andy thank you i think it's a really good coin around governance really about that ownership of all actions across the authority as we we'll call it downsize restructure whatever you may i think it's a real challenge sometimes and i know having worked with pam previously some owners of risks weren't there anymore and then they weren't updated and were showing on the system so i think when someone does leave the organization there'll be so many different things that they link into it's making sure everything flows through following follow up follows on and i think that'll be a real challenge for the organization moving forward so my question actually is one that's slightly linked to this but i may need a written response to and it relates to school condition surveys um now i think we'll all be really aware that there are there's a lot of work probably needed doing in some schools the work is rated you know those urgent works take priority my understanding is we've had some more money out of government a bit more than we normally get so my question is really having some reassurance that all of that money will be spent on school conditions work and that it is covering the sort of health and safety work that needs doing and if there's anything more that's not urgent then that would be great and i've just connected that to the school's condition i know it's not information we'll have to hand but i would love to have an email shall we ask um the chair of um children's group need to come back with a response on that specific question don't mind who it is but it it just triggered when i saw the school conditions survey jason can you um ask um on our behalf um for assurance from the chair of children's group neither that's um that has been captured yeah and also get an update from the service military response for that area as well in terms of where they are with that in terms of the funding the priorities and how that's been used etc so get a response back to you and i'm happy to share that with all the committee if that's helpful thank you i think it's something that's close to consolation and myself and we are aware that you know there are always always a long list of works thank you right quite like to move on unless anyone's got anything burning um this okay can i just clarify that the software that's called pentana is now the software that's called idea gen that we're so we're referring to idea gen it before it was pentana when it was with sedgemoor sedgemoor were earlier doctors as angela farmer would be able to tell us and so there's i think it's called a good deal we have got very good deal yes so we've got a really good the benefits of unit reacher wonderful okay thank you folks um thanks alistair um i think the report is noted um and we will look forward to the final report uh so moving on to item nine which is a strategic risk management update and plan hello pam hello angela it's going to be me today chair so good morning members um a couple of updates for you from a strategic and from a risk management point of view um first one obviously is risk management has moved um directorates we're now sat within strategy and performance um it makes the links um stronger between performance and risk and as um and shan has identified obviously that that combination of performance risk and budget will give a better overview of services as we move forward um as you've all said we are moving the risk management system to to idea gen from jcad and we have got jcad until the to march next year um so there is a piece of work to do to to transfer the risks over that said um we are currently working with idea gen just to update the the risk um the risks of information so that it actually so when we do import data actually imports into the right place and plus the fact as well that we have the right information that we need from a risk management perspective um we will be identical we will be putting risk on there though um transformation risks fraud risks and hopefully the new said strategic risk will go on there over the next couple of months and as you'll as you would have seen from shan's report um obviously we'll be starting reporting in the new um idea gen format as well um in respect of the committee template which was raised at committee last last time um obviously there's there's a report in the an overview of the potential changes to the template um there was a piece of work asked by i believe the chair on an overview of of how the risk templates used in in other committee reports and i've done a brief piece of work in a appendix four um i did use march which probably not the best month to use but it was probably a shorter month to use so my apologies but it does give you a little bit of an overview um i'd have to say probably risks are reported where you expect them to be reported which is executive um and a lot of reports that go to prior committees such as scrutiny will go onto executive anyway so risk is reported um a number of committees do have report on a different template which is much simpler template than what you'd what you'd see for this committee or executive so risk isn't a prominent feature in those reports so risks aren't being reported through those templates there is potential to to miss some of those risks in those reports especially if that that report doesn't emanate onto executive or your good selves um the other one the other um noticeable thing is a lot of report a lot of committees and hr committee is a good example are actually just powerpoint presentations they're not actual committee reports so again you do have the potential to miss risk some some of them um i think there was one from um one of the one of the schools or education reports did have a page on risk but there is a potential to miss risk so it's an intro it was an interesting journey to to look through some of that stuff but it's something for the committee to to be aware of um in respect to the committee at the committee template um as you'll see from the report we have put proposals to democratic we we haven't heard anything further back the intention is really to try and try and sort of covered it from a number of different angles the first one obviously is to identify any existing risks within jcad that follows through sorry idea gen in due course apologies so yeah florida didn't slip there um but to um to follow through with ensuring that we do make those those connections between risk and whatever the report is the report subject there will be the opportunity to identify new risk now new risk in the in a committee report is very much about the risk that is emanating from the subject matter being reported um what we're saying is look just identify the risk score it as if without mitigation so what we would call an inherent risk so members can see that in actual fact you know that that raw risk is is is x and it's going to be scored i probably high very high may even be low whatever so you've got that information if the report does not mitigate that risk so a lot of what in in the past what i found is a lot of people will identify risk and actual fact the recommendation to do x y or z will actually mitigate some or all of that risk if it doesn't then obviously we'll put in the process well we'll we'll pick that up and ensure that those risks are picked up and put onto the register um moving forward um obviously strategic risk review update is is attached as appendix we've got the new the register there um we've got 16 risks um eight high for sorry eight very high for high and for medium uh the report sets out as some changes uh both of the two very high financial risks that we had prior to april jason has gone through and reviewed and both of them have now had a reduction in their score and jason has very kindly agreed some updates which has the reasons for enabling the reduction in score the general housing risk that we have which is about the failure to continue supply of housing has has actually gone up and we are now in the we are now have we have now some controls within there which we previously didn't have um we will continue to as i said strategic risks are currently under review um that reviews um in instigated by by the chief executive officer um that work is started started to happen we've got a number of potential areas of strategic risks we need to review um i would like to think it will come back to a future committee i don't suspect it will come back to the next one in june but i would imagine one probably september committee it will it will come back to the last piece um just like to identify is the risk matrix which um as you know um lindy um in previous committees has identified a nominal long a couple of anomalies and say that word rightly um we have just up we have updated it um and the new interim matrix is before you it was a supplement to the papers because we had um some discussions at prb um as to the sort of like the the high very high and and things like that so um hopefully that will be if members agree then that will be in process placed form june until december 24 after which we'll review it again so we've taken it down to sort of three particular layers you've got obviously a red layer which is 16 and above you've got your what we call yellow layer which is 15 12 9 accordingly and then you've got green below that we're proposing that risks which are either one or two are are not recorded but then that to a certain extent that might just be that's also an option if people do so that's before you today um i i'm happy to take any further questions who'd like to go first rosemary or mandy let rosemary go first yeah i happen to feel the way things are presented and the way the agenda was put together you might as well speak swahili to me because i have no idea where the two match up i had some questions from reading the papers and i'd like some answers to those um on page 118 you talk about commercial investments um but you're the borrowing why it was borrowed and the way it's been handled is two different things investments um were the commercial investments as i understand it was to give a long-term help to the council but they're being sold off individually for short-term gain and it will never work if you invest in the stock market as some of us do you you either go for long term and take less or you go for short term and take a risk so which are you doing that's the council i can ask not the the auditors might be able to point us in the right direction but none of it makes any sense in the way it's presented i'm sorry right i think i'll probably get jason to answer some of that but i want one of the the difficult things sometimes to for people to get their heads around um rosemary and this isn't just directed at you this is a general thing in local government is that you don't borrow for one specific asset you borrow to fund your capital requirement so you're not the borrowing is not necessarily attached to a specific asset although sometimes when the borrowing is initially taken out that's the way it's couched that's uh i'm right in saying that jason is that fair so sometimes it becomes difficult then to disentangle that that borrowing overall so um it becomes difficult to flow that through the the papers which means if you're handling everything overall it's a right mess isn't it well not necessarily because you're you're you're borrowing to fund the council's capital finance requirements you're not borrowing to fund the specific asset so um there are two fundamentally different approaches as far as i'm concerned jason i'll bring you in to clarify um yeah so in terms of commercial investments remember somerset council started on the first 23 inherited position from the previous councils that was a mixed position so you had the county council had no investment properties four districts did one of the districts had only invested in the investment properties and had fixed these day debt to fund those the other three hadn't so they were actually financing longer-term investments from short-term cash so you've got that dynamic that's happening as well and obviously since then interest rates have gone from you know the 300-year layer of 0.1 up to where they are now at 5.25 percent if you're borrowing 200 million that's quite a lot of increasing costs so actually when we looked at the portfolio from somerset council's point of view it wasn't actually making return for the council it was actually costing the council we so that's where the decision uh to dispose of the properties come from you're right there should be a long-term investment with longer term debt set aside for them that wasn't a position this council inherited on top of that i think you have the government policy that's been really clear in terms of their guidance to councils and how they have subsequently changed the rules around counts borrowing to say they don't think council should be in this business they don't think we're skilled enough to do it haven't got the right setups to do it and shouldn't be acting as property developers in terms of trading properties that type of stuff so the government have made it quite difficult for authorities to borrow through those rigs for doing that so you've had the kind of government policy our practical position overlaying that then we have our capitalization direction and the need to fund 77 million pounds actually we could go out and borrow that we'd pay an extra one percent premium on on that debt so when you add it up it's kind of close to double digits to finance that debt so actually the cheaper way of us of doing that is by asset disposals so it's kind of those three bits all joined together i think the short answer is you wouldn't have really wanted to start from where we are but unfortunately that is the position we've inherited so we're trying to untangle that as best we can do right i've got a little queue so i've got lindy online and then i've got him mandy do you want to come in yeah any other hands like lindy good morning i'm sorry you've had difficulty getting in online but the floor's all yours thank you good morning everyone um i'll just email my questions that i had on the external audit plan for the new year as well as the internal audit report that was discussed and which i missed unfortunately all right so i must say thank you very much to the risk team it's looking much better i just have a question on page 116 on the risk org 70 if you look at the second scoring the current score it is five five and then 15 so i assume the five five need to be updated because five times five would give you 25 not 15 and then i've noted a similar similar error on page 119 um if you look at risk number 68 uh there's a zero zero in the inherent score however the current and desired is 16 and 12 so that must have not pulled through and then just the last one on page 121 um there is risk number 66 and the score on inherent is four four which should be 16 and not 20 thank you jay got our hands up and put put it down to to type of errors so apologies yeah thank you for picking those up lindy thanks lindy does it did you have any other questions or is that it um that is it thank you and thank you for the progress plan with seek out in the three different phases it it helps us follow where you are at and what you've done so far so well done thank you perfect um tim and then mandy thank you chair um yeah page 116 risk 62 the health and safety management especially with schools now it seems to me that almost all these other high risks contain factors uh outside of our control this one we i would assume that we pretty much have full ownership of yet the risk still remains at 12 uh is that because of the severe consequences of the risk make sure um the 12 score is actually what they would call the target score so the the first score is 25 so that's before any mitigation the mitigation is in place um is um it's put the score down to 20 so the target score is 12 at the moment it's not it's not a score that we're currently monitoring the current story is 20 so it's one we aspire to it's not necessarily one we're working to at the moment okay mandy thank you very much chair um so first of all probably the most comprehensive risk report we've ever seen in the committee i very much welcome it and welcome the work and some of the background that's been done in bringing the report um it's it's a lot of work and it's appreciated and i think needed i think we've probably got more serious risks facing us for a number of reasons than we've ever faced so it's really important that we get on top of it as a committee so my first uh question i suppose concern is around the move from uh jcad to idea gen where we've been asked to note that but there's no dialogue in the paper at all about it and it would have been nice to perhaps have had a little presentation just to understand why the move and what it's going to deliver i.e will it deliver what we need it to deliver um so um that was my first question um it's my second question um well a comment actually is on page 110 it outlines that there's no consistency in terms of how risk is presented in reports and i really again thank uh thank the team for the work on that because i've been banging that drum for a long time it's nice to see it's been looked into and formed um part of a report and in fact later in the reports today we will see some risk that isn't laid out in in that manner and i think the the quicker we can get to sort of that consistent approach and consistent presentation and for it to have the priority in the papers that it should have i think the better will be for all concerned um my last challenge i suppose is around the org 0070 and it says in the paper that that's been reviewed and that there's a downgrade of that risk um i suppose i'd like to challenge that um i can't agree that a sustainable mtfp should be downgraded from critical to major i suppose my thinking behind that is we haven't had the quarter to one figures yet we're still facing 100 million shortfall plus next year and over 80 million of this year's shortfall was bridged with the use of one-off funding i reserves and an in principle capitalization direction that's all there in fact the financial strategy showed that even if every plan saving was delivered to the maximum it would barely balance the budget and that's without any additional pressures arising between now and next next staple which could happen um from page 115 of the report it says that taking out reserves held on behalf of others shows the forecast reserves position of 74.9 million by the end of 25 26 and the forecast budget gap for 25 26 of 103.9 million is in excess of the forecast level in reserves of 74.9 million and we have to remember that the current usable reserves are just above the recommended minimum of 30 million so for me when i look at all that and it's all been through a number of papers i cannot agree and i i i'm up for challenge on it that that should be uh reduced and i'll just leave it there i hope you don't mind the challenge but when i just look at all the facts that are there through this paper and others it it doesn't no i think that the challenge is always welcome i think what i would like to do is bring the management response um on that in so that jason um can explain where his thinking is at the moment and then um we can probably take it from there yeah these these risk goals they're always judgments they're always a point in time i think in that one the reason why the likelihoods move down if you look at the um risk table likelihood of four is a 50 to 90 chance there is likelihood of five is 90 plus i think at this point in time and that might change in a couple of weeks time so need to be really clear on that you risk is dynamic it does move is that if you see the the bottom of page 115 some of the comments around that we have now an approved financial strategy agreed by council that says how we can balance the 25 26 budget so we have a plan clearly if we don't deliver on that plan the risk will go back up again but at this point in time we have an approved plan we have the workforce program in place council uh last week approved some voluntary redundancies and we're into the compulsory redundancies program coming shortly that will significantly reduce the staffing base again that takes to the direction of trouble there's been a huge amount of work done around the dedicated schools grant it's not there but it's in a far better place than what it was before and uh the final one that kind of completes the picture is is around deluxe and conversations with them is that we can amend our capitalization direction so if the 23 24 turn is worse than expected then you can amend your figures etc so taking those bits into account is why i've called it before rather than a five um i think also actually one of the things that today affects me of why i'm slightly in the four rather than the five and i think it needs a fine judgment call so i'm very happy to be challenged on it either could be right in truth is i think the general election being slightly earlier is actually good news for local government because it means our finance settlement which comes in december whoever the government is at least got a few months to think about it if there's been a late election i think that that that pushes the risks up to local government that'll be just a rollover budget which will mean bigger budget gaps so i think today i think on balance and it's not a perfect yes i'm right you're wrong mandy it really isn't it is it is on a whichever way you know i could be persuaded in for a cup of coffee which one i call it i've called it a four because of those things in place if something slipped so if the financial strategy if action was not taken in the next few weeks on those various things then it would very easily go to a five it like i say i think it's on a knife edge of where it is but i called it when i wrote the report as a four rather than a five i would disagree jason and we have won things in the past and we'll still be friends after i i just still think with with the background you can have a plan in place and a plan is a great thing but it's actually now about delivery of of that plan and that be we've yet to see and if i absolutely and i think this is where you've got to be careful of risk scores they imply a precise measure these aren't these are judgments aren't they um what it indicates whether it's a four or five this is one of the biggest risks facing this council whether you score on a four or five it's still one of the biggest risks facing the council and if something goes wrong it will cause major major impacts across the council i don't think anybody's in doubt that the fact we're discussing it actually is really helpful because i think the worst thing you can have on these races nobody talks about them that's when it's a reality isn't it but yeah take all those points on board all right norman uh sorry about coming in on tail end um uh page 117 or 191 whichever way you look at it uh general housing failure 64 um it's just to take issue with with a couple of um items there um the reduction in homes yes it's a serious impact but it hasn't had the phosphates issue a huge economic impact on on the community as well and and phosphates by and large are being unlocked now that's fine but it is still a hold up with the legal profession and getting the section 106 is out the door to get this system moving so there's still if you like um a log jam there and the other one is to step over the line and i'm sorry about this uh jason in advance but in defense of council woods a little bit here i'm afraid um and that is the previous page and the commercial investments um and liking the shares i'm aware as i'm sure everybody is that our average borrowing is now uh uh 4.83 across the board but it does seem a nonsense in some senses selling commercial property for instance at two-thirds of its value from 21 to 14 million um when we've had to refinance at five and a quarter percent we're on 20-year payback of five percent which makes it 10.5 i know it's still cheaper than the one percent extra um i'm also aware that we're losing money on it but by selling it we're realizing that uh crystallizing that loss and effectively your 14 million is having to pay back 21 million so effectively it's a 50 increase so you are as an individual costing a 15 percent for that money you're spending at this moment in time um and i wonder you know if we were able to act in a different manner whether we would um take that rather than take the 11 percent joy is that directed to jason well whoever is appropriate oh hello lis uh i'm quite happy to accept and i'd be the first to say that it's pretty disappointing that government encouraged local authorities to invest in commercial property and they did encourage it or they would not have allowed the borrowing through pwlb i wish they hadn't but i do understand why all four districts did it in order to protect their services i get that and i understand as well that it's it's not just about sale price versus purchase price but it's about loss of income in the revenue budget as well but we do have now a totally different government or we have had recently a different government approach than we had back in 2016 when i think mend it was the first of the four districts to start investing in commercial properties and did fortunately anchor the borrowing but then you anchor the borrowing for a period of time the mrp is equally important and that is that is one of the reasons why the debt cost for this council now is higher than it was for the individual districts before but don't forget as well that the county council particularly but also some of the districts had investments in pooled funds like the ccla and their value is also lower than it was before covid covid has changed a huge amount so have the interest rates so is inflation and and i certainly would not be arguing with you about the disappointment of this council having to take those actions at this time because of the financial emergency but we did have to write to government i think it was was it me that wrote that letter jason i think i had to write two letters one was asking about the possibility of council tax going above the referendum limit and the other one we did have to agree that we would sell commercial investments before we could talk to government about a capitalization direction so it is not not a decision that was taken in isolation i can assure you thank you right guys can i focus us back onto the recommendations which are on page 108 of the report so there are two distinct sets of recommendations the first one is 6a audit committee receives a risk deep dive report from an executive director each meeting providing a narrative of the strategic risks and steps they've taken to mitigate and manage each risk our members happy with that so i did think that was minuted from the minutes we've approved today already so i wasn't quite sure why it was there that's fine and the second block of recommendations uh set out in in point b um members happy to note those as well yeah fine um we're going to move on now because we've got a huge agenda still to get through today so um thank you for your time would members like a quick comfort break for 10 minutes yeah okay so committee will uh convene again at 12 o'clock i understand that barry and um grace do need to leave shortly after 12 so if you do want to ask any questions of the external auditors um you might want to ask it quickly you the um financial regulations recently there was something i asked have added to the audit lists of what they do because it was covered in the financial regs that would do it but it wasn't in the list of what order did and i'm just trying to recall what that was that that might need to be added uh somewhere in the list of what audit does okay so in terms of the head of internal audits um view on impairments um alistan thank you chair yep so in the internal auditing standards it is a requirement on me to declare if there's any impairments on me and what you do see in some local authorities is that the head of audit could also be responsible for overseeing risk and obviously that would mean that they couldn't necessarily be independent or objective in doing audits around risk management etc but the way you're set up in some state council there is no impairments then because we have no additional responsibilities so being part of swap it makes sure that we are independent and objective in our role so my only question is is that captured somewhere like the minutes today just so we know we've asked the question and acknowledge that yeah captured in the minutes thank you great report the level of detail in it it was a really good for me refresh and a reminder of what you do as a committee the level of work that we've been through in the last year but also really gives a good refresh and actually i think for any new members or anybody sits on audit it'd be really helpful for them to read because it's a bit of a catchall of what we've done what we plan to do and what we're guided by thank you chair any other comments jason just a quick one i'd love to take all the glory on this one man didn't sound like it all but um thankfully uh it's called management by delegation allister wrote the majority of this and i think it really is a good report i think it for council i think it's a helpful report this is the audit committee's report although we've wrote it it is your report so you need to own it but i think it's a really good report when you look at the appendices i think they're really set out as well the bits we know we're good at the bits where we've got some improvements etc etc um and so there's there's a couple of areas that's highlighted for development we'll pick those up in the forward plan going forward they're fairly easy to sort out action there's no fundamental issues so i think it's a very positive report another thing i would say is when you reflect back on the year which this is referring to it's been a fairly busy year and i personally like to thank all the audit committee members for their hard work in signing off the nine sets of accounts we've got through in the last year because i know it's not been easy yeah so uh you know i've i've said it many times to you already and you you will have my undying thanks for the the workload that the the committee's got got through over the last 12 months but also the spirit in which we've got there um because i think audit committee's always been a positive place we don't descend into um partisan um uh tribes we we try and focus on the the whole organization not necessarily on um party politics so um i think that's where where audit comes into its own really and the fact that we have got that wider remit um each of these scrutiny committees has obviously got got its own uh area of responsibility and they can deep dive into that but um actually having some way you can bring everything together is is really helpful um so thank you if there are no other suggested amends or comments on the report i'm going to move on if that's okay yeah happy person i've missed lindy oh hello lindy sorry i don't know why there was a delay in me joining the meeting um so it seems like i've missed again a little part of what was being discussed i just have one question on the um annual report of the old committee according to the guidance on i ias plus um it says that you need to disclose how the old committee composition requirements have been addressed and the name and qualifications of all members of the order committee during the period if not provided elsewhere so i'm not sure if it's maybe elsewhere in the report but i didn't see the qualifications of the audit committee members thank you alistair that's something you can pick up i do apologize i can't quite hear all the questions that was asked but um in terms of adding qualifications of the order committee we can certainly look at adding that into this report before it goes on to full council thank you andy i suppose my issue with that is qualifications or experience you know if you've worked in an order committee environment for five ten years not a qualification but for me that's valid and his experience um so um i suppose it's it's uh balancing uh that commentary isn't it jason yeah we can we can pick that up i think in terms of all the committees and councils by the nature they'll be made up of counselors and that's why we also supplement that with independent members despite lindy's part of the committee um as you know we did try and recruit two uh we only have one suitable counter that'd be something we revisit um but i'll take mandy's point as well in terms of that wider piece is i think one of the qualities we're looking from from counselors if this was full of lots of accountants i mean it'd be a jolly good exciting lunch and i'll see but actually we might miss loads of things it's it's the skills a range of skills that all the members bring and as mandy said i think one of the key things um is that inquiring mind asking questions a bit like was demonstrated and we talked about risks a minute ago it it's that type of stuff that actually makes a really good order committee as well so the qualifications yeah that's part of it but it's not the only thing we'll pick that up for the final report for council amend that to make sure we cover that half so our members happy to accept the changes that have been recommended in the meeting um and then for that to be um proposed to full council can i have a formal proposal simon our formal seconder tim all those in favor any abstentions everyone happy perfect thank you very much okay welcome to duncan and to louise yes um very pleased to be able to welcome you to audit committee today um so you're going to give us an overview um of the transformation risk report is that right yeah over to you excellent um to get this um a report regarding the improvement and transformation risks and today is an opportunity for the audit committee to consider the risks associated with the program um there's also what we'd like is to seek audit committee's view on the risks and the mitigated mitigations associated with those risks um the intention is to continue review the program race with audit committee and seek feedback so this won't be this is the first opportunity that you've seen the risk register um at audit committee but and we do intend to come back on a regular basis there are 19 risks within the um risk register at the moment and these are going to continually reviewed i just wanted to note that the risk um three um appreciate it they're not actually numbered in the report but it's risk three and that's the insufficient budget to fund redundancies that is rag rated 20 within the report however we have subsequently reviewed the risk register and it's now um the mitigation scar has now been reduced to 12. um initially the reason for the rag rating of 20 um was because we'd not actually received the capitalization directive and the um and the forecast for capital receipts she subsequently discussed this with um jason and nikki um regarding that mitigation and that's why we've reduced it because with a council has never been um refused the capitalization directive so actually the main reason for scoring it 20 was based on a refusal because we know it won't be refused or that a council has never had it refused we'd reduce that to 12. there's also um that there is a forecast of capital receipts from the disposal of assets including commercial properties that are actively managed through the property investment executive subcommittee and asset management group and also there's um there is a statute a strategy in place for disposal of assets to generate capital receipts that could be used be a flexible use of capital receipts policy and lastly there's 40 million pound in the bank capital receipts at present to cover the first batch of voluntary redundancies so um it's just noting that that that has been reduced so all of the 19 risks now the mitigating scores um are either amber or green and the next steps in terms of um risk management of risks for the program is that we um will be incorporating our risks onto info gen and pentana um i think you had a report about that earlier this morning um so we'll be aligning our risk approach with the corporate um approach being adopted for the program i think we were intending to week commencing the third but i think we're a bit ambitious trying to get onto pentana and idea gen the week commencing the third of june but with we started engagement with the risk team um and the risk manager for the program is also engaged with the risk team so we'll be aligning um corporately the program with the corporate approach as i just mentioned to start with it's really for us to just seek your an opportunity to seek feedback on the risks and if there's anything that you think's missing um that we you know this has been considered by officers we asked the same question as scrutiny yesterday as well if there's anything anything else that you think we should be um highlighting those risks on that register don't i don't know if you wanted to add anything nothing significant just say this is quite dynamic so i think next time you see this um you know which won't be next couple of weeks but probably a couple of months um at least one if not two of these will probably be closed so things like the voluntary redundancy value for money not evidence will see as we finalize and validate the figures we can see the payback period so some of those risks we will move past by the time you see it but obviously new things will drop onto the register as the program develops and we get into implementation stage so i think you will see this is quite a dynamic document rather than static document where it's the same risks and it's just about a bit of mitigation in different ways but it might be slightly different from the council wide strategic risks okay open the the floor up to members then so uh quill um thank you mr chairman um yeah thank you for clarifying these um the capitalization direction because i i have to say i thought it was a done deal and i read this now it's all got a kind of paycheck um and you then went on to say that uh the reason for the level of confidence is because one's never been refused before however of course if we do understand that the granting of this thing is contingent on this council delivering a series of actions so in a way that is where the risk lies whether we're you know it's whether we can convince deluck that we've actually done what we need to do and of course we're now into an election campaign and i don't know how that is likely to influence or affect any decisions i mean particularly if there's a change of government there will be a period of time of of embedding new people in but i don't know whether you have a sense of whether business will just carry on continue or whether any new government might have a different view so i'd be interested in your your thoughts on that um there's also um a risk about workforce what i call a sort of attrition that um and the redundancy scheme the compulsory one when it when and if it comes and the voluntary ones are all based around people who are deemed to be at risk however there seems to be an emerging picture that people in in areas that are not deemed to be at risk are leaving anyway and so we're we're starting to develop skilled holds uh and i don't think that this again i'd be welcoming your perspective on that i don't think that this necessarily adequately covers what's going to happen and the problem is whether you're dealing with staff matters you can't predict what people are going to do but at least you have to have some idea of what you're going to do if they do it and so i'd like a little bit more clarity on that um particularly as we will be losing this is the main point a lot of experience and and talent there's a risk in here about how we manage to capture people in knowledge management which of course is no good the day after they've left and i always held the view that actually once you leave a job you're probably still valuable to that organization for possibly six months depending on what you've been doing after that the organization's moved on um but i wonder is there any way that we can put up some sort of system to at least keep open contact with people who leave so that they can be called up so somebody says what's this or what what do we do here um i remember the classic example i was given was it was in a water company right she was in the environment agency in the middle of england where this guy retired on the friday he went back into the office on the monday to say goodbye to his colleagues and there was an absolute flat panic because there's a pollution incident in the stream and they didn't know where it was and he said oh that'll be old the old dye works up there and you know it's this kind of stuff it's very difficult to capture so it is to my mind very important you keep at least some kind of can you use the word old that doesn't sound right see keep contact with with this level of knowledge in the organization particularly as we're looking at such a large reduction in staff and you know and that's something we need to lose i've also written down moscow here which i think was an acronym let's get seven don't talk to us to answer the other questions first and then you come back to moscow i can't find moscow so is it watching anyway thank you did that make all that was a bit of a ramble but did it make sense i think it did thank you counselor and if you're happy uh chat i'm gonna ask you just to talk about moscow for two seconds it's um yeah sorry we've got an algorithm we should have changed that and but it's must do should do could do or would do um analysis in terms of um prioritizing project work or projects so it's making sure that you're doing the must the must do so the main priorities prioritization so if i may chair thank you um so in terms of the um monster if i want i don't think and i'll look to mr born as well but i don't think we're particularly worried about the capitalization the things we have to do as part of the capitalization direction direction aren't pass fail they're reviews for government to consider what the capitalization direction means for the council as an organization and really i see that as about future work so if um we had a sit for review for example and it said all there were problems i think that would be understood because we've asked for the capitalization to start with we wouldn't be doing that if everything was tickety boo um but it's not a case of because there are problems you don't get the capitalization it's more that that government wants to know if they need to take additional steps to support the organization or intervene in the organization so i think it's not we have to do things to get the capitalization as far as i'm concerned the capitalization has been agreed by government we're just in the process of waiting for that paperwork to be signed off i'm not necessarily expecting that pretty much for the settlement at the end of the year i don't know if mr vaughan would disagree um yeah yeah that was a nod on that point does that mean we can start spending the money before we have a decision we've got the capital receipts flexibility policy that we can use as a backstop if if that um doesn't come through anyway yeah exactly that so we we should have sufficient flexibility within the way we can spend the capital we have um that that won't be an issue until we have to close at the end of the year if we don't have it by the end of the year it's an issue because we certainly won't be able to close the account at the end of the year um in balance in any way shape or form without the capitalization um and i don't think the election particularly will have a big impact on that because if government started to change capitalization directions for the organizations they've agreed already um then you know 19 council is going to be major problems um and the only way out of that will be to go to government and ask for a capitalization direction so um it's it's very very unlikely i think that that that process for this year is at risk obviously future years we still need to work through um in terms of the point about motivation and people leaving the organization outside of the program if that makes sense um yes we we do have that there's a regular churn um there's a skill shortage across the whole of local government the qualified colleagues in a number of areas um you know talking to the director of children's services recently were were the equivalent of i think nearly two whole social work pods teams down um just in terms of recruiting and retaining people and it's a very competitive market in southwest so that is happening it's not as a result of the program so it's not as reflected in the risk management of the program in terms of the mitigation but it is going to be reflected and already is reflected in the strategic risk of the council so we we try and pick it up there but the program may exacerbate that problem because obviously people don't like uncertainty as a rule so therefore we may see people making decisions that aren't within the program but because they know the program's happening elsewhere which i think is what you're alluding to in terms of the final point yes we have developed a knowledge retention and transfer toolkit which is very grand title but basically it's a process to work through it so just mentioned on page 175 is password mitigation but if members want to see that separate they have to share it what that toolkit is is basically a work way of working through with colleagues who are staying in the organization and people who are leaving to understand what the key contacts are what the networks are we need to know about any key points as part of that there is that conversation we can't quite draft people i've always liked the american military view of once you've left the army you're still in it for the reserves for a couple of years just in case we're not quite in that position but to be fair i think most colleagues are actually parting with the organization in pretty good terms at least at this point in time and therefore people are very happy to come back and support their adult teams and just help out where they've got that relevant knowledge so you know and we still have a number of colleagues who departed the organization last year who were offering to help out or just know this one thing that will make life easy for people so we'll keep doing that we will work quite hard on that in terms of the organizational knowledge it will be affected there will be fewer people and people who've been posted for a long time not there anymore what we need to try and make sure is that the systems are actually up to date and capture it because that information the risk we have a lot of that information is with one person and that's what we need to move away from as an organization that's a risk in its own right if that makes sense we need to actually start to make sure the ownership of the information is system-sized so we can access it whoever needs it rather than it be locked in one person and that's a piece of work I think for all counties. So that actually brings me on to the question I was going to ask Duncan which is largely around having been through transformation at SAS Somerset where the plan was largely to digitize the systems and the digital infrastructure didn't keep pace with the rest of the changes in the organization I didn't see within the risk register here where the technological sort of enablers are to support the transformation are they on track are they already in place are we confident that they can support the the organization into the new future? So being very blunt they're not in this program those digital transformation pieces will be what we use to balance the books in future years so if you recall when we set the budget what we said was the budget that was being set effectively bought us this financial year that we're now in to turn over and try and do the transformation piece the transformation in this situation and being really honest I think all members of third Mercedes before is mainly cut this is about reducing the staffing base to try and close the 80 million pound one-off resource the gap effectively we pushed into next financial year so we're not reliant in this program on any significant digital transformation new systems because being honest exactly what you saw at the outset you can't turn that around in a year we don't have the capacity in the organization there isn't the system there already so we actually need to build up towards that so the digital team are building towards being able to put together a three-year program of transformation led by technology AI and it's not we're not doing those things so there are some pieces of that work already happening you'll be able to see it in the organization but the program savings are not predicated on delivering that because the timetable wasn't sufficient so the program savings for this year are very much about staff reduction and in a couple of cases maybe service closure but very few of those so yeah you're absolutely right but for that reason that that's the reason it's not in for this year you should see that next year for the year after if that makes sense okay thanks other questions Mandy thank you very much I think we had a long talk through in scrutiny about the project yesterday so I visited yesterday to scrutiny had some questions so I suppose the points for me for audit committee and the main point that I raised yesterday was for me we still have no target operating model I feel that that really underpins a lot of risk and the work that goes on in the program and for me when I look at the risks and in fact the whole project it's very understandably inward focusing but we cannot lose sight of our residents at Somerset and somehow they've been lost in all the busyness that's going on so I think we need to ensure that that's there so my questions relating because we've been asked to comment on the program risk so first of all we've just agreed that sort of risk matrix we're going to use and then suddenly we've got blues popping into this risk matrix and we're on red amber green so hopefully the blues will disappear and my second and you know we're looking for consistency which we discussed in the last paper which I think will help aid understanding so my first question really is around the non-delivery of mtfp savings so we've got there a rag rating of 15 with a mitigated of 8 so I've read the mitigating factors so resource planning to ensure adequate levels of resource that's going to be a challenge as our staff numbers contract prioritize projects within the mtfp savings within the involvement and transformation program that should happen always business as usual adopt a robust approach to monitoring and forecasting savings while you can you can have as robust an approach as you like but it won't save an extra penny and it's actually delivery of enable earlier identification of impact with savings and mitigating activity and I suppose to me the interesting bit there's the mitigating activity I suppose given we were over 80 million probably short of what we needed to balance this year's and we balanced it using reserves and flexibilities so for me mitigating activity if there was any mitigating activity ways to save money those should have been presented at our budget this year as opposed to taking it from reserves so my question is how a lot of that to me is business as normal and I don't get a sense of how those will mitigate from a 15 to an eight so that's my first question thank you chair thank you council chilco so I think in terms of that one just be clear this is the program risk of the transformation program this isn't the risk for the overall mtfp for the council which I know you appreciate but just be clear on that so in terms of the risk within the program itself we also have a number of savings which have been signed to the program for this financial year for delivery by the 1st of april and what we're trying to make sure is that we use program resource to actually make sure we get into those where we talk about mitigation to pick that up first what we're talking about there is if a saving cannot be delivered the way it was originally intended okay we accept things move on life is different you know things might be discovered that weren't known at the time what are we going to do within the program or potentially within the service to actually say okay well how can we make that good because what we can't afford to do is say well we're saving money on the one hand here but on the other hand we're not delivering all the things we said we do to start with and one just cancels out the other so we need to make sure and it's been very clear position since the council formed last year that if you're not delivering savings that have been agreed to it's incumbent on the team then service then the directorate and the executive directorate to try and find compensating savings to make up for that because what we don't want to do exactly as you said is allow that to hit the culprit center and then start to come out to reserves because that means just a different way of spending one-off money to balance the budget and that's not helping us so the mitigations that we're talking about in here are very much making sure we've got the right resource in the project team to be able to deliver the program because those are the savings that we're committed to and i think just about getting to that level now we've had a couple of vacancies effectively or gaps in the resource but that resource plan is there to make sure we've got the right people and team take it forward and what we've done in terms of prioritized projects within MTFP savings there was a risk the the council corporately couldn't resource all the different savings in different ways so we tried to make sure for example with the workforce piece and transformation program we're talking about today that we have basically tweaked most of the workforce directorate to be able to deliver that on the timetable we set recognizing there will be an impact on the rest of the council some of the other savings in the MTFP rely on staff changes in other parts of the council so we're just having to make sure we time those against each other so we're not all expecting the same resource at the same time to do five different jobs and that's what we've been trying to talk about when we prioritize the projects so obviously this is the biggest saving within the program so we've made sure we try and get this through earlier of course the earlier we take the saving the more make the one-off benefit in here and but we will need to make sure that resource is freed up to cover the other savings that we're committed to where they need that corporate support so that's what that side means in there and at this point in time i can report that we do have the right corporate resource as far as i'm aware in place to be able to support the program the problem will be and this is what we're working right now to make sure we don't we can help the program slip significantly we've got a little bit of contingency slippage won't necessarily affect the figures because the figures obviously from the first of april next year but if a program slips significantly in terms of delivery that corporate resource would teed up for this period of time but then be needed in that period of time when it needs to do something else and that's where the risk is which is what we're trying to talk about in that second mitigation so at this point in time we're in a good place with that if in two months time we're well behind program that will start to become more of an issue and that mitigation will no longer be sufficient to give us the confidence to reduce the residual score and then the final part in there you're absolutely right you know but at this point in time it is the robust nature of actually challenging why people aren't delivering savings there is a culture inherited from a number of predecessor organizations that if you didn't deliver savings that was fine Mr Gordon and corporate center always had that magic money tree and they would pay that doesn't exist so we've put quite a lot of effort in and I know Jason's been heavily involved in really robustly starting to monitor and track savings and challenge non-delivery because what we can't handle is finding out in the last portion of the year oh I didn't get that well that's not helping us if we need to know something's not working now bear in mind these are all for the first of april it within this program obviously the MTFS has got savings that are due to be delivered in year four this year but we need to know as early as possible so if we need to put that mitigation action together we can but the first line is well okay you say you can't do it why not what can you do instead how can you get this back on track and if we're not tracking it very carefully we can't have that conversation in a timely manner so that's what that mitigation covers and at this point in time again within the transformation program we do appear to be on track so you know there is a risk coming up in terms of operational delivery risk we've got a big piece of data validation to do in the next six weeks to validate all the posts and the as-is structure make sure they're all fully funded and we understand what those posts are and look at translating that into the new to-be structure and then we can work out what that indication is that's a really big piece of data validation work if that starts to slip some of these mitigations won't be strong enough anymore and the risk will go back up thank you and i think uh savings delivery of savings and percentage of savings is probably something that slipped slightly last year and certainly the scrutiny reports had very little around mitigating actions when budgets were not as they should be so i think if that's strengthened that's helpful right across the organization um my second question i'll roll the third into it if you like so page 172 insufficient budget to fund redundancies cancellation i think i heard you say yesterday and i was scribbling down at home that we have 40 million in the bank from capital receipts you said that figure yesterday um so if that's the case uh why have we still got a 20 on the insufficient budget to fund redundancies and do we know actually know how much we've raised from the sale of assets today i only ask that it's just that reassurance that with that delay in uh everything coming through and confirmation from government we've still got the money to carry on with this the redundancies and payments and i'll just finish my closing comment before you answer that so i'm reading the key program risks and looking at the mitigated rag it reads right across the program as quite low risk look at them in their entirety and i just cannot believe given the complexity scale and pace of the program that this is the case and my other concern with risk generally is that there are interdependencies with these risks you can get a little bit of something that's not quite here right here and another little bit not quite right there so whilst it might not hit the buttons to show up in an independent risk i am just concerned really at those interdependencies and where one risk links with another and it's how that will be uh captured thank you okay did did you want a response from liz on that yeah so yesterday when i sat on the other side of the room i do recall talking about asset disposals under two headings one is the council's own land and property and the other was the commercial investments i don't recall using the figure of 40 million at the time so okay um so there are two 40 millions um there's the 40 million that is the capitalization direction amount requested of government and there is the 40 million savings target the fact that they're the same figure i've not found terribly helpful yeah it would have been it actually would have been easier if they'd been different figures because i think people have so apologies if i misled in any way i didn't mean to it might be helped just for the record so you started the year with just over 14 million pounds of capital receipts in the bank one four one four not not not 40 14 just to be absolutely clear um we are in the process of a number of the commercial portfolio disposals i think we'll see somewhere around 25 to 27 million pounds over the next few weeks there is the program through the investment subcommittee and jll have advised the portfolio around that how we can look to do that we're confident we hit those sort of targets there is also the non-commercial asset sales and the asset management group modest that on a monthly basis and fine detail the type of numbers talking around there somewhere around the 25 27 million pounds sort of figure in the year so we're confident we will hit the capital receipts figure required for to finance this for the coming year thank you that's probably the first time i've had assurance that there's money to there to go ahead with that redundancy uh program um i think it'd be really helpful in future papers just to acknowledge that within the financial element of the paper so people know we are continuing but there is money there to fund it i think that'd be really helpful and just to you duncan it's just that interdependencies really and how you capture that yeah no i absolutely agree and one of the things that we've talked about in design authority is actually do we theme the risks because quite a lot of these risks are quite similar and that interdependency is a big issue so we've got 19 now i'm thinking we may well be better off having half a dozen themes which might have two or three risks in each as we you know move them around but as i said earlier this is going to be quite dynamic and you know in two months time if something slipped or we've had a delay you know some of these risks could be quite different so we'll keep working on that but i think that interdependency piece is quite important because there is some clear overlap in here and it's not easy in the current way we've laid it out to see how that will be reflected so we'll we'll reflect on that uh any any sort of final questions here oh sorry tim i forgot you thank you chair i'll finish off with i think what will be a silly question i think i've either forgotten the answer to this or i misinterpreted it somewhere what is the difference between a blue and a yellow 12 there's a blue and a yellow 12 it should it should be it should be an orange 12 not yet so um the colour coordinating of that um report apologies i was looking at i didn't notice that and it was submitted before after i'd reviewed it but it will definitely be aligned to the corporate risk register going forward you would check i can i ask that we actually put the rag ratings in we can we can ignore b for blue colour blinds might have to chase round and round find out where we are um but if you actually put rag in i'm in with a chance uh thanks simon that's a good disability accessibility point there um duncan one final question from me then and that's um how much clarity is there amongst the workforce and the uh the staff not necessarily at the uh the sort of senior leadership level but lower down the organization in terms of um what the time scales and what the impact on on them is going to be because i'm just really conscious of those people um who um may um be very very worried about about the situation at the moment um it's not fair to leave them dangling for any longer than than we need to we need to give them surety for themselves and their families yeah so thank you for that and i absolutely agree the point and the sooner we can give clarity we will the difficulty we have is in a lot of cases you know we do not know the answers to specific individual questions right now so the timetable we're working to is in july and that is july all of it right now so still trying to nail the date uh we will be coming out of layer four five and some of layer six where we've got that finished so we'll give that certainty as soon as we can um any will not cover than that will be in september um so the target still is obviously we have to make the savings by the first of april um for them to be able to be agreed in the budget process um or price of the budget process if they don't need the budget agreement um so we'll have that in place the next year um in terms of certainty for colleagues we are trying to focus the savings in areas that won't affect frontline delivery um obviously anywhere where we've got demand management um we've got staff to the demand that we have to manage we can't reduce and say well that'll go one of the key things that i think is not clear enough for colleagues and we do need to work harder to get us messaging out this is not reducing the number of people in the organization and saying everyone's left's got to pick up slack this is saying with reduced numbers we've got we will have to do things differently we will have to stop doing some things we will have to work differently we'll have to ditch maybe some of the process and bureaucracy that i think we've all seen in the organization over years and actually work out how we do things a bit more simply because it's not going to be okay to just say to a smaller team please do the same thing in the same way and that's not what we want to get but i think that's one of the bigger worries people have got that's going to be about strength and management all the way through the organization to help people translate into that new culture and structure so that needs to come out as well by september's people because we go to a new structure but we all work the way we work now it's not going to work and that picks up council shield cost point about the operating model which is being worked on just to reassure everyone thank you um by my reckoning that's uh that's all the questioning so uh feel free if you uh if you want to leave or if you want to stay you're very welcome okay thank you thank you both all right uh moving on to item 12 which is an update on my life my future the adult social transformation program um welcome mel and team feel free to grab cake on the way past so okay thank you for inviting us here today um we haven't been before with the transformation and the my life my future so i'm hoping what we've got for you today is what you need if it isn't we will uh we've got a load of slides here so we will make sure that if we need to jump in and out we can and listening to your last comments we'll make sure we put the red in words and and green on these for the future so that you can actually see them if you're color brown a really good spot so thank you for that uh so where we are is obviously we've given you a report and some uh documents to go with it which i'm assuming that you have had a chance to have a look at and read i think from our point of view uh where we are at the moment is we are on track uh to deliver our high scenario however uh as always we're monitoring this on a daily basis or a fortnightly basis just to check where we are and the numbers will change during the year based on that because it's a cumulative effect of us delivering and people leaving the service so if we have less people coming in to particular areas so for example if we have less people coming into residential care which is what we're trying to do we sometimes there's a lag because people leave that setting or don't need that setting any any further or die and sometimes there's a slight lag so we monitor both those coming in and those leaving or dying from our services which sometimes has a lag but we manage that what you can see so far is that our teams are now completing 30 to 40 percent more work meaning that we are assessing more people so you will know we've talked through a lot of the time around productivity and how productivity needs to change in the way that we deliver and you've talked just before around different systems and processes and we have really looked at the processes that we have in place currently to make that a lot more simple for our staff and a lot of work that we've done with Newton around that productivity how do we work how do we do it better how do we work with people quicker and prevent that crisis and we've got a lot of work in that space we've seen about 21 decrease in the average change of community based support package meaning that people are maintaining their independence a lot more so we're making sure we're using our communities we're using people to actually do that we've got almost 20 more people being successfully re-abled that's great so that early intervention to stop people going into hospital but more importantly it's when people leave hospitals we are enabling them to re-able them really well we continue to need to improve upon that but you're starting to see that coming through and young people into into transition for the first time we're now on average assessing people before they're 18 and that's the first time we've done that for many many years we need to get it 17 we need to get it 16 but we're getting that earlier and that is because of that better planning making about a 500 a week reduction in those required support packages when they're coming over i think we'll get even more as we get better at doing that and modeling in the right way we've also formed as you're probably aware i'm sure our learning disability teams and those peer forums have now increased those specialist teams i mean that actually we can look at people very differently and work that through so again it's about reviewing the quality and the outcomes and the average cost in that area we know has started to go down will continue to go down it's a longer lag time for people with a learning disability moving somebody with a learning disability and their families and getting the family to support to do that into a better environment takes a little bit longer but again we're working that through so we also know that for 24/25 we haven't put in that progression model of progression and enablement into that work stream yet so i think we will see an increased opportunities in that area probably going through for 24/25 so you'll see in our rounds going forward some more savings coming in at that point but only when we're really clear about that whilst we've seen a slight increase in the overall residential starts and you'll see that from our baseline period so our baseline period was last year when we looked at how we do this what we like in there and we have seen a slight increase in that very small but that's because of our productivity and 30 percent more people in our neighborhoods and our his teams are in the last four months so we've seen because we've got the backlog you've seen more people come through we're working working harder with people looking at different ways of doing it you've seen a slight increase but it is tiny compared to what we were and we know in that that in the past six weeks approximately 11 more people have stayed at home over that six weeks period so we are doing this down to individual people so that we can monitor because our budget is all made up of individuals so the whole budget is mainly people the less people we can get in that direction the better we can so the best we can do and that looks like about 95 people per year are able to remain at home rather than going into residential care the cost of that is a great is good that's what we're trying to to achieve so i don't know what do you want to shall i stop at that point and ask you for any questions you want and if there's any lots of detail i'll be passing just across the beginning members questions landing predictable chair thank you um lots of uh reading there lots of uh program-ish dialogue throughout actually um and um but yeah helpful background so my first question is um why are we still in the position so far into the program whereby we're saying overall the program is on track to deliver financial benefits between the low and the high so i think that's a fairly broad uh range and i'm just wondering why at this stage in the program we're not starting to hone down a bit more into it i have got some other questions on the figures but i'll leave you with that one to start with to patient number you want mandy 179 it's mentioned in several places but it just says that the the program is looking to deliver on track to deliver the financial benefits between the low and the high scenarios the way we track the the program so we've done for every individual kind of indicator that we're looking at we've got a baseline period in i think it was six months over 2023 we then track week by week how our performance in each of those indicators is doing so that is giving us a range because we are tracking relatively frequently we see those things move week to week we know for the financial year 20 23 24 we're confident that that's now kind of fixed where we've ended up at the end of that period because we know there are still things changing week to week for how we're going to forecast the next year we're keeping that kind of range as to where we're going to land because we still think that things will improve from where we are now when we're doing our forecasting we're just saying if we held today's performance indefinitely where will that get us so that i think it's the seven million number you'll see at the end of 24 25 that says if we stayed where we were today that's where we'll land we think there's more work to do that that can go up but we don't want to be overly optimistic or overly forecasting so everything we're doing says where we're at today if we kept doing that indefinitely how how much savings will this bring even though we know there's more to go at week i suppose the alternative is we try and do a kind of where do we think we'll get to but because that's that's i guess forecasting stuff that hasn't happened yet we haven't wanted to ever be reporting like that we've wanted to be reporting on if we stayed where we were today forwards where will that get us knowing there's more work to do so if anything it's it's probably a conservative number but we want some we don't want to build in any kind of optimism bias of saying yeah we've got all these things in the plan and we'll end up miles better we're kind of forecasting from today's performance forward does that does that help answer the question yeah thanks i sort of would expect with a program and it is a complex program to have sort of on track ahead of track from where you are in the program i would have expected to probably have had that laid out so you can really easily highlight the areas that you're exceeding your expectations on and those probably where you're falling short i move on to the risks and uh key risks and issues which we've got on page 211 um just to say we've had a lovely long paper on risk today and this doesn't probably fit with the layout that we're going to be expecting to see so it's that reassurance that that's going to be brought in line line so our our risk and the reporting of it is consistent and i'm i'm getting a nodding of the head so that's great um so if i can shoot to page 215 and i'll just bring it up in front of me right page which should have the figures on it if i've got the right page oh if i've failed i'll talk about it something you've got is the page with all the figures on eight basically so um we're saying um my understanding is the cost is 7.5 million i think that was originally stated and if we look at the multiplier that gets to about year 10 million um and then on another page 182 it says on those figures oh that's the page 182 let's go back to that i was bouncing around the paper trying to cross reference figures right so on page 182 we've got all the figures there which was the bit i was sort of focusing on can you just talk me through the um i was looking at the last boxes which is the um me glasses projected total mtfp contributions by 24 25 and when that came down to the bottom it came to 6.5 to 7.5 and then we've got our original target so is that the total savings you're looking to make i couldn't quite quite get a sense of the figures and the tables can you talk me through them yeah the the kind of left-hand two columns one let's say original overall target annual value yeah that's the full annualized value of the work we're doing because yeah all of the work we're doing is pretty much around managing demand into certain services whether that's residential care supported living whatever it might be they have a profile of savings if we avoid someone going into residential care today we won't see the full benefit of that for 61 weeks because that's how long an annual an average duration of a placement is so although we know operationally we've avoided that residential start we don't kind of bank the full cash from that till over a year's time so then the left-hand two columns are when we have accrued all of the value of the changes we've made that's where we'll be the two columns on the right hand side are almost that if we cut off the value at march 24 and if we cut off the value at the end of march 25 how much will we have had right so is that does that help i sort of think so and i didn't really get a sense from that sort of as it's as it's presented so my question is originally within the planning it was five million year one five million year two so what i can't get now is uh year one and year two have moved forward i just haven't captured the sense of how much this year how much next year is some following into the following year the one million we have banked this year so that's slightly over what we expected so last year thank you so 23 yeah 24 we have done one million that's that's in that year we have taken out of the base budget already 10 million for this program over the two years over the years so we my expectation is that this year we get to nine million overall ten one from last year nine permits at the moment this is looking at about seven point between six point eight and seven point five that is saying that's what if we did nothing else now that's where we'd get to obviously we've got programs of change happening all along it is also predicated on and as you said so let's say so somebody will stay in a residential setting for about 61 weeks before they either before they let's be blunt before they die that's probably about the length of stay the average length of stay in a residential or nursing setting for somebody a bit less in a nursing setting that's great because that means people have stayed in their home as long as possible and only gone somewhere to have their end of their life that's that's the reality of what we're trying to do here if that's the case then we have so we stop somebody coming in we then have to wait 62 weeks possibly for people to die unless like this year we've seen a rise in in deaths if we monitor that therefore the number will increase so we manage that constantly and that's what we're looking at so when she's talking about what do you then see at the end of the year there will be a little bit of a flux in that dependent on where we get to but that's not the only thing that we look for so we've got other programmes of change in there so the other ones that you've got in there are around reablement where we've got a fixed what we do in reablement is say okay people come into the service we were trying to reduce the amount of ongoing care they require and therefore again that's not a lag on that that's just the norm that we see we can we can record that in that way the only thing i'd add the two bottom two work streams so on the table they're learning disability progression and preparing for adulthood those are looking at our cohort of adults with a learning disability the duration of their packages is much longer so they they take much longer than that 61 weeks to kind of accrue the full value so we we typically see our value come through quicker when we're impacting older adults than we see it in our learning disabilities cohort okay i've got some more questions do you want me to carry on i don't know if there's anybody else at me yeah yeah okay i'll roll them together roll them together and then we'll just try and keep things focused thank you so throughout the papers you state the savings will be achieved if performance is sustained i think that'll be a challenge with the council's challenges that itself faces in the next year and my understanding was from back along that there'd been a newton team in to sort of support this work and get it going um so my question is do you think that will be sustained when the newton team are no longer in place because there will be a capacity issue and my last question why on earth was georgia receiving two members of staff i read that case study which is in the papers um she had two staff 24 hours a day and now we're looking hopefully she might get a part-time job and transition into independent living i'm just really concerned at the dynamics of going from that to that and why was that particular case never looked at previously i found it concerning to read so let's start with the case because that's the easy bit for me so so sometimes when you come through transition so you come from being a child to an adult are they have a different you will see that some of the children are supported far greater than we do when they're an adult which is a real problem for families but that's the case and that's why if we get in earlier perhaps those costs at that end could be reduced slightly differently there's also slightly different law in place and sometimes the courts will say this is what you have to do whereas when they become an adult we don't have to do that which is always a good thing so what we try and do always is progress somebody the other thing is if somebody's sometimes people need a lot of support through transition and you need to do that perhaps they're leaving home perhaps they're in a different place so you tend to put quite a bit of support in at the beginning to then reduce that so there'll be lots of cases where we are looking at people and reducing that support dramatically as things go forward i find that concerning i it would have been nice to see that step we will do it as a step it's not going to suddenly say right you started on two and now tomorrow and you're 18 and you're going to go down to one but we have that progressive model of support and we're really clear about how that has to work because actually what we want people to be as independent as possible and have the best life and the best chances in life and sometimes that may take us six months to get to there and that's what you were describing it's not going to happen overnight please don't say somebody's got x amount of care then and the next day they've not but okay all right we'll make sure but we absolutely try to work with those individuals to get them the right support going forward so that was that one and there was capacity posters so when newton leaves so what we're doing at the moment is we're really working to make sure this is business as usual so our data that we've collected and the way in which we're doing our data we're making sure that the people are owning this and slowly we're sort of chance we're transferring it at the moment saying actually this is your role now this is what your role has got to be for the future this is how you work and that's what we've been doing all the way through this process we've hand-holding and slowly you reduce the hand-holding newton are not just disappearing tomorrow so when they go i can still pull them back if things aren't quite working or if things aren't quite the way they want to be or get that advice that's the beauty of having newton with us is about how do i i know talking to other colleagues that actually something perhaps didn't go quite right and they they rang and said can you come back and just have a look at this for me not at additional costs but actually can you have a look at that that's how it works but we are making this business as usual because it is people's roles to do that and the reorganization shouldn't affect this because most of this is about frontline staff delivering and as you've already heard we're not looking at changing our social workers changing our adult social care practitioners as part of that transformation it is a demand-led services we can't quite meet the demand we've got we can't quite get the staffing it's not not so so that area hopefully we will reduce the the risk in that area as much as we can but you're right it is a risk that when you to leave us do we do we keep going and do we get it right and i think it's about embedding that now the only thing i'll add to that so for each of the the work streams we write the starts out an operational work stream sponsor and a commissioning work stream sponsor so each one of them has got two really key links into the service who've been involved the whole way through and are going to be the kind of lead people to making sure that this does become business as usual so there's there's names in the frame in your service and they've been there all along so those names have been there all along they've learned how to do this as we've gone and that's what the importance is that this is embedded into how we work going forward thank you all right folks thanks uh mel and emily for giving this an update um is there anything else that members want to ask before i let mel and emily have their slice of cake and be on their way no thank you thank you for coming along okay thanks louise right so moving on to item 13 uh which is the contract management update now we've got two choices we've got about so four more substantive items on the agenda um we can have a break for lunch now or we can try and push through does anyone feel like they need a break what do you want to push on okay we we can do i was just just trying to see if we could if we can push through then we can finish earlier and then you can have the rest of the day to do uh do what you like but um if you want to if you want a break we'll take a break let's go 20 minutes until fast and then we'll push through and finish the agenda okay thank you for inviting me today um i've got a report on contract management and it covers three external reviews that have been undertaken of contract management so we've had a review by swap but we've also had two reviews for the department for leveling up housing in communities one of which was planning improve procurement improvement planning support the other one was contract management pioneer program and the general findings of the two of the three reviews is that category management and commissioning needs to improve within the council and contract management itself across the council needs to improve we've got a small team in the center that provides support to contract management and contract management is decentralized out to services but the small team i lead it for supports that work across the council we've been able to move forward some actions some um the delivery of is dependent on the restructure so without the restructure putting a new board in place and determining the senior responsible officer it's effectively on hold but we have delivered quite a bit of work so the successful delivery at the moment has been increased engagement with contract managers across the organization and service managers that's enabled tiering of contracts and tiering is a term we use for looking at the risk and value of contracts and putting them in order so we know our highest risk highest value contracts and can concentrate on those that works been undertaken we've moved to a single contract register do that as well so we've combined all the contract registers into one and we have established spend control board so although we haven't got a effectively a strategic board at the moment we've got a spend control board that's running a couple of times a week and looking at all new contract placements extensions of contracts and new contracts and we've got documentation built ready for the new sro when they come into post and we've been preparing for the new human act in parallel with that so the timing of us developing our documentation is quite good we need to change it anyway for the new procurement act that's coming in from october and we've been building a new contract management system so that's an extension of our current procurement system so we're not changing systems we're just putting an extra module on so we'll have one system where we can keep all of our contracts and changes to contracts so there's quite a lot of activity at the moment we're also bringing in a new system to look at social value and the delivery of social value so we're bringing in a loop system which allow all the social value commitments be loaded to one system tracked the value of them then captured so there's an although some elements of contract management and some of the actions we haven't been able to deliver we are making significant progress on some of the other actions within those three reports okay thanks gary um any questions from members andy thank you very much and thank you um for the report i'm really pleased to hear that there's a single contract register i know that was part of the joining together the councils and i think that started well ahead of pre-vesting day so it's good that that's together and i'd be really interested to see whether the overlay and mapping is putting in particular areas of pressure where you might have several very large contracts or needing work on at once so i'd be really interested to see how that piece of work is going and really welcome the fact that our social value will be recorded monitored and reported via the new system loop um i think for me it's what actions we take when the social values agreed to are not delivered i think as a council we need to be chasing that um so but question is page 253 can we be assured that the list of contract managers in the contract register is now up to date and when was it last checked i think that should be done every three months do you want me to shoot through all of them chair i'll do one at a time um so the second question was you're talking about three sessions by the end of september training wise should have been delivered so um how many have been delivered and how many of the staff that needed to attend it have attended um my next question is around page 254 do you plan to rerun the survey there's a survey there about um contracts and and training and i'm just wondering as part of the swap work whether that will be uh rerun at some time my last question is have we got um no i'll stop there actually i can use that one so the first point on the number of contract managers and getting that list correct that's been a big priority for the team uh we've gone through that now so i think that information is as good as it can be we are working with people being appointed to roles and leaving roles at the moment due to the transition so one contract manager was appointed in the post this week i've contacted them and they've already undertaken the foundation training so we're keeping an eye on it but it it's it like you say it's not something that's fixed we need to keep on top of it because of all the changes through the organization at the moment but we're aware of that and we're top of that in terms of the briefing sessions i they i've talked to services i've got capital managers agreed i've not delivered any of those sessions yet but i have spoken individually to each one of the managers managing a contract with a value over two and a half million pounds so and check where they are with their training so that has led to some other conversations and some team bookings so but those three will definitely be booked by september those three sessions will happen those luncheon loans but none are being delivered yet so i've had individual conversations but none of those have happened yet and the training rerun of the numbers the training numbers come from government they come from government commercial college rather than through the learning center so we do have to go back and ask for those numbers every two or three months i know that we've got more through the training than they're actually listed in the report i've given you simply because when i talk to the contract managers managing the higher value contract some of them will send me their certificate but that hasn't yet fed through through government commercial college so i'll go back and rerun those numbers and i'm happy to share that once that once that comes through again it'll be moving numbers we may have less contract managers and total and more that have completed the training it's it's going to be something we have to keep an eye on and monitor and work on over the next 12 months at least i would think so thank you chair i mean i'm really concerned that any manager should be managing contracts without the necessary training i think there's also a level of concern it's the managing of the contract itself monitoring the outcomes you know this is public money and public funds so you know i really would like some assurance that that is happening you know if they're not delivering on an area of contract you know what are we doing about it i think as an audit committee moving forward it might be nice to get some reassurance around how how that's going especially with a changeover um of staff thanks um gary would you be able to update us on on that at this point specifically yeah i think it would be useful if we could try to put in a recommendation maybe that training became mandatory again across the organization i think the contract managers the contract management training should be managed mandatory i don't think it going back along it was so i don't i don't think there'd be any dissent from the committee i'm really happy to recommend that so yeah i think we'll all be happy to recommend that um yeah we actually put the remember can we put a formal recommendation yeah okay so i'm going to propose that uh any uh contract manager within the organization has to undergo the um organization's contract management training within six months of taking up the post yeah um three months three months right that's my proposal just clarify on that and the question of the three months we don't want to set the target that's not the same the training period we've got two organizations offering training so there's a potential for a gap in between the two organizations we've got the government and our e-learn satellite yeah so so they could be registered in either neither or one or the other and what happens to the people that drop through the hole in the middle between the two training organizations and also is three months a sensible a realistic time or does the course take longer than that or is it you know i don't know with respect i don't know the length of the course some contract manager like i say one contract manager that started first thing this week or maybe last week has already completed the training so it they can be it can be done that's my formal proposal mandy's formally seconded so um is this uh just going to wonder if there was ever likely to be a risk that some would be running a contract if they're appointed to a post whether they'll be running a contract before they have the training that i think that can eliminate that i don't know well i think that's why we said that they need to do within the three months of taking up the post uh although it's not ideal that people will be running contracts without having completed the training um we can at least limit the scope of the risk by putting in the um putting in the training i think you know given that the there are going to be lots of gaps appearing across the organization the management team's probably going to have to potentially move people into roles that they never necessarily expected to be in so to say that they have to have done the training before they start the role might be a little bit restrictive but no i i get the point i mean i think if people have been moved into roles and they're expected to take up contract management on day one which is quite likely to happen then i would suggest they're going to need some sort of support from an experienced contract manager somewhere along the line some sort of buddying arrangement someone they could talk to before they get the formal training because it can be quite daunting i don't know if the organization's considered that gary it is being done with some of the higher risk higher value contracts but only the top kind of goal just because we haven't got a resource to do i mean the other option is we look we say that it's compulsory before you'd manage a tier one contract but uh it has to be done within three months for a tier two um or is there a tier three the tier three as well or just tier one and two i think one of the things we have got we've got some quite experienced contract managers that come in from say the private sector and get employed by the organization or are managing say insurance which comes in as a contract so i think immediately they may cause issues within the organization i think the three month window will give me enough leverage to say this is mandatory we need to do it and then now that we know that the people that are the contract managers because we've done the work to identify them we can keep on top of it then so i think we've got a clear steer then then three months seems reasonable um we've got a formally proposed and seconded um recommendation uh all those in favor your hands okay so thank you thank you so just looking at page 254 which is the survey results on 254 of the document i was really disturbed probably reading some of that 21 percent of we're not sure if there are consequences for failing to meet performance targets 21 we're not sure if the contract detailed how variations should be managed you know these are to me basic skill i've not been a contract manager but dealing with a variation within a contract i would think could happen quite often um you know as situations change and contracts flex and you might not be doing one bit of the contract and be able to do a bit more in another area i am concerned that about a fifth of those surveyed um felt they didn't have those skills um and knowledge so my my question really is are you going to rerun the survey and i think from an audit point of view and swap point of view you know if those figures have not improved i would find that a great concern so are you going to rerun the survey because i think again as an audit committee if the results weren't better um i would be really concerned at that so second question yeah i haven't haven't got that planned at the moment but yeah happy to so we can see the supposed to see the results of where we've got with the training once we've done that so i think it's swap that ran ran the survey is that right callister yeah um i can come in on that so we do have contract management here in there's an order in the 24 25 audit plan obviously there's a high level scope for why i was putting the audit plan but certainly when we have that detailed scoping meeting obviously part of the conversation could be around whether we do rerun that survey i do appreciate if we run it too early um some of those officers were surveying won't be here potentially in three four months time so there was going to be a timing issue when it's best to run that survey to get a good understanding but we can certainly make sure we include it in in the scope uh i think certainly what six 12 months is that sort of right time time frame this time by next march our organization should sort of be in place so it might fit yeah so sort of march april so reporting back hopefully this time next year so we can see yeah and my last question chair is there's quite a bit of guidance and trainings for counselors on procurement and contract management which i don't think anybody in the organization's done um and actually it covers how as counselors you can challenge contracts and get involved in you know how contract well perhaps a particular contract sort of become involved in looking at that early stages before the contracts let i just think as a council moving forwards it'd be quite good for counselors to have a better understanding of that and start to provide some challenge certainly on the larger contracts waste uh being a case in point um but there we go right uh thank you gary so much for uh coming along to give us that briefing it has been uh very helpful oh sorry quill did you have a question uh yes oh i'm lindy sorry i missed you um yeah i'm just interested lindy sorry i'll just bring quill in in the room and then i'll bring you in next okay okay thank you i'm just interested in appendix one and the control boards um a lot a lot has been put on the the success of the control boards in bringing down expenditure but if i write read the table right it saved about 27 000 pounds and only two requests have been declined um and bearing in mind that these must be populated by fairly fairly high level people and the level of preparation for each meeting i'm just wondering are they really worth worth it just to save 27 grand over six months is it in the grand scheme of things it's um a relatively small amount of money is against that report correct there are a lot of recommendations for negotiation and there are a lot of recommendations for um people to go away and then come back again to the board come back to us in a week's time or two weeks time when they've spoken again to the supplier and i think the board also has the impact of people negotiating before they come to the board because they're aware that that is a question we'll we'll now ask and challenge people have they negotiated that prices down challenge them on the scope of what they've done is everything within the scope of what they've requested mandatory and statutory service delivery are there some additional requirements that they've added in there so there is a challenge but yeah you're correct the actual appendix is not a high value of saving shown there how may i come back um okay well i mean you've said that the process itself adds a level of rigor to people coming to the committee and sort of sharpens them up a bit which of course feeds into mandy's point about training for contract managers anyway um are the contract managers the people who do the procurement and set up the um contract specification or are they just the ones who see it through no we're a commissioning led organization so very often at the at the front end there's a commissioner who will work with the existing contract manager to pick up lessons learned from the existing contract then the commissioner will look broadly at what the need is determine that and then start the procurement process rolling and then once the procurement is finished and we've got a new contractor then there's a transition across to the contract manager to manage the contract but tends to be commissioning at the front end contract managers at point of contract award and hopefully the contract manager also talking to the commissioner to feedback what they've learned during the cycle of the contract who goes to the program board is it the commissioner or the contract manager commissioners and contract managers and sometimes service managers yes it makes though and those roles actually sometimes you've got a commissioner who is also a contract manager so uh sometimes those roles have changed but it's quite a fluid who actually manages the contract i mean perhaps this is a question for jason i mean bear in mind that the relatively small figures here i mean as you as 151 officer this was one of the key components of the managing the financial crisis crisis do you think it has had a sufficient impact on the organization to to justify its continuation so the short answer is yes but remember this is one of three boards so this isn't the span to control board this is around the procurement side of things you've also got the staffing establishment i think what's behind your question is yeah does the cost of running the board justify that savings you take out some of this is about changing the organization's behavior and i would say we're not there yet um by the fact there's a board some of the perhaps poor behaviors we've seen in the past have stopped and people have got themselves already into order so i know certainly on the spender control board some requests haven't come forward because people have gone i won't get this through so when you look at the measure of savings you go that's actually a bit lower than what you thought but you've actually stopped stuff i think you still need to keep looking at it and it keeps going have we got the format right is it to only wrestle not but i would say at the moment it's still worth doing when we look at the out turn if you strip out adults and children's and look at the rest of the organization for about month three onwards when we started putting the pressure on the drop-off and spend is quite dramatic and i think he's in the room alan's in the room i know i was speaking to him earlier when we were looking at the treasury cash flows the actual creditor runs the numbers dropping quite significantly compared to this time last year so it is having an impact i think the trouble has been seeing numbers like this you go is it worth it well i did use the word impact yeah yeah i think it's it needs constantly reviewing on i'd say a regular basis to say have we got the format right or is it stop that now because it's not and you might need to do a different intervention to change new behaviors that have emerged right i've got a very patient lindy online sorry lindy to um kept you waiting so long um thank you i almost forgot what i wanted to ask on page 254 my question is around the supplier resilience checklist so it says that the checklist will give the minimum level of engagement and the information that needs to be obtained on an annual basis but will this supply resilience checklist ensure that there are visits from the management to the supplier will it ensure that the supplier is actually really performing and will it ensure that should the supplier not be able to fulfill the contract that something is in place and then the second part is to this credit safe where the council is being informed if there's any changes in the supplier's financial status that will indicate whether they can fulfill the contract or not but that's just one part of ensuring that there is a contingency plan in place it's so so what if you inform the manage the contract manager that there is a problem with the supplier because my issue is that it's 33 there's no contingency plan in place and there can be other reasons why the supplier might not be able to fulfill the contract so basically my question is will the actions that's been listed on the right-hand side be effective to address what the survey has found thank you did you get that carrie yeah i think it's about you know ensuring people deliver the contract obligations that they they've got within their contracts i think if if the contract training is rolled out now that we've identified who our contract managers are all the contract managers will be aware when a contract starts you need to actually run through the contract obligations with the supplier then track them through and if they're not being delivered take some action to ensure that they are delivered as well as managing change through the contract so that should address those issues and i think the increased engagement with the services that we're having at the moment as well is also helping people beginning to the higher i suppose engagement with the services bringing more questions into the team so that's also helping address things in terms of credit safe the credit safe system is a it's a live system so we have our all of our suppliers are loaded into the system and we get credit reports come in when there's a change say to directors or the credit rating of the organization but that is reviewed daily and then that information once it's received if there's a negative report arrives goes across to finance for more scrutiny and also goes to the service managers just to advise them the contract managers that they know that an alert has been raised against the supplier so it's it's it's a good system in that we're not relying on annual reviews of suppliers this is happening daily we get reports come through and then they're fed out to the contract managers okay thank you um so in terms of the recommendations uh this report is just for noting so a member's happy to note this and move on yep perfect right uh thank you gary for coming along today and we look forward to hearing from you again in future all right so we're going to move on to item 14 which is the age debt 2023 for out turn position uh and over to ben um now we've got about three substantive matters still left on the agenda we've got around about half an hour so i just ask members to try and keep the contributions focused if possible thanks thanks chair so i'd introduce myself as the head of corporate earlier corporate finance and that was around the statements what i also cover in my area is exchequer which sundry debt falls into but also systems which is why this paper is relevant um so i'll keep it brief in terms of them i'm actually really pleased to be able to bring something to the committee on reporting a year-end position for debt and debt recovery um and i think those complexities bringing together the unitary the onboarding of all of the legacy debts and the new finance system as well when one of those graphs you can see where the sundry debt goes up to over just over 50 million and actually a lot of reporting and progress has been made since january onwards um so i think quite a significant recovery position from mid quarter three of the year to the end um and just i give this error some of that heightened attention we should be looking at our income and our collection of income as well as controlling spent uh ultimately if we don't collect our income then our budget's impacted by writing off um so just to make that statement and then the the key highlight um in producing these reports it's clear that that the sundry and the revenues are very separated and the disparity within them and also even with each of those themes the multiple systems processes and approaches as well that we're still managing as per legacies um and you'll note i've tried to put together an action plan just to try and show you what's next and a lot of that is around systems and processing people um so although i'm pleased with the position that we're at at the moment there's a significant amount of work going to happen over the next but with the revenue side 18 months to two years as well in terms of getting us to a single unitary position i'll stop there then and just welcome any comments um committee chair yeah uh thanks uh ben so opening up to uh members so we've got mandy all right i was slightly disappointed to read that there's no staffing consolidation planned for now are you bringing the teams together um and that the debt recovery is performed at 96.68 so sorry collection we're at 96.68 and so it would be nice to have a comparison across the teams to see whether some teams are performing better than others and i think if there's best practice when we bring the teams together it'd be nice to have some learning from that um and do we still get extra money back into our finances if collection rates are above a level we used to have that i don't know if it's still in place and if so are we above that level or below the level um and my last question is um enforcement agents are only successful in 40 of cases um and um in one team they've got dedicated officers to deal with recovery and i'm just wondering why if that is good practice and that's working why that model hasn't been rolled out to all the districts until they all come in together thank you tason's looking at me i'm looking at you tason so those questions actually all related to revenues which is probably more um yours i just the housing benefit but it's still a thing that we're going to pick up on that in terms of 100 plus the yeah so just on the council taxing business right collections yeah it's a good point we can compare between the teams just to give you i was just looking at the national figures actually um they'll be published shortly and they'll be they'll be published shortly for 23 24 but for the prior year so council tax nationally was at 96 percent so actually the first year unitary to be known as 6.868 pretty good business rates was 96.8 percent slightly down by a lot so yeah we will pick up those comparisons with the teams etc as well and the best practice i think that's one of the key things we are operating is four very different ways of operating we need to take the best of each of them bring that together into the new team as it were when we got onto one system of way of operating and you're absolutely right on the housing benefit overpayments you're right you can make a bonus if you're very efficient at collecting those debts you can still keep that thank you sorry chair that's that one about they've got one team that's using officers to collect that's working well i'm just wondering why we haven't rolled it out everywhere yeah i think that's part of aligning our processes across the piece now and we like i say they do operate very differently as different areas at the moment they are on different finance systems different collection systems indeed that's one of the projects ben's got of streamline how to get money into the council in the first place having one system so although it looks you see a council tax bill with our logo at the top and it all looks joined up that's a bit of a mirage what's behind that it's still very separate for councils how they're collecting it so that that project to bring everything together it's a very live project that nick is leading at the moment over the next sort of six to eighteen months to bring that all together that's making money that's all that's collecting better so i'm just wondering why we are not doing it now if we need money that's all but simon carswell and then simon coals i would say you could say simon c but we still be um it's just as confusing um i just want to go on from the fact that you're saying that collections are getting better um especially chasing invoices but if i know we had a case jason and hopefully that's resolved now but if there's an agreement say with a local parish or town to pay tens of thousands of money per annum to the council um and it's just not being invoiced or collected can we be confident that we have now got robust systems in place to make sure that money is being chased and collected because if a parish or town isn't being chased for money they're not going to pay it i think we would say the systems are there so our if i call it our finance systems work and we can collect the debt i think the bit we've struggled being a new council not a surprise is that intelligence of all the debt you should be collecting in the first place if it's regular debt that wasn't a problem i think with a more ad hoc debt that might have been in one or two people's knowledge bases that's where the real dangers are that somebody agreed something they no longer work here or are doing a different role so picking up those i think that's why you've seen the improvements made would i guarantee we've done everything uh no i'm not putting my name to that because i suspect there'll be something we haven't quite got right across the piece but i think we are getting better at eliminating all those and those risks and i think the monitoring system that ben's got in place there and able to do that will further improve it because it starts to throw up the areas we go what's going on here that delu right sorry jason just following up on that and so as jason said whatever's in the system we are now actively that chasing all of the recovery action from the system is all on and we've now got um in the sundry side of our active um legal debt recovery team now chasing those debts and following up one of the bits though that i've asked them to do in the next well from april onwards so we're already in it is how do we engage and promote that across the organization so that's that reference to icot that income code of practice but also want to look at that higher level which covers both revenues and sundry debt what is our income collection policy how do people act when they're they're recovering that what should they be doing in their roles and developing some e-learning that we've got but it needs to look right for a unitary piece so that's part of what's on the action plan coming over the next few months and that should then raise the awareness you're right there i'll probably pick up on that point along the way of and make sure the system knows the debt that we should have because otherwise how are we supposed to monitor it and report it thanks ben um something calls thank you chair um it's just on page 259 the last reference the housing benefit overpayment 2.8 million total debt excluding some invoices for two districts do we have a quantum of the missing two districts and should we be worried about it that's a piece of work underway now so this is reflecting the fact that some do it through our finance systems some do it for their revenue systems um there's a bi report that's um you'll start hearing me say bi report a lot i imagine over the next few months uh they're joining the data now it just wasn't ready for time for this so i can always bring that back or send something round when that report's available how concerned should we be not being indicated any concerns in terms of the values and the volumes that are coming through the 2.8 seems really fairly representative across the piece the bit on housing benefits though referencing back to mandy's point is around how actively did all the legacies chase and recover it because actually we need to be able to maximize that and if we go in we just accept the debt actually want to be able to go beyond that which is more than 100 actually if we really do okay everyone happy um so thank you ben for presenting the plan um sounds like we're all relatively content with the um the plan that you've set out and just keeps updated um periodically on progress um thank you so moving on to 15 which is the revised treasury management strategy statement um for 24/5 um i've seen anton's face online i can't see him in the room no i'm online yeah i've got alan in the room but um we can't see you here in the room anton um the screen do you hear me yes we can hear you hear you that's okay though are you ready for me to crack on yes go ahead so um members will be aware of the gravity project in outline and there is a separate paper that will go through uh executive and full council on the budget implications etc of that one of the um knock-on effects should that um work be agreed by council is that the prudential indicators in the original treasury management strategy approved by full council in february uh were perhaps not sufficient to deal with the additional debt that gravity will create or could create and therefore we are bringing back a revised treasury strategy to merely to simply update those prudential indicators to provide sufficient headroom that will be able to stay within them so the particular prudential indicators in question are referred to as the operational boundary and the authorized limit this is where under the sit for codes members agree limits to the amount of borrowing that officers are allowed to do and therefore it is an upper limit um that we hopefully will stay well within but um it's an upper limit that we we need to operate within and so we've revised these for the budgeted impacts of gravity assuming it's signed off and uh bringing it back to you for consideration today and then ultimately it will go to full council because prudential indicators under the codes should be approved by full council. Thanks Anton um so it's relatively straightforward from that perspective um in that we are allowing you to effectively have a a larger spending limit on the the credit card um I suppose the the question which probably isn't a question for me for you so I'm going to ask it of Jason is um are how far along are we in signing deals etc or deals being signed for the gravity site does it pose us any risk if there's a change of government are we effectively going to incur that borrowing and and then uh potentially face the risk that uh the deal falls apart and we're left holding the can? Good question I wish they called a general election when they did because we were very close to finalizing everything that's obviously put a spanner in the works of getting final agreements although we are still working with civil servants and had quite a few exchanges yesterday with them around getting final wording on stuff um we will not put the council in a position we've been really clear on this where the council funds the costs of this debt that is why the government is willing to give us the grant um so the two go together in terms of this paper it's kind of a technical paper on the consequences of agreeing the gravity deal if you agree the gravity deal you need to do this otherwise we break our own rules which seems a bit stupid but the control would be in terms of agreeing that and making sure that we have got this lined up as you say and don't expose the council to a borrowing risk they can't fund and I'm assuming if anything were to happen and it doesn't go ahead then Anton wouldn't borrow the money? Indeed right unless the yeah I suppose there is a set of circumstances where the 151 asked me to borrow for other purposes um but um we'll we'll assume that that would go through if it was of sufficient size would go through proper um scrutiny um and and sign off anyway. Okay thanks Anton. Mandy? Super quick comment um this paper went through uh scrutiny yesterday um so just a plea really um section 19 scrutiny comments if it's moving on please don't forget that it's been to scrutiny you need to pop their comments um in there and secondly for anybody that wants it there was a really good paper on gravity yesterday that went to resources so if anybody wants to get the up-to-date position I found that really helpful thank you. Right so let's move this to a vote so is everyone happy to accept the revised paper? All those in favour? Any abstentions? No? Got your authorization thanks Anton. Thank you very much I shall await the the movement through uh through exec and full council. Thank you uh so moving on to our last substantive items today which is um the treasury management annual report for 23/4 and over to Alan. Thank you chair uh this is the year-end report as required uh by local government act 2003 that reports on treasury activity for 23/24 uh and the debt and investment positions as at 31st of March 2024. Uh importantly this report gives assurance that treasury activities undertaken have been in full compliance with relevant legislation codes strategies policies and practices. To give some external context the UK bank rate has been raised three times during a period 4.25 to 5.25 percent in August 2023 and at that point it looked like rates had plateaued with expectations that rates would fall in early 2024. As inflation figures have remained above the Bank of England targets expectations of rate reductions have been pushed back. As a result investment and borrowing rates have remained elevated with a fair amount of volatility. Tables showing movements in the key rates are shown in appendix B. Investment activity during the year there were 210 cash deposits totaling nearly 1.4 billion pounds mostly with money market funds to to maintain sufficient liquidity and to allow to repay maturing debt as it fell due. Average balances stood 100 sorry investment balances stood 192 million on the 31st of March which included 28 million of cash fell held for external bodies. Legacy portfolios and investment balance information at the beginning and end of the period can be seen in tables 5 to 8.70 to 75. Cash balances are over 103 million lower at the year end the majority being used to return cash held on behalf of NHS Somerset. Income net of that apportion to external bodies of over 11 million pounds has been out in the year. The borrowing activity the inherited borrowing position of Somerset council is laid out in table 1.37 it shows that 53 million pounds was lending borrowing between legacy councils 48 million of which was lent by Somerset county council this was effectively cost on the 1st of April. There was also 206.5 million of borrowing of a temporary nature from other local authorities most of it maturing during the financial year. Tables 2 and 3 points 38 to 40 show the movement in borrowings and the rates paid during the year. During a period an aggregate of 110 million of temporary loans has been repaid and also 15 million pounds of lobos were repaid as the lenders exercised their option to raise the rate of the loans so we exercised our option to repay them. New borrowing taken at higher rates has pushed up the overall interest rate for borrowing from 3.45 at the beginning of the period to 4.26 at the end but this was inevitable given the rise in interest rates over the last year although the cost of debt did underspend on the budgeted cost. Thank you Alan so over to members for questions. Andy because of times it's got two more meetings to run through and I can save questions for them thank you. Just a quick comment there's two graphs on pages 328 and 329 and they've got a percentage on one axis but they've got no timeline or any other one so I don't know what the bottom line is what is that years months something else doesn't say 328 329 the return on total investments internal and external funds. Sorry I don't have a full report with me that's a graph. Alan do you want me to come in because I know which one it is. Okay thank you. So Councillor that those are graphs which show the axis is different individual councils and obviously we've indicated which is Somerset council but we neither have nor would feel it appropriate to disclose who the other councils on that list on that sort of width are so there there isn't really a an axis to report on does that make sense? Yes thank you. Okay any other questions from members if not our members happy to note the report and recommend it to executive then to full council. Perfect thank you Alan thank you Anton. All right moving on to item 17 which is the audit committee work plan so our members happy with the plan as set out. I was just gonna say one of the things Michelle just been messaging each other one of the things we do is set out the plan across the whole year so you can see the pattern of what comes where I think that's quite helpful then you can see yeah when debt's coming or update and swap etc etc. Sure so we may I'll talk it through with officers but I'm concerned that the June meeting may be a bit superfluous if the south Somerset audit isn't ready to to come so chances are we may end up cancelling the June meeting have members got strong feelings about that either way at this moment? Yeah okay we're talking through with officers and make a decision come out if anyone's got any strong feelings in either direction please can you message me okay Mandy you had a question. Thank you my only feeling would be if you're loading too much onto the next agenda that would be my only comment and so just a couple of yeah a couple of things have we got procurement waivers reported I think page 85 of the report said that we'd have procurement waivers reported in the work plan and then we had the update on auditors key recommendations I think that's going to go into the work plan as well for what did we say September was it I can't remember. Not sure off the top of my head we'll review the the forward plan for the the next three meetings just to see if we can get the balance of reports into a better shape so that we haven't got quite as much workload so we either meet more frequently and try and split the work workload out so we have shorter meetings which I suspect might be preferable to members or we stick with a you know a fairly hefty agenda and when we're here we're here I don't know what approach you would prefer. I think we've got all the accounts all the numbers of accounts out of the way but I do think there are some emerging issues certainly around risk I think there we all need to look at the program risks for all the work that's going on with the council as well as our normal risks and probably gravity risks as well that's another separate risk register and I think the sort of debt and recovery figures again great report to see but I think we're going to need to program that into into our works program so I think there will be whilst we won't have as many counts I think there will be one or two items that we're going to be seeing reported on to replace them almost. So as we moved from the previous phase which was very much about clearing off those old accounts now we're moving into a different rate and rhythm with trying to get ahead looking at the future risks and trying to help the organization manage its overall balancing act of different balls in the air at any any given moment so I think there's still plenty for us to do this year. The Somerset council first audit is going to be an absolute pig if I'm honest it's going to be really complex we've got a new finance system there's massive amounts of environments between different budgets and all that sort of stuff it's going to be hugely complex so the timetable the auditors have set out today I think is ambitious maybe even courageous but there we go. Jason? Just on the work sort of plan going forward we'll try and balance it across the month so it kind of fits better. One of the things that I'll have a think about because I don't know quite what it looks like yet but one of the concerns I have is that part of the capitalization direction requirement is that you have a sit for review that is very much focused on the finances but it is a bit wider when you look at the reviews they are governancy stuff though I think having you done the annual report today you can see actually I think virtually everything I think is covered off but I will double check no things that this committee should have done that it hasn't done because it's been so consistent in the accounts that of course you've spent with us at the other end so I'll have a look at that and if there's any if there are any gaps then we'll make sure they're on your agenda as well. Okay look thank you thank you all for your hard work again today I hope you have the nice rest of the day the sun is still shining at the moment there is also still cake left if you want to take home some home with you thank you all. you [BLANK_AUDIO]