Transcript

Transcript

My name is Councillor Arjun Mitra and I'm the chair of the Governance, Audit, Risk Management and Standards Committee. Welcome to all members of the committee. Please note that this meeting is being webcast by the Council and those present may be picked up in recordings. Can I please remind members and officers to use the microphone when speaking by pressing the middle speaker icon. Item number one, absence of members, if any. Richard Harbord, the independent member, has sent his apologies. I haven't had any general apologies from anyone else. Minutes of the previous meeting are on pages 5 to 18. We have an action which is on page 15, the computer reboots. So page one of the previous meeting, the quarterly risks report and the Open Door Homes acquisition programme. The committee were advised that officers would report back at the next meeting what the impact would be on the open response that we've had. The responses in the papers on page 15 was the quarterly risks report committee requested an update on the Barn Next Zero challenge, which was launched in November last year. Last, the information we circulated to members via email of successful applicants and what their ideas were saying that the sustainability team would be reprofiling the carbon offset fund risk and requested further information be provided to the next meeting. The next block was on page four, which is the internal exceptions recommendations. The committee held a discussion regarding legacy debts, noted that there were processes in place of debt recovery policies, legacy debts. The meeting was advised that final figure of the written-off debt would be detailed in the future report. The members also noted that action points relating to the cyber security, third-party security and awareness audit would be completed by 2024 and that the committee would receive a report detailing progress and the processes being devised to undertake this would be fed back at the next committee. So all of the responses are in the minutes there. I won't read the ones. I'll take too much time. The final one on the treasury management, I think we are awaiting today's committee if that's okay with members. Okay. That being the case, can I take it that members of the committee approved the minutes of the previous meeting held on the 23rd of July? Is that approved? Agreed. Thank you. Item number three. Do any members have anything they wish to declare? Item number four, dispensations by the monitoring officer, there are none. Item number five, deputations, there are none. Item number six, petitions, there are none. Item number seven, public questions and comments, there are none. Our anniversary today. Thank you, Chet. Today marks one year of Hamas' terror attack on the communities of southern Israel. Remember the 1,200 victims murdered in their homes, communities and at the Nova music festival. 250 taken hostage to Gaza and the thousands of innocent lives torn apart. We also remember the huge loss of innocent life that has occurred in the years since in Israel, Gaza and now Lebanon. At the party conference, I was privileged to meet the families of two of the over 100 hostages that remain in Hamas' captivity in Gaza. This includes a British citizen. I reaffirm the overwhelming rallying call to bring them all home now. Please to the committee to hold a minute's silence as we reflect on the deep pain of the past year for many of our residents, our twin town of Ramadan and to unite in our shared hope for a peaceful future. Thank you. Thank you very much. Councillor Rose. Apologies to Councillor Grover, I had meant to share that with you before the meeting. Right. Move on to items before we dive into questions. Thank you, Elaine. Hi, everybody. So this is the call to one report for 24/25. So the report presents an overview of the risks across the organisation. It focuses on the strategic risks, which are all the cross cutting risks that we manage and all the high level service risks. And so we're managing 202 risks currently across the organisation. And there are 22 high level risks that we focused on in the report and provided some more detailed information in there. More than happy to take questions on individual risks. I may have to take those questions away and feedback the answers. So bear with me. I'm happy to do that. Thank you very much. Do members of the committee have questions on this item? Councillor Grover, I know Councillor Rose does. Thank you, Chair. I just I'm kind of looking at the it's the introductory paragraphs and obviously one of the risks that are highlighted that is highlighted as being of zero risk. Elaine, do you want to take that? Let me just bring up the risk description and I'll explain it to you. Hold on one moment. Does anybody have the actual risk reference to have? Make it easy to find it. It is. Is it S.T.R. 031 that you're looking for? That might be it. No, not that one. 31. Hold on. Looking at 13. Yes, so that the actual description of the risk is about ensuring we get the necessary funds for the sustainability programme. So, yeah, it's it's the whole of the sustainability programme. So there is a question mark of getting the funds to fund the full sustainability programme. Yeah. So the risk itself is the inability to raise the funds for that programme. And what is the total amount of funding required for that programme? That I would have to take away and find out the answer to that. I don't have that information. I think it will have been I when you asked the question, I do remember reading it somewhere, but I could not remember off the top of my head. Do you have any follow up questions or any further questions? OK. Can I go to Councillor Rose, please? Thank you. On page 27 under health and safety, there's a section on latent effects identified in the build quality throughout the Colindale office. I was reassured to read that it's safe for us not asking our staff to work in unsafe environments. I was deeply concerned that a new building that the council is using and owns, I believe, has such serious defects. I want to know how we are trying to fix that, if that affects the value of the property and what we intend on doing it. Before I go to officers, Councillor Radford has a follow up point to that. Is there any way of recovering some costs associated with the fact that probably it wasn't our fault that it has latent defects as well? We have a response that might be helpful. This isn't my area, my service area, but I am aware of the issue in the building. And I've got some notes from Chris Smith, who's the assistant director for this area. So we're in dispute with a company that constructed the building. We've already sent them a letter of claim for compensation, pressing for them to remediate some of the defects. But we're also working to identify if there's any other defects that may not be immediately visible. So we've got the totality of what the issues are before we kind of proceed. So we're conducting some intrusive surveys and some further surveys ourselves. Our intention is to claim all costs back from the developer. They will likely contest some of that. We think it will be a long disputed commercial negotiation and meetings are ongoing at the moment. So I guess if you want any further information, I could ask Chris Smith to circulate that to the committee. Yes. I think updates that have come through to directors group, I think it's been going on for a very long time. Maybe I can add to that. Presumably, I mean, most of the time there's multiple projects which builders work with in a particular location. Slightly concerned that we may have found some defects that maybe other people might be unaware of. Do we know if there are other buildings, either for us or other people, which this builder's done? I'm thinking about like if you think about the rack scandal, right? It doesn't just affect one school. You know, I'm just kind of should we be worried that this isn't just the Collinsdale offices, I guess is mine. I'll pass that through to Chris and ask him to include that information in a briefing. OK, thank you. Does anybody else have any questions? All right. Yeah, go ahead. And then we'll go back to Council. I've got a few sporadic ones here. That's right on resource pressures affecting. What's it say? The second it's on page twenty six. And it is about resource pressures affecting service delivery and income collection for parking. I'm aware certainly in my ward, and I think this is kind of a wider problem, that there's been actually a rise in intimidation of our wardens, which might be affecting kind of essentially being able to tickets and collecting money on that. Could someone kind of report back on kind of if what reports we have got about intimidation of our wardens, whether that is affecting actually recovery and issuing of tickets and then recovering income from people? Obviously, we've had to have some joint patrols. That's clearly not sustainable way of doing things. Question around that sort of pause in between my questions. I think I don't think we'll have that information to hand, but I think we'll make a note of that request. Ask that to be put on our new action for next time. Thank you. And then probably from the minor to the micro to the macro, in terms of the Brent Cross program. You sort of talked a bit about last time round about what if interest rates were to rise and sort of curious as well, if we're to follow the Bank of England's projections for income, interest rates to come down. What does that actually look like in terms of the economics, I suppose, of Brent Cross, because that seems to be a sort of ongoing risk. It's interesting to look at it in the other direction potentially as well, because we're talking about affordability. It seems like what we've seen in the States, if the UK follows at all, we're hoping we're looking for interest rates drops rather than rising. I'm just wondering about how much cushion that provides us. I don't know whether you've done that analysis as part of the over 5 percent part. But we haven't. But it's a really good point. We probably should take that one away as well. Have a look at that. David's online may be able to add something over to David. Or do we need to take that one away? Yeah, I think we need to take that one away, Kevin. Thank you. Turning to adult social care, we talked about pressures obviously there. Do we know what other boroughs are? I mean, I guess my questions are, maybe this could be a request, I suppose, is are we actively asking other boroughs what everyone is having trouble with adult social care? Everyone has cost pressures. Feels like if we're doing our own homework, when we could be cribbing other peoples, this is a wasted opportunity. Is there sort of best practice we can learn from in terms of spending some time in Dagenham, in Enfield, in wherever, to try and work out how they're redesigning their adult social care program and potentially maybe if there is a kind of audit of the current program which could come back, that might be useful as well. What we're planning to do in terms of stopping these pressures in adult social care? I think I can try and answer that initially and then Kevin can give you a proper answer. The short answer is yes, there is always a lot of best practice sharing across the sector. We are not alone in being the only borough in London that has had a substantial increase in adult social care costs. As Councillor Radford well knows, these are really difficult costs to control because they are statutory expenditure. We know that cases are getting a lot more complex across the board, but in terms of a bit more detail about what the council is specifically doing, I think he wanted to come in on this. I was simply going to talk about the macro position across London which might interest Councillor Radford and I think if you want, we do have some steps. We're obviously not a service delivery committee so not all the relevant offices will be. I'm going to go back to Councillor Grove and then Councillor David. Just a brief one. So the risk rating in relation to business continuity is reduced, which is obviously good. How often do you have tabletop exercises to test those? When was the last time you had one? General business continuity exercises or cyber? Either. They tend to be cyber related these days, don't they? Most of them. One of the actions that came out of the internal audit into business continuity was to develop a more intensive training plan. That's in progress at the moment. We've got a much more update on business continuity. So that hasn't such an exercise taken place in the past six months or not? There's various kind of smaller exercises that would have taken place. I'm not sure if it's exactly the last six months, but I know it was this year. And that's really how the exercise for business continuity at the moment, because rather than kind of organisation, it's like what would happen if going through your plans step by step, you can do it on a desktop exercise. So there has been smaller cyber IT exercises and there's been a group exercises that take place in the borough as well. I would obviously I'm not an expert, but I would suggest that that's a gap in the reason preparedness. Just down the kind of councils IT operations. So, you know, that that that that's a fairly standard thing that most big organisations do. And that sounds like it's a bit of a gap in our preparedness. Yeah. And we have had a desktop exercise this year with senior officers and it was identified. I think that's a very timely comment, actually. My workplace has been a serious cyber attack on TFL calls. It wasn't for additional. Well, and also you tend to learn quite a lot through these exercises as well, which is which is kind of the point of having them. It's actually going to have all of these plans sitting somewhere, but it's actually when you go through the exercise that you learn something. Or even when you actually have a real life scenario, that's actually when you learn more than anything else, but testing is quite important. It's a very good point. Very well. Thanks. I've got two questions. And the first one is to do with the healthcare. I wonder if it's time that we do a kind of deep dive ourselves to see. Yeah, of money because the second one is looking at. Page 23. The strategic risks finance has got 68. Kind of obviously, and then statutory 76. Are they kind of related or are they just. Very high. I think on the first point. Yes, there is a lot of work that is going on at the council to reduce costs. We now have a cabinet member for finance whose job it is to make sure all of these other cabinet colleagues are drilling down on costs. I gather that there are very regular meetings to discuss. To discuss cost and managing the budget. I will hand over to Kevin. Again, to give you a more coherent answer. I'm sure I can do that chair, but that's pretty coherent. It was the point I mentioned. We haven't done an internal audit recently. I mean, that could be considered, of course, but there is a specific city, but I certainly wouldn't. If you're interested in getting those steps here and committee, we could good luck to bring some back. Right. Okay. Thank you, Councillor David. The current permission of the committee. I'd like to turn to the recommendations on page 19, which are committee note the status of the council's strategic and high level 15 plus service risks. Including the control mitigations in place to manage these risks. Is that agreed? That's agreed. Thank you. Turning to item nine, the treasury management performance update Q1 2024/25, which starts on page 37. We've got David here virtually to make that item and introduce it. Thank you. Thank you, chair. As Councillor Mitchell has said, this is a quarterly treasury report. It's part of a series of reports that is provided through GAMS. It documents the treasury activity over the period 1st of April 2024 to the 30th of June 2024. I have it starting on page 43. Oh, sorry, it's 37, but the page, perhaps where the report really starts is page 43, which is an appendix, which is on Barnet, Barnet format. If you could jump to that. I'm just going to note some of the points in the report, key points in the report, and then we can take questions. So over that quarter, 10 million of new was undertaken. That was taken very early in the quarter around 2nd of April. We'd actually applied for that borrowing in the previous financial year. Since then, over the summer, the council has borrowed a further 65 million, but that would be captured in the Q2 report that will be forthcoming. We are expecting to need to borrow significantly more than this to cover refinancing. There's about 100 million pounds of refinancing that's needed this year and also to fulfil the capital programme and use of reserves. Money market funds are around 100 million, and then we have a further 70 million held as gilts, which are there to back the Brent Cross obligations. It's not surprised we have quite healthy money market fund balances this time of year. That was as expected. We are expecting that balance to wind down quite significantly over the next few months. I wanted just to raise a couple of points with the committee, firstly on page 46, which is section one. And what we've done on this page is we've just highlighted how the capital programme has, as reported, has changed since when we set our treasury management strategy statement, which we did based on the February 2024 capital programme information. So this information is based on the information that was provided to a cabinet in July. So you can see there, the line I'm most focused on is the borrowing line, where you see it had increased by 38.47 million. Now, I've had these numbers come through from the September cabinet information. And what we've seen there is actually these numbers will slip back again. And so it's not unusual that during the year there will be some variance within the information that's provided to us regarding the capital programme. But I think it is a is a key priority that we can get, I guess, more accurate forecast, because it does impact our strategic planning. The next section I just wanted to draw your particular attention to was on page 49, which is the capital financing budget. Now, there's a table on there which I think it'd just be worth walking through, if you can see that. So in twenty three, twenty four, the net capital financing budget was around twelve and a half million and the out turn last year by the actual expenditure relative to that budget. Thirteen point seven million. That was a one point two million pressure. Now, we've been working quite hard to work through what the impact on the capital financing budget will be this year. Now, the budget was increased from twelve point five million to around thirteen point three million. And an additional two million was added to the budget from contingency, taking the budget to thirteen point three. And we've worked through some provisional numbers. And so there's numbers we've given there and we're given a range. So even if there was no further borrowing undertaken, we project that the out turn would be nineteen point two million, which would be a pressure of around four million. And we've, as I explained, already taken seventy five million of borrowing. So that's a scenario that cannot be, cannot hold. If we was to fulfil the borrowing requirements as set out in the twenty four, twenty five, July twenty, twenty four capital programme sent to Canada. And that pressure would build to eight million. And so there's a quite large focus on this. And in the report, we've suggested from a Treasury perspective, some of the actions which need to be looked at to sort of help mitigate this. And there is a lot of work, particularly around the capital programme. Kevin can can can feed back on the work being done there. But also on the debtors position, there's quite a lot of money, frankly owed to the council. And obviously, if we can recover that cash, that will impel the Treasury position because we'll have more cash and therefore won't need to borrow as much. So that was my update. And just to take questions. OK. In terms of. Yeah, so it's so I have some I have some very high level analysis on this. It is quite a complex picture, so it's not it's just like five debtors owing us large monies. There are there are some debtors that are of significant sounds, particularly from the NHS. But perhaps Kevin can comment on that. But he does feed right the way through down the chain. So from the numbers I've seen, there's quite a lot of debtors just related to quite a significant number of small debtors that add up to a large number. And I'm not I'm not trying to dodge the question here, but it's not it's not the Treasury team's role to sort of oversee the debtors position. It's just obviously we've got keen interest on this because I think the feeling is that there is a is a large debtors position sort of evolving. I think if I can be helpful, that information is provided to the overview. So I don't want to proceed if you do want to go through the list. I think it says usually the biggest debtor the council has is a Fremantle NHS trust. Not entirely sure why, but it just always has been a big one. You know, I'm not necessarily asking for names of organizations. I was actually just trying to understand if it was council taxpayers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to make a general point to kick off with and alluded to it, but I want to say a little strongly so. Management of the council's budget goes through the cabinet, the cabinet manage things like capital financing costs and debt management and those sorts of things. So David's report is about Treasury management. I just wanted to make that clear to everybody. So don't think that David and others should be answering for the debt position or indeed capital financing position of the council because he clearly should not. His report is around Treasury management. I'm not saying there aren't very important questions to ask about that. There are. A number of them will go through the cabinet itself. We can bring a debt position. I've got, as the CFO at the moment of the council, a number of areas that I'm concerned about, and the extent of the council's debt is one. And the debt management procedures and practices in place is one that David has mentioned here, the capital financing budget overspend. And that's feeding into the overall out-term forecast, the revenue overspend that we're forecasting at the moment, order one and potentially increasing two. So there are a number of significant factors in there. We've already mentioned one tonight, that's the adult services overspend position, debt management. In fact, there are three of the very large areas that we are concerned about in terms of bringing back into a balanced position going forward. So we can bring debts to you. So there's some negotiation going on there with them about trying to level that up with both organizations. I think I've accepted that we need to regularly, and the debt one, as David says, sorry, the capital financing position, the borrowing position is one that there's a question in there. Is this linked to which I'd like to answer as well as I know that is that I've asked cabinet members to accept suggestion from me. I've got Councillor Radford, then Councillor Rose, then Councillor David. Just to respond quickly to I guess what Kevin just said, I think it was this committee last time that I was like, normally you set a budget and then operate within it, and that should include the capital budget as much. So as much as I think having that kind of emergency cap on, I think there might be a kind of a broader policy even in fat times as well as lean times that maybe could be worked up. Can I ask, in terms of how the capital program interacts with the treasury management function and how that is being integrated into one piece, is that something which could be kind of looked at and brought to the next committee? Because I think that's something which is sort of in terms of both like modeling for the rest of it too, because it's something which seems to come up a lot, but it'd be good to just see it in one place and have a discussion just about that if possible. And then I've got one other question which maybe I can ask at the same time, which is about the refinancing. Maybe this is more to David. So obviously we spent money backed by cash and then we've had to externalize, but we spent the money with cash when we had zero percent interest rates. We now don't have zero percent interest rates. In terms of the rates at which we're refinancing these things, what was the previous rate and what would the rate now be in terms of the shift in terms of the money actually going out of the bank account because of the difference in the interest rate? Do you want me to take that one first or Kevin, did you want to respond to the first one? Yeah, OK. So it's a really good question, the refinancing. Actually, last year, so last fiscal year, 20, 23, 24, towards the end of the year, we borrowed for what I call working capital purposes, i.e. we borrowed what we felt we needed for the capital program, but we still were short on cash. So we had a liquidity issue. And so we took a decision last year to borrow one year, which is the shortest time we can borrow under PWLB. PWLB allowed you to borrow for periods of up to one year or up to 50 years, sorry, down to one year. Now, last year, so that effectively meant we was borrowing at the base rates at the time. So we took that borrowing about five, five and a half percent. That would need to be refinanced in February and March this year, which will likely be a significantly lower rate. We won't need to re-borrow all of that money if we can recover cash because we think we needed to borrow that money largely because of our, potentially because of our debtor's position. But we've worked it through and I think there will be a saving to the capital financing cost centre because we will be refinancing that at a lower rate this year relative to last year. And that accounts for about 85 million. And then there's around 15 million of general purpose borrowing. And we broadly took our average rate year last year was broadly about three percent. So we will be refinancing that at a slightly higher rate than what we took that borrowing at, if that answers your question. On the point about who manages the capital program, the capital financing budget, that's very clearly on treasury management, the fact that the treasury management team undertake the borrowing and we hold the capital financing budget within finance, within my area of responsibility for the future. I guess I maybe to be more precise, I guess one of my questions is if you're looking at a capital project in the private sector, you think about what was my weighted cost of capital, that would include the cost which you're borrowing from in terms of the bank, whatever it might be. Considering there's a bit of a murky picture around what are we going to wind up borrowing when in terms of whether it's minimum revenue provisions, whether it's what interest rates are going to be, et cetera, et cetera, is the idea that that doesn't take place for individual capital? Or what do we use in terms of modelling it for individual capital projects? Or do we just say let's ignore that and then put in a kind of a hurdle at the macro position so you need to clear it by so much regardless of how much we try and anticipate what the borrowing cost would be? Does that make more sense? Does it make it more relevant to the treasury management side of things too? It makes more sense, but it's very different in the public sector and how we do things and you might be somewhat surprised at the way it's done. But in ideal terms, there's a review process for every capital project that comes forward. And a key, key question around that is how it links to the council's priorities and where the council wants to go ahead with and it meets the priorities of the council plan. And then therein is the question around funding. And how it should be is that the funding source comes with that and if we're going to, if we need to borrow, prudential borrowing for the project, then that needs to be identified. And the revenue implications, if there are any of any capital project, needs to go forward as part of the overall budget-setting process that goes then to cabinet onto full council. And then treasury management team will be divided with, because the council would have agreed a budget, capital financing costs, cost of borrowing, and under normal circumstances, if it's gone through the normal methodology, then that budget will be sufficient to meet those revenue costs based on the annual program. I hope that's clear enough. I'll be happy to discuss more with you outside if you want to. I fear that's sadly something we both might say yes to. But yeah, maybe that would be good at some point. I think maybe just to summarize, I think what would help me in terms of I think when I speak to residents and other things about it is given the financial position we find ourselves in over the last two or three years, what added things have we done in terms of around governance and risks and whatever when it comes to the capital project, when it comes to liquidity buffers, when it comes to all of this stuff in order to try and get ourselves in shape, both in terms of like the governance and the rules and the stuff we're doing around it to make sure we're being rigorous. Because I know we're talking about different bits and pieces, but I struggle to recall all of them at once, if that makes sense. So maybe there's just a kind of a list of since 2022, we've taken the following steps would just be really helpful to try and convey that to residents that we're having due regard, I suppose. I don't know if that's possible. I'd be very grateful if so. Do we want to take that as a paper to come to the committee at another time? Yes, absolutely. It's a challenge that we can certainly have a go. I think we're taking a note of that request. Maybe let's come back to that when we look at the forward programme. OK, Councillor Rose and then Councillor David. Two slightly less technical questions. The first one, on page 49, we're talking about potentially for longer term spend, for example, youth centres and preventative health. The second point was a more strategic question in terms of, you know. The first go David and then I'll follow up. Yes, so on the first question regarding the strategies, I must stress on the paper, these are saying these are the things that could be done to help soften the impact on the capital financing cost centre. So we're not saying that we should just sell all our assets, but if we did, then there would be a process that would be undertaken to sort of test the viability of that. So Kevin might want to explain more around what that process is, but there definitely would be a process. And this is really just to highlight some of the options that might be available on the second. Yeah, I mean, there are assets we have where, frankly, there might be best to sell them. There might be worth more for us to be sold than to be kept, just like any organisation will consider selling capital assets. So it doesn't always necessarily have to be in a financially distressed situation. I think there's always a review of the capital assets we have and there will be a strategy around that. On the second point regarding the strategic objectives. I mean, Kevin and I and more broadly have considered these at length. You raised this question and called over clearly. I think it's a very good point that perhaps in the next version of this, there should be just a sort of a comment on the effectiveness of what we've achieved, not just saying what they are. I think that would be a good idea. I think it's for us perhaps to consider internally whether there needs to be an independent view of that, because otherwise it's almost like we're marking our own homework. I think it's a good point to raise that we should just set the strategic objectives, we should monitor how successful they've been. Yeah, I fully agree with that. Yeah, really important that David emphasised, and I know you know this, but just some of the things that we could do, we've got to address that and maybe other things we're considering and it's pretty difficult for us to deliver as well. Thank you very much. Councillor David for the last question. So we definitely, it is under consideration whether we should make an interest charge to the NHS on outstanding debt. We don't do that at the moment. Then they don't charge us either. So there's a lot of negotiation involved. Okay, I'm going to take us to recommendations page 38, which are that the committee notes the Treasury management update for quarter one defined by the Treasury team for 24/25 and beyond. Note that the strategic priorities identified cut across the council's operations and so required by the Treasury management team. Is that noted? That's noted. Thank you very much. Move on to item number 10, 2023/4, corporate complaints, local government and social care ombudsman, LGSCO. Hi, everyone. The council is required to report the corporate complaints performance, LGSCO performance of the arms committee. This is a report of the monitoring officer. This report covers the period 1st of April 2023 to 31st of March 2024. And it includes a summary of our performance in relation to different stages of our corporate complaints and also social care ombudsman. Every July, the LGSCO issues. These are intended to further improve things. Therefore, they're often critical. Our last report highlighted a number of issues, including some delays in the inquiries. This year, they've highlighted the improvements in the processes. The annual report, I think it tells a story of our focus on improvements last year. And that is about people who use council services. And there are some positive things linked to that as well. So we've done quite an in-depth analysis of the data itself, just so that we don't take you on face value. It gives the reduced number of complaints, proportional complaints that help us reduce the escalations that have reduced as well. And fewer complaints that are escalated to the ombudsman and held by the ombudsman. The improvements we've made, including the accessibility of the service, the complaints process itself, as well as information about how to make a complaint, efficiency in how we deal with what we do with learning from complaints to improve services, and also the monitoring of our performance throughout the year through our new dashboards. In terms of key trends, I'll just touch on a few numbers. I imagine the reduced number of complaints has come down by 422 in comparison to last year. The lower proportion of them are upheld, so it's 37%. And they're all indicating that we are dealing with complaints earlier in the process to avoid costly escalations and further dissatisfaction by ourselves as well. The annual cost of compensation, obviously, in addition to the cost of investigating and resolving complaints, there are the compensations that have been paid. So they vary from year to year because you might have one or two complaints where you get higher value compensations paid. In 2023-24, it's gone down by 82%. OK. Does anybody have any questions? I always think it's difficult to judge a complaint sometimes, given the case of complaints coming down. I do think we always need to be vigilant about that, though, you know, the bilateral pressures that are on the council. I'm not expecting us to get as good a return next year. We will continue to work on it and do the best we can, keeping close. So far, we have seen recent trends, but we've got 12 complaints upheld by LGSE. I'm slightly intrigued as to why Street Scene has some slightly lopsided numbers in terms of very few partially upheld cases. Why that's so low in comparison to. Is it just the Street Scene cases are so transparently easy to know the potholes? Yes. So with Street Scene, we do find that they're quite cut and dried cases. We did they collected the bin or not. So it can be one or the other way. It tends to be partially upheld cases. It can be a mix of a staffing issue mixed within that. And obviously, we're unable to advise on that. And so we put in that issue and find that way. That being the case, I'd love to see some case studies on the partially upheld cases. They're probably the most interesting of the lot. Do any other committee have any questions? Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for your report. Recommendations are on page 58. Number one, to note and consider the 2023/2024 corporate complaints and the LGSEO's annual letter, which is Appendix A. Number two, to note and consider the LGSEO's annual letter to the council relevant lessons and actions, which are Appendices. B and C, I got that right. Number three, to note and agree the actions taken by the council to remedy issues, improve performance, which I think we have done in that brief discussion. Can I take those all as noted? Those are all agreed unanimously. Thank you. Right. My favourite item on tonight's agenda. Number 11, complaints about councillors. April 23 to March 24. Thank you, Chair. This is the annual report about complaints about councillors in the current annual report to the Garms Committee. So if I just tell you a bit about how we deal with complaints against elected members, what happens is the complaint comes into me. I then consult the councillor concerned, and I always consult the independent person. We've got five independent persons. They're all appointed by council and they will all refer it to informal group, which is standard working group, who I can take the matter to for further advice. And just to note as well that there are very few sanctions under the Localism Act, we can ask the councillor to apology sanctions under the Arrangements Localism Act. So for that period, we had six complaints. And you'll see there that one of which the resident didn't provide any details. I don't know if anyone has any questions for me. I'm very pleased that none of these have been about. I'm also pleased that Councillor Rhys, just a technical question about whether group WIPs are given not necessarily details, but an awareness that the group should be doing to consider the upstandings of their members. My practice is to let the group leader know about the complaint, but not the group WIPs, but I'm happy to change that practice. Well, I would have to cross that bridge. Who is the group WIP? OK, well, I think we've all been remarkably well made this year. I don't have the cake. Unless there are any further questions or serious points, recommendations on page 150, very serious. May wish to complain about me. I don't know. Recommendations on page 115 for the committee, note the complaints about Councillors. I think that's noted. Thank you. Right. Item number 12, internal on the exception recommendations report and Q1 progress report, 9th of May, 2024 to the 30th of June, 2020. Thank you, Chair. Committee, so you may recall at the last meeting when we bought the Q4 internal audit report, we actually took the report right up to the 8th of May. So the timing slightly after this Q1 report, because we've gone from 9th of May through to 30th of June, so much shorter period. But to take us back in line with quarterly reporting. And we did that last time because we had a number of audits that were still ongoing that we wanted to include the findings in the annual opinion. So just to remind members why we're slightly out on timeframe. So for this period, 9th of May to 30th of June, which concludes Q1, we have six reviews, which is 36% of our annual audit plan, which is above target of 25%. We have no limited or no assurance reports issued in this quarter. The details, summary details of the audits we've undertaken are included within the report, predominantly scores audits. There are a number of audits in progress, so I think we'll see quite a lot of outcomes coming through to Q2, which will be presented in November. So the substance of this report is really the follow-up work that we've undertaken in the internal audit team. So it's been quite a busy time. There's been quite a lot of prior priority and medium priority actions arising from previous audits that we followed up, and we followed up all of those. We put a breakdown in the report of what the outcomes of those are, and we put the schedule in there of what they are as well. So 26 actions were implemented, which is 47%, and 27 were in progress, which is 48%, and we've got three that were not yet implemented, so 5%. It's probably worth saying at this point that a substantive number of the actions were due to the business continuity audit. So you'll remember that we had that come, I think, two times ago, two meetings ago, and there were a number of high-priority actions within that. It shows you in there that most of them are implemented or on track, and there's going to be a much more detailed review of where we are with those, which PwC is just undertaking at the moment, which will be reported at the next meeting. But just to go to your earlier, Councillor Grover, it is documented within the schedule that there is a recommendation within that audit which talks about management oversight activities, exercising, and training. And that is marked as on track, and we'll get a fuller update for you next time. So that's really quite a brief update from internal audit for this quarter. Our new head of internal audit will be in post on the 4th of November, and he'll be here at the next meeting to present internal audit report. So we've appointed Adam Karmson, who is currently our PwC audit manager, who has got some history with Barnet, so is well aware of, you know, all of the work that we've been doing, and will take up the reins as head of internal audit on the 4th of November. And then online, we've got Ian Spears, who's been with the Council many years, and he is currently covering the vacant internal audit manager post. Have you got any really hard or technical questions for me? I'm going to defer to Ian this evening. But yeah, that's really what I wanted to update this evening. You know, I think we're going to let her know this as well. Right. Does anybody have any questions? Excellent, fine. Well, I'm going to go straight to page 120, where the recommendations are. Number one, that the Governance Audits Management and Standards Committee note the general work completed today of the internal audit Q1 report, 9th of May, 2024 to the 30th of June, 2020. And there are no high priority findings. Right. Enjoyable. Item number 13, external audit 2020/21, 2021. Good evening, Chair. You've got the update paper in front of you. It's not where we want it to be at this stage. I think the paper, I'll just pick out some key items out of the paper. So we continue to progress the work during July and August, towards the end of July. He informed us that he's going to get some, the Council is going to get some legal advice in the matter. So we're waiting in conclusion about legal advice, partners review, to make sure that the work that's on there is complete. As part of that process, we've identified some areas where we have follow-up queries on the work that we carried out previously. And I guess due to the length of time this audit's been going on, some of the people here that work on completion. And then the end of the process. So that work is in progress. We're meeting with the interim executive director of resources. Any questions? I have a number of questions, but I'll let members of the committee go first. OK, I mean, you said when you introduced your comments that it's not where we want to be, it's not where we want it to be for years now. You know, it not being where it's about, where it's wanting, it not being where we want it to be and moving it to somewhere that we want it to be are two entirely different things. And, you know, we have we haven't started the process of moving it. You've barely got the car keys out to move it. I have a list here that's been provided to me very helpfully by officers of a list of your outstanding queries, some of which really are quite mind boggling. You said that, you know, you've been making progress since July. Your query to us in July was Brookhill Nursery School's bank sort code. Which I gather we provided to you on the day has now been completed, so I'm hoping that that one's been done. But there's a series of other things here, which I just find astounding that you now need four years after you started doing this. There are requests for measurements for pot sizes. More stuff about bank accounts. You've asked us for audit committee minutes. Please provide minutes of the audit committee for the period September 2022 to July 2023. You were here for that. You were in the room. They're on the website. There's a recording. You know, this is pathetic. There are one or two items on the list which we have access to some of that information and we have corrected we have corrected that subsequently internally to make sure that we're only asking for information that's outstanding. OK, well. I honestly I don't know what to say. I mean, also, I know that there's a whole load of things coming on the 30th of September, which is a few days ago, in time to have some ready reasons to not have filed these for this meeting. I mean, how long how how give us a date, give us a date, tell us when you're going to sign this off. So when all of these smaller things are done, there's one piece of out there's one piece of outstanding work that needs doing fine. I accept that. But these other things should be done by now. All things that could have been dealt with over the last year that you've been coming here and telling me and my committee, oh, we're working on this. Oh, we're making progress on this. You could have asked for Brookhill Nursery School's sort code months ago. Years ago, in fact. Give us a date. As I've said, the backstop date that's been implemented by the government is the 13th of December. So all of these orders will be signed off by the 13th of December. That's a promise. That's cast in stone. But you are going to get everything done by the 13th of December. That's a requirement for the council to publish its accounts by the 13th of December. And we've got to complete our order between the meetings for that. Right. OK. You heard it here. We're going to minute it. And I'm sure in two years you could ask for the minutes. Chair, I think I will point out as part of that, we do have to consider what the form of the opinion will be as to whether that will be an unqualified opinion. A qualified opinion or a disclaimer opinion. And that we will have to make a decision over the course of the next month as to which area we're in, depending on where we get to on the pensions matter. Where we get to in terms of the outstanding information that we need to complete the order. Yeah. And for two whole years, those are going to be disclaimers, aren't they? Because. Right. OK. I think I've had my fill. Do members of the committee have any questions or expressions of exasperation? I'll go to Councillor Radcliffe and Councillor David. I mean, a noise might be better than a. But in terms of the statutory obligation. I take your point, but it's like being told you could have had their homework. You can scroll on it and have it and say you've done your homework. It's about doing a good job or as good a job as possible by the deadline. As much as to your point, then we can we have a qualified. You know, it's. I don't want to rehash what considering very eloquently said that if you're only getting sort codes, which we're getting stuff which are available on the Web site well down this line, doesn't give me a lot of faith. It's what? October about Christmas holidays, a couple of days of hangover for the Christmas bash. Are you really going to get a great job done if you don't have the basic. It just doesn't fill me with confidence. I mean, this evening we've talked so much about finance and information delayed and. This is what the audit is. I think the committee, you know, we've been shortchanged because the depth position and other matters that has arisen this evening would have been picked up. And most of the staff on the document are probably not here anymore. But it's just. You know, the continuous delay. I don't know what the value of the outcome would amount to. That's my take on this. I can only pay. I can only hope that we don't pay the same lack of alacrity and speed that you have handled our accounts unless anybody else has comments. They want to cancel the rise. Do you think if you'd included the same level of detail in your reports as you can of theirs that we might have come to some of these outstanding queries earlier? It's possible I wasn't here for the presentation of the feedback. OK, I'm going to take us to the recommendations on page 170. Committee note the audit progress and sector update number two committee provides any comments that they may have to make this matter. I think you know how we feel. I frankly think you've known how we feel for a year. And there's been so little progress. Outranged. Would we be able to change the recommendation to limited unsatisfactory progress? I take that that's agreed. Thank you. Right. Thank you. Right. We now turn to item number sorry. I've done the wrong recommendations. That was recommendations for that one was that the committee note the content of BDO's report on the progress towards a sign off. So I think I think Councilor Rose was seeking to amend that to lack of progress towards a sign off of the council's 2020/21 statement of accounts and up to. Limited and unsatisfactory. I will I will just take the vote again, just to be clear that that's the correct thing. Is that one agree? I think that's agreed. Thank you. Right. We now move on to the 2023/24 external audit progress report, which is from page 169 to 202. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you, Chair. So, yeah, you have a progress report. Obviously, you'll recall at the last meeting we presented value for money report. At this meeting, we have progress on the financial statements audit, which we commenced for 23/4 at the beginning of July. We've worked well with the finance team to to take forward the audit and this report. What we wanted to do for you is sort of set out a detailed analysis really of where we've got to. The report reflects where we are on issues identified, samples that have been processed, samples that are still with the council and some of the naughty matters that are coming up as part of the audit. And clearly. It is no surprise that obviously, given given the sort of history going into this audit, there's going to be things identified because time moves on or requirements move on, accounting requirements move on. So so there's obviously quite a few things we've identified and we're working with officers on. We've also identified we've also done some work on IT controls as well, which we've we've reported here in terms of our assessment there. So it's quite a comprehensive report, I think, in terms of where we are in terms of the way forward. There's a couple of key key things to consider. The next meeting of this committee, which I believe is towards the end of November. We will produce our audit findings report, which is a detailed report. And then we also have to play into into account the twenty three four backstop, which the recent legislation has committed everyone to the end of February twenty, twenty five, which is actually brought forward from the previous government's consultation, which had the end of May twenty five. So we'll obviously have to consider with the council what the right what the right meeting is to close off the twenty three four audit in whatever form, because we obviously have to take into account of the completion of the video years audits and how that plays out into our work on areas such as opening balances. So that that is quite complicated technical sort of thing to consider. We'll bring we'll bring an assessment of what that looks like to you at the next meeting. I think these things have to be taken in context. I think we're actually making more progress on it than we are most of the jobs that we've taken on recently. They are new to Grant Thornton. And that's thanks to colleagues in the finance department for the support in that process. So happy to take any questions, chair, from members of the committee on our approach report. Right. Thank you very much. Can I just check you're you're going to do things on time. You're going to complete your audit on time, right? So with your audit finance report to the next meeting, we have to sign this audit off by the statutory deadline of twenty eight for February. That's that's a requirement on us. I think the issue the only issue really about that is is not that we'll whether we'll finish by then because we have to. It will be the nature of our audit opinion, how much assurance we're able to give. I think we're able because we've done a lot of work that there will be some more assurance and councils had recently on recent years. But what that that the level of assurance is still open to the completion of audit procedures and our reflection on on the opening balances position. OK. And presumably you've got Brookhill Nursery School sort code. You're not going to come back to us in four years and ask that vital piece of information, right? Comment on that one. OK, excellent. Right. Does anybody else have any? You're welcome to if you want to. If you don't want to, that's fine. I don't really think I'm going to add to either Karen. All of said, although I did hear Paul Sager significant issue, I just thought when the members noticed he'd said that or just a question, I wouldn't mind asking Councillors chair for you. I'm going to go to the recommendations on page one hundred and seventy. The number one committee note the audit progress and sector update number two that the committee provides any comments that they may have done so. I think that's agreed. Right. We move on to item number 50, the committee forward work programme. I think we're going to have a very short discussion about this. I think we're looking for things to add to the programme. So do members have anything they want to add? I saw Councillor Rose first. Then I'll go to Councillor. All right. Oh, yeah. Just to whether we could consider bringing forward an audit of the Treasury management systems for next committee. We know that request, I think starts on the fourth of November, so maybe we talk to him about that when he starts. I think that's a very, very good idea. Councillor Radford had a comment earlier about the capital programme. What do you want to put on the forward work programme potentially? I mean, I guess just to get Kevin's point about what what kind of steps we're taking on to kind of get that within the balance. But if you balance, which and also particularly about how it might interact with management, so maybe there's an overlap out there in terms of how it's incorporated in terms of how is the repressures from the Treasury management actually sort of reflected in the decision making in terms of. May I ask if Councillor David would be happy with the report from the Adults Financial Sustainability Board, where they've been doing the deep dives that you've suggested we bring back feedback of what they've been doing there. There's an awful lot of statistics and work that's been done on that board. I think answers your question, but I wanted to make sure you're OK with that. It is definitely to do with Barnet. It's 100 percent Barnet. OK, thank you. I think that's the forward work programme discussed. There are no other urgent items that the chair decides are urgent. Oh, sorry. Just on item 15, I do need to advise the committee that the dates of the 2025 municipal year be moved and that the committee will be canvassed about their availability for dates in the next municipal year. Sorry. Oh, well, this year my birthday fell on the committee date. I couldn't I couldn't think of a finer group of people to celebrate one's birthday with. We did. We had cake. Yeah. There are no other urgent items, so I declare the meeting. Thank you all very much.

Transcript

My name is Councillor Arjun Mitra and I'm the chair of the Governance, Audit, Risk Management and Standards Committee. Welcome to all members of the committee. Please note that this meeting is being webcast by the Council and those present may be picked up in recordings. Can I please remind members and officers to use the microphone when speaking by pressing the middle speaker icon. Item number one, absence of members, if any. Richard Harbord, the independent member, has sent his apologies. I haven't had any general apologies from anyone else. Minutes of the previous meeting are on pages 5 to 18. We have an action which is on page 15, the computer reboots. So page one of the previous meeting, the quarterly risks report and the Open Door Homes acquisition programme. The committee were advised that officers would report back at the next meeting what the impact would be on the open response that we've had. The responses in the papers on page 15 was the quarterly risks report committee requested an update on the Barn Next Zero challenge, which was launched in November last year. Last, the information we circulated to members via email of successful applicants and what their ideas were saying that the sustainability team would be reprofiling the carbon offset fund risk and requested further information be provided to the next meeting. The next block was on page four, which is the internal exceptions recommendations. The committee held a discussion regarding legacy debts, noted that there were processes in place of debt recovery policies, legacy debts. The meeting was advised that final figure of the written-off debt would be detailed in the future report. The members also noted that action points relating to the cyber security, third-party security and awareness audit would be completed by 2024 and that the committee would receive a report detailing progress and the processes being devised to undertake this would be fed back at the next committee. So all of the responses are in the minutes there. I won't read the ones. I'll take too much time. The final one on the treasury management, I think we are awaiting today's committee if that's okay with members. Okay. That being the case, can I take it that members of the committee approved the minutes of the previous meeting held on the 23rd of July? Is that approved? Agreed. Thank you. Item number three. Do any members have anything they wish to declare? Item number four, dispensations by the monitoring officer, there are none. Item number five, deputations, there are none. Item number six, petitions, there are none. Item number seven, public questions and comments, there are none. Our anniversary today. Thank you, Chet. Today marks one year of Hamas' terror attack on the communities of southern Israel. Remember the 1,200 victims murdered in their homes, communities and at the Nova music festival. 250 taken hostage to Gaza and the thousands of innocent lives torn apart. We also remember the huge loss of innocent life that has occurred in the years since in Israel, Gaza and now Lebanon. At the party conference, I was privileged to meet the families of two of the over 100 hostages that remain in Hamas' captivity in Gaza. This includes a British citizen. I reaffirm the overwhelming rallying call to bring them all home now. Please to the committee to hold a minute's silence as we reflect on the deep pain of the past year for many of our residents, our twin town of Ramadan and to unite in our shared hope for a peaceful future. Thank you. Thank you very much. Councillor Rose. Apologies to Councillor Grover, I had meant to share that with you before the meeting. Right. Move on to items before we dive into questions. Thank you, Elaine. Hi, everybody. So this is the call to one report for 24/25. So the report presents an overview of the risks across the organisation. It focuses on the strategic risks, which are all the cross cutting risks that we manage and all the high level service risks. And so we're managing 202 risks currently across the organisation. And there are 22 high level risks that we focused on in the report and provided some more detailed information in there. More than happy to take questions on individual risks. I may have to take those questions away and feedback the answers. So bear with me. I'm happy to do that. Thank you very much. Do members of the committee have questions on this item? Councillor Grover, I know Councillor Rose does. Thank you, Chair. I just I'm kind of looking at the it's the introductory paragraphs and obviously one of the risks that are highlighted that is highlighted as being of zero risk. Elaine, do you want to take that? Let me just bring up the risk description and I'll explain it to you. Hold on one moment. Does anybody have the actual risk reference to have? Make it easy to find it. It is. Is it S.T.R. 031 that you're looking for? That might be it. No, not that one. 31. Hold on. Looking at 13. Yes, so that the actual description of the risk is about ensuring we get the necessary funds for the sustainability programme. So, yeah, it's it's the whole of the sustainability programme. So there is a question mark of getting the funds to fund the full sustainability programme. Yeah. So the risk itself is the inability to raise the funds for that programme. And what is the total amount of funding required for that programme? That I would have to take away and find out the answer to that. I don't have that information. I think it will have been I when you asked the question, I do remember reading it somewhere, but I could not remember off the top of my head. Do you have any follow up questions or any further questions? OK. Can I go to Councillor Rose, please? Thank you. On page 27 under health and safety, there's a section on latent effects identified in the build quality throughout the Colindale office. I was reassured to read that it's safe for us not asking our staff to work in unsafe environments. I was deeply concerned that a new building that the council is using and owns, I believe, has such serious defects. I want to know how we are trying to fix that, if that affects the value of the property and what we intend on doing it. Before I go to officers, Councillor Radford has a follow up point to that. Is there any way of recovering some costs associated with the fact that probably it wasn't our fault that it has latent defects as well? We have a response that might be helpful. This isn't my area, my service area, but I am aware of the issue in the building. And I've got some notes from Chris Smith, who's the assistant director for this area. So we're in dispute with a company that constructed the building. We've already sent them a letter of claim for compensation, pressing for them to remediate some of the defects. But we're also working to identify if there's any other defects that may not be immediately visible. So we've got the totality of what the issues are before we kind of proceed. So we're conducting some intrusive surveys and some further surveys ourselves. Our intention is to claim all costs back from the developer. They will likely contest some of that. We think it will be a long disputed commercial negotiation and meetings are ongoing at the moment. So I guess if you want any further information, I could ask Chris Smith to circulate that to the committee. Yes. I think updates that have come through to directors group, I think it's been going on for a very long time. Maybe I can add to that. Presumably, I mean, most of the time there's multiple projects which builders work with in a particular location. Slightly concerned that we may have found some defects that maybe other people might be unaware of. Do we know if there are other buildings, either for us or other people, which this builder's done? I'm thinking about like if you think about the rack scandal, right? It doesn't just affect one school. You know, I'm just kind of should we be worried that this isn't just the Collinsdale offices, I guess is mine. I'll pass that through to Chris and ask him to include that information in a briefing. OK, thank you. Does anybody else have any questions? All right. Yeah, go ahead. And then we'll go back to Council. I've got a few sporadic ones here. That's right on resource pressures affecting. What's it say? The second it's on page twenty six. And it is about resource pressures affecting service delivery and income collection for parking. I'm aware certainly in my ward, and I think this is kind of a wider problem, that there's been actually a rise in intimidation of our wardens, which might be affecting kind of essentially being able to tickets and collecting money on that. Could someone kind of report back on kind of if what reports we have got about intimidation of our wardens, whether that is affecting actually recovery and issuing of tickets and then recovering income from people? Obviously, we've had to have some joint patrols. That's clearly not sustainable way of doing things. Question around that sort of pause in between my questions. I think I don't think we'll have that information to hand, but I think we'll make a note of that request. Ask that to be put on our new action for next time. Thank you. And then probably from the minor to the micro to the macro, in terms of the Brent Cross program. You sort of talked a bit about last time round about what if interest rates were to rise and sort of curious as well, if we're to follow the Bank of England's projections for income, interest rates to come down. What does that actually look like in terms of the economics, I suppose, of Brent Cross, because that seems to be a sort of ongoing risk. It's interesting to look at it in the other direction potentially as well, because we're talking about affordability. It seems like what we've seen in the States, if the UK follows at all, we're hoping we're looking for interest rates drops rather than rising. I'm just wondering about how much cushion that provides us. I don't know whether you've done that analysis as part of the over 5 percent part. But we haven't. But it's a really good point. We probably should take that one away as well. Have a look at that. David's online may be able to add something over to David. Or do we need to take that one away? Yeah, I think we need to take that one away, Kevin. Thank you. Turning to adult social care, we talked about pressures obviously there. Do we know what other boroughs are? I mean, I guess my questions are, maybe this could be a request, I suppose, is are we actively asking other boroughs what everyone is having trouble with adult social care? Everyone has cost pressures. Feels like if we're doing our own homework, when we could be cribbing other peoples, this is a wasted opportunity. Is there sort of best practice we can learn from in terms of spending some time in Dagenham, in Enfield, in wherever, to try and work out how they're redesigning their adult social care program and potentially maybe if there is a kind of audit of the current program which could come back, that might be useful as well. What we're planning to do in terms of stopping these pressures in adult social care? I think I can try and answer that initially and then Kevin can give you a proper answer. The short answer is yes, there is always a lot of best practice sharing across the sector. We are not alone in being the only borough in London that has had a substantial increase in adult social care costs. As Councillor Radford well knows, these are really difficult costs to control because they are statutory expenditure. We know that cases are getting a lot more complex across the board, but in terms of a bit more detail about what the council is specifically doing, I think he wanted to come in on this. I was simply going to talk about the macro position across London which might interest Councillor Radford and I think if you want, we do have some steps. We're obviously not a service delivery committee so not all the relevant offices will be. I'm going to go back to Councillor Grove and then Councillor David. Just a brief one. So the risk rating in relation to business continuity is reduced, which is obviously good. How often do you have tabletop exercises to test those? When was the last time you had one? General business continuity exercises or cyber? Either. They tend to be cyber related these days, don't they? Most of them. One of the actions that came out of the internal audit into business continuity was to develop a more intensive training plan. That's in progress at the moment. We've got a much more update on business continuity. So that hasn't such an exercise taken place in the past six months or not? There's various kind of smaller exercises that would have taken place. I'm not sure if it's exactly the last six months, but I know it was this year. And that's really how the exercise for business continuity at the moment, because rather than kind of organisation, it's like what would happen if going through your plans step by step, you can do it on a desktop exercise. So there has been smaller cyber IT exercises and there's been a group exercises that take place in the borough as well. I would obviously I'm not an expert, but I would suggest that that's a gap in the reason preparedness. Just down the kind of councils IT operations. So, you know, that that that that's a fairly standard thing that most big organisations do. And that sounds like it's a bit of a gap in our preparedness. Yeah. And we have had a desktop exercise this year with senior officers and it was identified. I think that's a very timely comment, actually. My workplace has been a serious cyber attack on TFL calls. It wasn't for additional. Well, and also you tend to learn quite a lot through these exercises as well, which is which is kind of the point of having them. It's actually going to have all of these plans sitting somewhere, but it's actually when you go through the exercise that you learn something. Or even when you actually have a real life scenario, that's actually when you learn more than anything else, but testing is quite important. It's a very good point. Very well. Thanks. I've got two questions. And the first one is to do with the healthcare. I wonder if it's time that we do a kind of deep dive ourselves to see. Yeah, of money because the second one is looking at. Page 23. The strategic risks finance has got 68. Kind of obviously, and then statutory 76. Are they kind of related or are they just. Very high. I think on the first point. Yes, there is a lot of work that is going on at the council to reduce costs. We now have a cabinet member for finance whose job it is to make sure all of these other cabinet colleagues are drilling down on costs. I gather that there are very regular meetings to discuss. To discuss cost and managing the budget. I will hand over to Kevin. Again, to give you a more coherent answer. I'm sure I can do that chair, but that's pretty coherent. It was the point I mentioned. We haven't done an internal audit recently. I mean, that could be considered, of course, but there is a specific city, but I certainly wouldn't. If you're interested in getting those steps here and committee, we could good luck to bring some back. Right. Okay. Thank you, Councillor David. The current permission of the committee. I'd like to turn to the recommendations on page 19, which are committee note the status of the council's strategic and high level 15 plus service risks. Including the control mitigations in place to manage these risks. Is that agreed? That's agreed. Thank you. Turning to item nine, the treasury management performance update Q1 2024/25, which starts on page 37. We've got David here virtually to make that item and introduce it. Thank you. Thank you, chair. As Councillor Mitchell has said, this is a quarterly treasury report. It's part of a series of reports that is provided through GAMS. It documents the treasury activity over the period 1st of April 2024 to the 30th of June 2024. I have it starting on page 43. Oh, sorry, it's 37, but the page, perhaps where the report really starts is page 43, which is an appendix, which is on Barnet, Barnet format. If you could jump to that. I'm just going to note some of the points in the report, key points in the report, and then we can take questions. So over that quarter, 10 million of new was undertaken. That was taken very early in the quarter around 2nd of April. We'd actually applied for that borrowing in the previous financial year. Since then, over the summer, the council has borrowed a further 65 million, but that would be captured in the Q2 report that will be forthcoming. We are expecting to need to borrow significantly more than this to cover refinancing. There's about 100 million pounds of refinancing that's needed this year and also to fulfil the capital programme and use of reserves. Money market funds are around 100 million, and then we have a further 70 million held as gilts, which are there to back the Brent Cross obligations. It's not surprised we have quite healthy money market fund balances this time of year. That was as expected. We are expecting that balance to wind down quite significantly over the next few months. I wanted just to raise a couple of points with the committee, firstly on page 46, which is section one. And what we've done on this page is we've just highlighted how the capital programme has, as reported, has changed since when we set our treasury management strategy statement, which we did based on the February 2024 capital programme information. So this information is based on the information that was provided to a cabinet in July. So you can see there, the line I'm most focused on is the borrowing line, where you see it had increased by 38.47 million. Now, I've had these numbers come through from the September cabinet information. And what we've seen there is actually these numbers will slip back again. And so it's not unusual that during the year there will be some variance within the information that's provided to us regarding the capital programme. But I think it is a is a key priority that we can get, I guess, more accurate forecast, because it does impact our strategic planning. The next section I just wanted to draw your particular attention to was on page 49, which is the capital financing budget. Now, there's a table on there which I think it'd just be worth walking through, if you can see that. So in twenty three, twenty four, the net capital financing budget was around twelve and a half million and the out turn last year by the actual expenditure relative to that budget. Thirteen point seven million. That was a one point two million pressure. Now, we've been working quite hard to work through what the impact on the capital financing budget will be this year. Now, the budget was increased from twelve point five million to around thirteen point three million. And an additional two million was added to the budget from contingency, taking the budget to thirteen point three. And we've worked through some provisional numbers. And so there's numbers we've given there and we're given a range. So even if there was no further borrowing undertaken, we project that the out turn would be nineteen point two million, which would be a pressure of around four million. And we've, as I explained, already taken seventy five million of borrowing. So that's a scenario that cannot be, cannot hold. If we was to fulfil the borrowing requirements as set out in the twenty four, twenty five, July twenty, twenty four capital programme sent to Canada. And that pressure would build to eight million. And so there's a quite large focus on this. And in the report, we've suggested from a Treasury perspective, some of the actions which need to be looked at to sort of help mitigate this. And there is a lot of work, particularly around the capital programme. Kevin can can can feed back on the work being done there. But also on the debtors position, there's quite a lot of money, frankly owed to the council. And obviously, if we can recover that cash, that will impel the Treasury position because we'll have more cash and therefore won't need to borrow as much. So that was my update. And just to take questions. OK. In terms of. Yeah, so it's so I have some I have some very high level analysis on this. It is quite a complex picture, so it's not it's just like five debtors owing us large monies. There are there are some debtors that are of significant sounds, particularly from the NHS. But perhaps Kevin can comment on that. But he does feed right the way through down the chain. So from the numbers I've seen, there's quite a lot of debtors just related to quite a significant number of small debtors that add up to a large number. And I'm not I'm not trying to dodge the question here, but it's not it's not the Treasury team's role to sort of oversee the debtors position. It's just obviously we've got keen interest on this because I think the feeling is that there is a is a large debtors position sort of evolving. I think if I can be helpful, that information is provided to the overview. So I don't want to proceed if you do want to go through the list. I think it says usually the biggest debtor the council has is a Fremantle NHS trust. Not entirely sure why, but it just always has been a big one. You know, I'm not necessarily asking for names of organizations. I was actually just trying to understand if it was council taxpayers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to make a general point to kick off with and alluded to it, but I want to say a little strongly so. Management of the council's budget goes through the cabinet, the cabinet manage things like capital financing costs and debt management and those sorts of things. So David's report is about Treasury management. I just wanted to make that clear to everybody. So don't think that David and others should be answering for the debt position or indeed capital financing position of the council because he clearly should not. His report is around Treasury management. I'm not saying there aren't very important questions to ask about that. There are. A number of them will go through the cabinet itself. We can bring a debt position. I've got, as the CFO at the moment of the council, a number of areas that I'm concerned about, and the extent of the council's debt is one. And the debt management procedures and practices in place is one that David has mentioned here, the capital financing budget overspend. And that's feeding into the overall out-term forecast, the revenue overspend that we're forecasting at the moment, order one and potentially increasing two. So there are a number of significant factors in there. We've already mentioned one tonight, that's the adult services overspend position, debt management. In fact, there are three of the very large areas that we are concerned about in terms of bringing back into a balanced position going forward. So we can bring debts to you. So there's some negotiation going on there with them about trying to level that up with both organizations. I think I've accepted that we need to regularly, and the debt one, as David says, sorry, the capital financing position, the borrowing position is one that there's a question in there. Is this linked to which I'd like to answer as well as I know that is that I've asked cabinet members to accept suggestion from me. I've got Councillor Radford, then Councillor Rose, then Councillor David. Just to respond quickly to I guess what Kevin just said, I think it was this committee last time that I was like, normally you set a budget and then operate within it, and that should include the capital budget as much. So as much as I think having that kind of emergency cap on, I think there might be a kind of a broader policy even in fat times as well as lean times that maybe could be worked up. Can I ask, in terms of how the capital program interacts with the treasury management function and how that is being integrated into one piece, is that something which could be kind of looked at and brought to the next committee? Because I think that's something which is sort of in terms of both like modeling for the rest of it too, because it's something which seems to come up a lot, but it'd be good to just see it in one place and have a discussion just about that if possible. And then I've got one other question which maybe I can ask at the same time, which is about the refinancing. Maybe this is more to David. So obviously we spent money backed by cash and then we've had to externalize, but we spent the money with cash when we had zero percent interest rates. We now don't have zero percent interest rates. In terms of the rates at which we're refinancing these things, what was the previous rate and what would the rate now be in terms of the shift in terms of the money actually going out of the bank account because of the difference in the interest rate? Do you want me to take that one first or Kevin, did you want to respond to the first one? Yeah, OK. So it's a really good question, the refinancing. Actually, last year, so last fiscal year, 20, 23, 24, towards the end of the year, we borrowed for what I call working capital purposes, i.e. we borrowed what we felt we needed for the capital program, but we still were short on cash. So we had a liquidity issue. And so we took a decision last year to borrow one year, which is the shortest time we can borrow under PWLB. PWLB allowed you to borrow for periods of up to one year or up to 50 years, sorry, down to one year. Now, last year, so that effectively meant we was borrowing at the base rates at the time. So we took that borrowing about five, five and a half percent. That would need to be refinanced in February and March this year, which will likely be a significantly lower rate. We won't need to re-borrow all of that money if we can recover cash because we think we needed to borrow that money largely because of our, potentially because of our debtor's position. But we've worked it through and I think there will be a saving to the capital financing cost centre because we will be refinancing that at a lower rate this year relative to last year. And that accounts for about 85 million. And then there's around 15 million of general purpose borrowing. And we broadly took our average rate year last year was broadly about three percent. So we will be refinancing that at a slightly higher rate than what we took that borrowing at, if that answers your question. On the point about who manages the capital program, the capital financing budget, that's very clearly on treasury management, the fact that the treasury management team undertake the borrowing and we hold the capital financing budget within finance, within my area of responsibility for the future. I guess I maybe to be more precise, I guess one of my questions is if you're looking at a capital project in the private sector, you think about what was my weighted cost of capital, that would include the cost which you're borrowing from in terms of the bank, whatever it might be. Considering there's a bit of a murky picture around what are we going to wind up borrowing when in terms of whether it's minimum revenue provisions, whether it's what interest rates are going to be, et cetera, et cetera, is the idea that that doesn't take place for individual capital? Or what do we use in terms of modelling it for individual capital projects? Or do we just say let's ignore that and then put in a kind of a hurdle at the macro position so you need to clear it by so much regardless of how much we try and anticipate what the borrowing cost would be? Does that make more sense? Does it make it more relevant to the treasury management side of things too? It makes more sense, but it's very different in the public sector and how we do things and you might be somewhat surprised at the way it's done. But in ideal terms, there's a review process for every capital project that comes forward. And a key, key question around that is how it links to the council's priorities and where the council wants to go ahead with and it meets the priorities of the council plan. And then therein is the question around funding. And how it should be is that the funding source comes with that and if we're going to, if we need to borrow, prudential borrowing for the project, then that needs to be identified. And the revenue implications, if there are any of any capital project, needs to go forward as part of the overall budget-setting process that goes then to cabinet onto full council. And then treasury management team will be divided with, because the council would have agreed a budget, capital financing costs, cost of borrowing, and under normal circumstances, if it's gone through the normal methodology, then that budget will be sufficient to meet those revenue costs based on the annual program. I hope that's clear enough. I'll be happy to discuss more with you outside if you want to. I fear that's sadly something we both might say yes to. But yeah, maybe that would be good at some point. I think maybe just to summarize, I think what would help me in terms of I think when I speak to residents and other things about it is given the financial position we find ourselves in over the last two or three years, what added things have we done in terms of around governance and risks and whatever when it comes to the capital project, when it comes to liquidity buffers, when it comes to all of this stuff in order to try and get ourselves in shape, both in terms of like the governance and the rules and the stuff we're doing around it to make sure we're being rigorous. Because I know we're talking about different bits and pieces, but I struggle to recall all of them at once, if that makes sense. So maybe there's just a kind of a list of since 2022, we've taken the following steps would just be really helpful to try and convey that to residents that we're having due regard, I suppose. I don't know if that's possible. I'd be very grateful if so. Do we want to take that as a paper to come to the committee at another time? Yes, absolutely. It's a challenge that we can certainly have a go. I think we're taking a note of that request. Maybe let's come back to that when we look at the forward programme. OK, Councillor Rose and then Councillor David. Two slightly less technical questions. The first one, on page 49, we're talking about potentially for longer term spend, for example, youth centres and preventative health. The second point was a more strategic question in terms of, you know. The first go David and then I'll follow up. Yes, so on the first question regarding the strategies, I must stress on the paper, these are saying these are the things that could be done to help soften the impact on the capital financing cost centre. So we're not saying that we should just sell all our assets, but if we did, then there would be a process that would be undertaken to sort of test the viability of that. So Kevin might want to explain more around what that process is, but there definitely would be a process. And this is really just to highlight some of the options that might be available on the second. Yeah, I mean, there are assets we have where, frankly, there might be best to sell them. There might be worth more for us to be sold than to be kept, just like any organisation will consider selling capital assets. So it doesn't always necessarily have to be in a financially distressed situation. I think there's always a review of the capital assets we have and there will be a strategy around that. On the second point regarding the strategic objectives. I mean, Kevin and I and more broadly have considered these at length. You raised this question and called over clearly. I think it's a very good point that perhaps in the next version of this, there should be just a sort of a comment on the effectiveness of what we've achieved, not just saying what they are. I think that would be a good idea. I think it's for us perhaps to consider internally whether there needs to be an independent view of that, because otherwise it's almost like we're marking our own homework. I think it's a good point to raise that we should just set the strategic objectives, we should monitor how successful they've been. Yeah, I fully agree with that. Yeah, really important that David emphasised, and I know you know this, but just some of the things that we could do, we've got to address that and maybe other things we're considering and it's pretty difficult for us to deliver as well. Thank you very much. Councillor David for the last question. So we definitely, it is under consideration whether we should make an interest charge to the NHS on outstanding debt. We don't do that at the moment. Then they don't charge us either. So there's a lot of negotiation involved. Okay, I'm going to take us to recommendations page 38, which are that the committee notes the Treasury management update for quarter one defined by the Treasury team for 24/25 and beyond. Note that the strategic priorities identified cut across the council's operations and so required by the Treasury management team. Is that noted? That's noted. Thank you very much. Move on to item number 10, 2023/4, corporate complaints, local government and social care ombudsman, LGSCO. Hi, everyone. The council is required to report the corporate complaints performance, LGSCO performance of the arms committee. This is a report of the monitoring officer. This report covers the period 1st of April 2023 to 31st of March 2024. And it includes a summary of our performance in relation to different stages of our corporate complaints and also social care ombudsman. Every July, the LGSCO issues. These are intended to further improve things. Therefore, they're often critical. Our last report highlighted a number of issues, including some delays in the inquiries. This year, they've highlighted the improvements in the processes. The annual report, I think it tells a story of our focus on improvements last year. And that is about people who use council services. And there are some positive things linked to that as well. So we've done quite an in-depth analysis of the data itself, just so that we don't take you on face value. It gives the reduced number of complaints, proportional complaints that help us reduce the escalations that have reduced as well. And fewer complaints that are escalated to the ombudsman and held by the ombudsman. The improvements we've made, including the accessibility of the service, the complaints process itself, as well as information about how to make a complaint, efficiency in how we deal with what we do with learning from complaints to improve services, and also the monitoring of our performance throughout the year through our new dashboards. In terms of key trends, I'll just touch on a few numbers. I imagine the reduced number of complaints has come down by 422 in comparison to last year. The lower proportion of them are upheld, so it's 37%. And they're all indicating that we are dealing with complaints earlier in the process to avoid costly escalations and further dissatisfaction by ourselves as well. The annual cost of compensation, obviously, in addition to the cost of investigating and resolving complaints, there are the compensations that have been paid. So they vary from year to year because you might have one or two complaints where you get higher value compensations paid. In 2023-24, it's gone down by 82%. OK. Does anybody have any questions? I always think it's difficult to judge a complaint sometimes, given the case of complaints coming down. I do think we always need to be vigilant about that, though, you know, the bilateral pressures that are on the council. I'm not expecting us to get as good a return next year. We will continue to work on it and do the best we can, keeping close. So far, we have seen recent trends, but we've got 12 complaints upheld by LGSE. I'm slightly intrigued as to why Street Scene has some slightly lopsided numbers in terms of very few partially upheld cases. Why that's so low in comparison to. Is it just the Street Scene cases are so transparently easy to know the potholes? Yes. So with Street Scene, we do find that they're quite cut and dried cases. We did they collected the bin or not. So it can be one or the other way. It tends to be partially upheld cases. It can be a mix of a staffing issue mixed within that. And obviously, we're unable to advise on that. And so we put in that issue and find that way. That being the case, I'd love to see some case studies on the partially upheld cases. They're probably the most interesting of the lot. Do any other committee have any questions? Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for your report. Recommendations are on page 58. Number one, to note and consider the 2023/2024 corporate complaints and the LGSEO's annual letter, which is Appendix A. Number two, to note and consider the LGSEO's annual letter to the council relevant lessons and actions, which are Appendices. B and C, I got that right. Number three, to note and agree the actions taken by the council to remedy issues, improve performance, which I think we have done in that brief discussion. Can I take those all as noted? Those are all agreed unanimously. Thank you. Right. My favourite item on tonight's agenda. Number 11, complaints about councillors. April 23 to March 24. Thank you, Chair. This is the annual report about complaints about councillors in the current annual report to the Garms Committee. So if I just tell you a bit about how we deal with complaints against elected members, what happens is the complaint comes into me. I then consult the councillor concerned, and I always consult the independent person. We've got five independent persons. They're all appointed by council and they will all refer it to informal group, which is standard working group, who I can take the matter to for further advice. And just to note as well that there are very few sanctions under the Localism Act, we can ask the councillor to apology sanctions under the Arrangements Localism Act. So for that period, we had six complaints. And you'll see there that one of which the resident didn't provide any details. I don't know if anyone has any questions for me. I'm very pleased that none of these have been about. I'm also pleased that Councillor Rhys, just a technical question about whether group WIPs are given not necessarily details, but an awareness that the group should be doing to consider the upstandings of their members. My practice is to let the group leader know about the complaint, but not the group WIPs, but I'm happy to change that practice. Well, I would have to cross that bridge. Who is the group WIP? OK, well, I think we've all been remarkably well made this year. I don't have the cake. Unless there are any further questions or serious points, recommendations on page 150, very serious. May wish to complain about me. I don't know. Recommendations on page 115 for the committee, note the complaints about Councillors. I think that's noted. Thank you. Right. Item number 12, internal on the exception recommendations report and Q1 progress report, 9th of May, 2024 to the 30th of June, 2020. Thank you, Chair. Committee, so you may recall at the last meeting when we bought the Q4 internal audit report, we actually took the report right up to the 8th of May. So the timing slightly after this Q1 report, because we've gone from 9th of May through to 30th of June, so much shorter period. But to take us back in line with quarterly reporting. And we did that last time because we had a number of audits that were still ongoing that we wanted to include the findings in the annual opinion. So just to remind members why we're slightly out on timeframe. So for this period, 9th of May to 30th of June, which concludes Q1, we have six reviews, which is 36% of our annual audit plan, which is above target of 25%. We have no limited or no assurance reports issued in this quarter. The details, summary details of the audits we've undertaken are included within the report, predominantly scores audits. There are a number of audits in progress, so I think we'll see quite a lot of outcomes coming through to Q2, which will be presented in November. So the substance of this report is really the follow-up work that we've undertaken in the internal audit team. So it's been quite a busy time. There's been quite a lot of prior priority and medium priority actions arising from previous audits that we followed up, and we followed up all of those. We put a breakdown in the report of what the outcomes of those are, and we put the schedule in there of what they are as well. So 26 actions were implemented, which is 47%, and 27 were in progress, which is 48%, and we've got three that were not yet implemented, so 5%. It's probably worth saying at this point that a substantive number of the actions were due to the business continuity audit. So you'll remember that we had that come, I think, two times ago, two meetings ago, and there were a number of high-priority actions within that. It shows you in there that most of them are implemented or on track, and there's going to be a much more detailed review of where we are with those, which PwC is just undertaking at the moment, which will be reported at the next meeting. But just to go to your earlier, Councillor Grover, it is documented within the schedule that there is a recommendation within that audit which talks about management oversight activities, exercising, and training. And that is marked as on track, and we'll get a fuller update for you next time. So that's really quite a brief update from internal audit for this quarter. Our new head of internal audit will be in post on the 4th of November, and he'll be here at the next meeting to present internal audit report. So we've appointed Adam Karmson, who is currently our PwC audit manager, who has got some history with Barnet, so is well aware of, you know, all of the work that we've been doing, and will take up the reins as head of internal audit on the 4th of November. And then online, we've got Ian Spears, who's been with the Council many years, and he is currently covering the vacant internal audit manager post. Have you got any really hard or technical questions for me? I'm going to defer to Ian this evening. But yeah, that's really what I wanted to update this evening. You know, I think we're going to let her know this as well. Right. Does anybody have any questions? Excellent, fine. Well, I'm going to go straight to page 120, where the recommendations are. Number one, that the Governance Audits Management and Standards Committee note the general work completed today of the internal audit Q1 report, 9th of May, 2024 to the 30th of June, 2020. And there are no high priority findings. Right. Enjoyable. Item number 13, external audit 2020/21, 2021. Good evening, Chair. You've got the update paper in front of you. It's not where we want it to be at this stage. I think the paper, I'll just pick out some key items out of the paper. So we continue to progress the work during July and August, towards the end of July. He informed us that he's going to get some, the Council is going to get some legal advice in the matter. So we're waiting in conclusion about legal advice, partners review, to make sure that the work that's on there is complete. As part of that process, we've identified some areas where we have follow-up queries on the work that we carried out previously. And I guess due to the length of time this audit's been going on, some of the people here that work on completion. And then the end of the process. So that work is in progress. We're meeting with the interim executive director of resources. Any questions? I have a number of questions, but I'll let members of the committee go first. OK, I mean, you said when you introduced your comments that it's not where we want to be, it's not where we want it to be for years now. You know, it not being where it's about, where it's wanting, it not being where we want it to be and moving it to somewhere that we want it to be are two entirely different things. And, you know, we have we haven't started the process of moving it. You've barely got the car keys out to move it. I have a list here that's been provided to me very helpfully by officers of a list of your outstanding queries, some of which really are quite mind boggling. You said that, you know, you've been making progress since July. Your query to us in July was Brookhill Nursery School's bank sort code. Which I gather we provided to you on the day has now been completed, so I'm hoping that that one's been done. But there's a series of other things here, which I just find astounding that you now need four years after you started doing this. There are requests for measurements for pot sizes. More stuff about bank accounts. You've asked us for audit committee minutes. Please provide minutes of the audit committee for the period September 2022 to July 2023. You were here for that. You were in the room. They're on the website. There's a recording. You know, this is pathetic. There are one or two items on the list which we have access to some of that information and we have corrected we have corrected that subsequently internally to make sure that we're only asking for information that's outstanding. OK, well. I honestly I don't know what to say. I mean, also, I know that there's a whole load of things coming on the 30th of September, which is a few days ago, in time to have some ready reasons to not have filed these for this meeting. I mean, how long how how give us a date, give us a date, tell us when you're going to sign this off. So when all of these smaller things are done, there's one piece of out there's one piece of outstanding work that needs doing fine. I accept that. But these other things should be done by now. All things that could have been dealt with over the last year that you've been coming here and telling me and my committee, oh, we're working on this. Oh, we're making progress on this. You could have asked for Brookhill Nursery School's sort code months ago. Years ago, in fact. Give us a date. As I've said, the backstop date that's been implemented by the government is the 13th of December. So all of these orders will be signed off by the 13th of December. That's a promise. That's cast in stone. But you are going to get everything done by the 13th of December. That's a requirement for the council to publish its accounts by the 13th of December. And we've got to complete our order between the meetings for that. Right. OK. You heard it here. We're going to minute it. And I'm sure in two years you could ask for the minutes. Chair, I think I will point out as part of that, we do have to consider what the form of the opinion will be as to whether that will be an unqualified opinion. A qualified opinion or a disclaimer opinion. And that we will have to make a decision over the course of the next month as to which area we're in, depending on where we get to on the pensions matter. Where we get to in terms of the outstanding information that we need to complete the order. Yeah. And for two whole years, those are going to be disclaimers, aren't they? Because. Right. OK. I think I've had my fill. Do members of the committee have any questions or expressions of exasperation? I'll go to Councillor Radcliffe and Councillor David. I mean, a noise might be better than a. But in terms of the statutory obligation. I take your point, but it's like being told you could have had their homework. You can scroll on it and have it and say you've done your homework. It's about doing a good job or as good a job as possible by the deadline. As much as to your point, then we can we have a qualified. You know, it's. I don't want to rehash what considering very eloquently said that if you're only getting sort codes, which we're getting stuff which are available on the Web site well down this line, doesn't give me a lot of faith. It's what? October about Christmas holidays, a couple of days of hangover for the Christmas bash. Are you really going to get a great job done if you don't have the basic. It just doesn't fill me with confidence. I mean, this evening we've talked so much about finance and information delayed and. This is what the audit is. I think the committee, you know, we've been shortchanged because the depth position and other matters that has arisen this evening would have been picked up. And most of the staff on the document are probably not here anymore. But it's just. You know, the continuous delay. I don't know what the value of the outcome would amount to. That's my take on this. I can only pay. I can only hope that we don't pay the same lack of alacrity and speed that you have handled our accounts unless anybody else has comments. They want to cancel the rise. Do you think if you'd included the same level of detail in your reports as you can of theirs that we might have come to some of these outstanding queries earlier? It's possible I wasn't here for the presentation of the feedback. OK, I'm going to take us to the recommendations on page 170. Committee note the audit progress and sector update number two committee provides any comments that they may have to make this matter. I think you know how we feel. I frankly think you've known how we feel for a year. And there's been so little progress. Outranged. Would we be able to change the recommendation to limited unsatisfactory progress? I take that that's agreed. Thank you. Right. Thank you. Right. We now turn to item number sorry. I've done the wrong recommendations. That was recommendations for that one was that the committee note the content of BDO's report on the progress towards a sign off. So I think I think Councilor Rose was seeking to amend that to lack of progress towards a sign off of the council's 2020/21 statement of accounts and up to. Limited and unsatisfactory. I will I will just take the vote again, just to be clear that that's the correct thing. Is that one agree? I think that's agreed. Thank you. Right. We now move on to the 2023/24 external audit progress report, which is from page 169 to 202. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you, Chair. So, yeah, you have a progress report. Obviously, you'll recall at the last meeting we presented value for money report. At this meeting, we have progress on the financial statements audit, which we commenced for 23/4 at the beginning of July. We've worked well with the finance team to to take forward the audit and this report. What we wanted to do for you is sort of set out a detailed analysis really of where we've got to. The report reflects where we are on issues identified, samples that have been processed, samples that are still with the council and some of the naughty matters that are coming up as part of the audit. And clearly. It is no surprise that obviously, given given the sort of history going into this audit, there's going to be things identified because time moves on or requirements move on, accounting requirements move on. So so there's obviously quite a few things we've identified and we're working with officers on. We've also identified we've also done some work on IT controls as well, which we've we've reported here in terms of our assessment there. So it's quite a comprehensive report, I think, in terms of where we are in terms of the way forward. There's a couple of key key things to consider. The next meeting of this committee, which I believe is towards the end of November. We will produce our audit findings report, which is a detailed report. And then we also have to play into into account the twenty three four backstop, which the recent legislation has committed everyone to the end of February twenty, twenty five, which is actually brought forward from the previous government's consultation, which had the end of May twenty five. So we'll obviously have to consider with the council what the right what the right meeting is to close off the twenty three four audit in whatever form, because we obviously have to take into account of the completion of the video years audits and how that plays out into our work on areas such as opening balances. So that that is quite complicated technical sort of thing to consider. We'll bring we'll bring an assessment of what that looks like to you at the next meeting. I think these things have to be taken in context. I think we're actually making more progress on it than we are most of the jobs that we've taken on recently. They are new to Grant Thornton. And that's thanks to colleagues in the finance department for the support in that process. So happy to take any questions, chair, from members of the committee on our approach report. Right. Thank you very much. Can I just check you're you're going to do things on time. You're going to complete your audit on time, right? So with your audit finance report to the next meeting, we have to sign this audit off by the statutory deadline of twenty eight for February. That's that's a requirement on us. I think the issue the only issue really about that is is not that we'll whether we'll finish by then because we have to. It will be the nature of our audit opinion, how much assurance we're able to give. I think we're able because we've done a lot of work that there will be some more assurance and councils had recently on recent years. But what that that the level of assurance is still open to the completion of audit procedures and our reflection on on the opening balances position. OK. And presumably you've got Brookhill Nursery School sort code. You're not going to come back to us in four years and ask that vital piece of information, right? Comment on that one. OK, excellent. Right. Does anybody else have any? You're welcome to if you want to. If you don't want to, that's fine. I don't really think I'm going to add to either Karen. All of said, although I did hear Paul Sager significant issue, I just thought when the members noticed he'd said that or just a question, I wouldn't mind asking Councillors chair for you. I'm going to go to the recommendations on page one hundred and seventy. The number one committee note the audit progress and sector update number two that the committee provides any comments that they may have done so. I think that's agreed. Right. We move on to item number 50, the committee forward work programme. I think we're going to have a very short discussion about this. I think we're looking for things to add to the programme. So do members have anything they want to add? I saw Councillor Rose first. Then I'll go to Councillor. All right. Oh, yeah. Just to whether we could consider bringing forward an audit of the Treasury management systems for next committee. We know that request, I think starts on the fourth of November, so maybe we talk to him about that when he starts. I think that's a very, very good idea. Councillor Radford had a comment earlier about the capital programme. What do you want to put on the forward work programme potentially? I mean, I guess just to get Kevin's point about what what kind of steps we're taking on to kind of get that within the balance. But if you balance, which and also particularly about how it might interact with management, so maybe there's an overlap out there in terms of how it's incorporated in terms of how is the repressures from the Treasury management actually sort of reflected in the decision making in terms of. May I ask if Councillor David would be happy with the report from the Adults Financial Sustainability Board, where they've been doing the deep dives that you've suggested we bring back feedback of what they've been doing there. There's an awful lot of statistics and work that's been done on that board. I think answers your question, but I wanted to make sure you're OK with that. It is definitely to do with Barnet. It's 100 percent Barnet. OK, thank you. I think that's the forward work programme discussed. There are no other urgent items that the chair decides are urgent. Oh, sorry. Just on item 15, I do need to advise the committee that the dates of the 2025 municipal year be moved and that the committee will be canvassed about their availability for dates in the next municipal year. Sorry. Oh, well, this year my birthday fell on the committee date. I couldn't I couldn't think of a finer group of people to celebrate one's birthday with. We did. We had cake. Yeah. There are no other urgent items, so I declare the meeting. Thank you all very much.

Transcript

My name is Councillor Arjun Mitra and I'm the chair of the Governance, Audit, Risk Management and Standards Committee. Welcome to all members of the committee. Please note that this meeting is being webcast by the Council and those present may be picked up in recordings. Can I please remind members and officers to use the microphone when speaking by pressing the middle speaker icon. Item number one, absence of members, if any. Richard Harbord, the independent member, has sent his apologies. I haven't had any general apologies from anyone else. Minutes of the previous meeting are on pages 5 to 18. We have an action which is on page 15, the computer reboots. So page one of the previous meeting, the quarterly risks report and the Open Door Homes acquisition programme. The committee were advised that officers would report back at the next meeting what the impact would be on the open response that we've had. The responses in the papers on page 15 was the quarterly risks report committee requested an update on the Barn Next Zero challenge, which was launched in November last year. Last, the information we circulated to members via email of successful applicants and what their ideas were saying that the sustainability team would be reprofiling the carbon offset fund risk and requested further information be provided to the next meeting. The next block was on page four, which is the internal exceptions recommendations. The committee held a discussion regarding legacy debts, noted that there were processes in place of debt recovery policies, legacy debts. The meeting was advised that final figure of the written-off debt would be detailed in the future report. The members also noted that action points relating to the cyber security, third-party security and awareness audit would be completed by 2024 and that the committee would receive a report detailing progress and the processes being devised to undertake this would be fed back at the next committee. So all of the responses are in the minutes there. I won't read the ones. I'll take too much time. The final one on the treasury management, I think we are awaiting today's committee if that's okay with members. Okay. That being the case, can I take it that members of the committee approved the minutes of the previous meeting held on the 23rd of July? Is that approved? Agreed. Thank you. Item number three. Do any members have anything they wish to declare? Item number four, dispensations by the monitoring officer, there are none. Item number five, deputations, there are none. Item number six, petitions, there are none. Item number seven, public questions and comments, there are none. Our anniversary today. Thank you, Chet. Today marks one year of Hamas' terror attack on the communities of southern Israel. Remember the 1,200 victims murdered in their homes, communities and at the Nova music festival. 250 taken hostage to Gaza and the thousands of innocent lives torn apart. We also remember the huge loss of innocent life that has occurred in the years since in Israel, Gaza and now Lebanon. At the party conference, I was privileged to meet the families of two of the over 100 hostages that remain in Hamas' captivity in Gaza. This includes a British citizen. I reaffirm the overwhelming rallying call to bring them all home now. Please to the committee to hold a minute's silence as we reflect on the deep pain of the past year for many of our residents, our twin town of Ramadan and to unite in our shared hope for a peaceful future. Thank you. Thank you very much. Councillor Rose. Apologies to Councillor Grover, I had meant to share that with you before the meeting. Right. Move on to items before we dive into questions. Thank you, Elaine. Hi, everybody. So this is the call to one report for 24/25. So the report presents an overview of the risks across the organisation. It focuses on the strategic risks, which are all the cross cutting risks that we manage and all the high level service risks. And so we're managing 202 risks currently across the organisation. And there are 22 high level risks that we focused on in the report and provided some more detailed information in there. More than happy to take questions on individual risks. I may have to take those questions away and feedback the answers. So bear with me. I'm happy to do that. Thank you very much. Do members of the committee have questions on this item? Councillor Grover, I know Councillor Rose does. Thank you, Chair. I just I'm kind of looking at the it's the introductory paragraphs and obviously one of the risks that are highlighted that is highlighted as being of zero risk. Elaine, do you want to take that? Let me just bring up the risk description and I'll explain it to you. Hold on one moment. Does anybody have the actual risk reference to have? Make it easy to find it. It is. Is it S.T.R. 031 that you're looking for? That might be it. No, not that one. 31. Hold on. Looking at 13. Yes, so that the actual description of the risk is about ensuring we get the necessary funds for the sustainability programme. So, yeah, it's it's the whole of the sustainability programme. So there is a question mark of getting the funds to fund the full sustainability programme. Yeah. So the risk itself is the inability to raise the funds for that programme. And what is the total amount of funding required for that programme? That I would have to take away and find out the answer to that. I don't have that information. I think it will have been I when you asked the question, I do remember reading it somewhere, but I could not remember off the top of my head. Do you have any follow up questions or any further questions? OK. Can I go to Councillor Rose, please? Thank you. On page 27 under health and safety, there's a section on latent effects identified in the build quality throughout the Colindale office. I was reassured to read that it's safe for us not asking our staff to work in unsafe environments. I was deeply concerned that a new building that the council is using and owns, I believe, has such serious defects. I want to know how we are trying to fix that, if that affects the value of the property and what we intend on doing it. Before I go to officers, Councillor Radford has a follow up point to that. Is there any way of recovering some costs associated with the fact that probably it wasn't our fault that it has latent defects as well? We have a response that might be helpful. This isn't my area, my service area, but I am aware of the issue in the building. And I've got some notes from Chris Smith, who's the assistant director for this area. So we're in dispute with a company that constructed the building. We've already sent them a letter of claim for compensation, pressing for them to remediate some of the defects. But we're also working to identify if there's any other defects that may not be immediately visible. So we've got the totality of what the issues are before we kind of proceed. So we're conducting some intrusive surveys and some further surveys ourselves. Our intention is to claim all costs back from the developer. They will likely contest some of that. We think it will be a long disputed commercial negotiation and meetings are ongoing at the moment. So I guess if you want any further information, I could ask Chris Smith to circulate that to the committee. Yes. I think updates that have come through to directors group, I think it's been going on for a very long time. Maybe I can add to that. Presumably, I mean, most of the time there's multiple projects which builders work with in a particular location. Slightly concerned that we may have found some defects that maybe other people might be unaware of. Do we know if there are other buildings, either for us or other people, which this builder's done? I'm thinking about like if you think about the rack scandal, right? It doesn't just affect one school. You know, I'm just kind of should we be worried that this isn't just the Collinsdale offices, I guess is mine. I'll pass that through to Chris and ask him to include that information in a briefing. OK, thank you. Does anybody else have any questions? All right. Yeah, go ahead. And then we'll go back to Council. I've got a few sporadic ones here. That's right on resource pressures affecting. What's it say? The second it's on page twenty six. And it is about resource pressures affecting service delivery and income collection for parking. I'm aware certainly in my ward, and I think this is kind of a wider problem, that there's been actually a rise in intimidation of our wardens, which might be affecting kind of essentially being able to tickets and collecting money on that. Could someone kind of report back on kind of if what reports we have got about intimidation of our wardens, whether that is affecting actually recovery and issuing of tickets and then recovering income from people? Obviously, we've had to have some joint patrols. That's clearly not sustainable way of doing things. Question around that sort of pause in between my questions. I think I don't think we'll have that information to hand, but I think we'll make a note of that request. Ask that to be put on our new action for next time. Thank you. And then probably from the minor to the micro to the macro, in terms of the Brent Cross program. You sort of talked a bit about last time round about what if interest rates were to rise and sort of curious as well, if we're to follow the Bank of England's projections for income, interest rates to come down. What does that actually look like in terms of the economics, I suppose, of Brent Cross, because that seems to be a sort of ongoing risk. It's interesting to look at it in the other direction potentially as well, because we're talking about affordability. It seems like what we've seen in the States, if the UK follows at all, we're hoping we're looking for interest rates drops rather than rising. I'm just wondering about how much cushion that provides us. I don't know whether you've done that analysis as part of the over 5 percent part. But we haven't. But it's a really good point. We probably should take that one away as well. Have a look at that. David's online may be able to add something over to David. Or do we need to take that one away? Yeah, I think we need to take that one away, Kevin. Thank you. Turning to adult social care, we talked about pressures obviously there. Do we know what other boroughs are? I mean, I guess my questions are, maybe this could be a request, I suppose, is are we actively asking other boroughs what everyone is having trouble with adult social care? Everyone has cost pressures. Feels like if we're doing our own homework, when we could be cribbing other peoples, this is a wasted opportunity. Is there sort of best practice we can learn from in terms of spending some time in Dagenham, in Enfield, in wherever, to try and work out how they're redesigning their adult social care program and potentially maybe if there is a kind of audit of the current program which could come back, that might be useful as well. What we're planning to do in terms of stopping these pressures in adult social care? I think I can try and answer that initially and then Kevin can give you a proper answer. The short answer is yes, there is always a lot of best practice sharing across the sector. We are not alone in being the only borough in London that has had a substantial increase in adult social care costs. As Councillor Radford well knows, these are really difficult costs to control because they are statutory expenditure. We know that cases are getting a lot more complex across the board, but in terms of a bit more detail about what the council is specifically doing, I think he wanted to come in on this. I was simply going to talk about the macro position across London which might interest Councillor Radford and I think if you want, we do have some steps. We're obviously not a service delivery committee so not all the relevant offices will be. I'm going to go back to Councillor Grove and then Councillor David. Just a brief one. So the risk rating in relation to business continuity is reduced, which is obviously good. How often do you have tabletop exercises to test those? When was the last time you had one? General business continuity exercises or cyber? Either. They tend to be cyber related these days, don't they? Most of them. One of the actions that came out of the internal audit into business continuity was to develop a more intensive training plan. That's in progress at the moment. We've got a much more update on business continuity. So that hasn't such an exercise taken place in the past six months or not? There's various kind of smaller exercises that would have taken place. I'm not sure if it's exactly the last six months, but I know it was this year. And that's really how the exercise for business continuity at the moment, because rather than kind of organisation, it's like what would happen if going through your plans step by step, you can do it on a desktop exercise. So there has been smaller cyber IT exercises and there's been a group exercises that take place in the borough as well. I would obviously I'm not an expert, but I would suggest that that's a gap in the reason preparedness. Just down the kind of councils IT operations. So, you know, that that that that's a fairly standard thing that most big organisations do. And that sounds like it's a bit of a gap in our preparedness. Yeah. And we have had a desktop exercise this year with senior officers and it was identified. I think that's a very timely comment, actually. My workplace has been a serious cyber attack on TFL calls. It wasn't for additional. Well, and also you tend to learn quite a lot through these exercises as well, which is which is kind of the point of having them. It's actually going to have all of these plans sitting somewhere, but it's actually when you go through the exercise that you learn something. Or even when you actually have a real life scenario, that's actually when you learn more than anything else, but testing is quite important. It's a very good point. Very well. Thanks. I've got two questions. And the first one is to do with the healthcare. I wonder if it's time that we do a kind of deep dive ourselves to see. Yeah, of money because the second one is looking at. Page 23. The strategic risks finance has got 68. Kind of obviously, and then statutory 76. Are they kind of related or are they just. Very high. I think on the first point. Yes, there is a lot of work that is going on at the council to reduce costs. We now have a cabinet member for finance whose job it is to make sure all of these other cabinet colleagues are drilling down on costs. I gather that there are very regular meetings to discuss. To discuss cost and managing the budget. I will hand over to Kevin. Again, to give you a more coherent answer. I'm sure I can do that chair, but that's pretty coherent. It was the point I mentioned. We haven't done an internal audit recently. I mean, that could be considered, of course, but there is a specific city, but I certainly wouldn't. If you're interested in getting those steps here and committee, we could good luck to bring some back. Right. Okay. Thank you, Councillor David. The current permission of the committee. I'd like to turn to the recommendations on page 19, which are committee note the status of the council's strategic and high level 15 plus service risks. Including the control mitigations in place to manage these risks. Is that agreed? That's agreed. Thank you. Turning to item nine, the treasury management performance update Q1 2024/25, which starts on page 37. We've got David here virtually to make that item and introduce it. Thank you. Thank you, chair. As Councillor Mitchell has said, this is a quarterly treasury report. It's part of a series of reports that is provided through GAMS. It documents the treasury activity over the period 1st of April 2024 to the 30th of June 2024. I have it starting on page 43. Oh, sorry, it's 37, but the page, perhaps where the report really starts is page 43, which is an appendix, which is on Barnet, Barnet format. If you could jump to that. I'm just going to note some of the points in the report, key points in the report, and then we can take questions. So over that quarter, 10 million of new was undertaken. That was taken very early in the quarter around 2nd of April. We'd actually applied for that borrowing in the previous financial year. Since then, over the summer, the council has borrowed a further 65 million, but that would be captured in the Q2 report that will be forthcoming. We are expecting to need to borrow significantly more than this to cover refinancing. There's about 100 million pounds of refinancing that's needed this year and also to fulfil the capital programme and use of reserves. Money market funds are around 100 million, and then we have a further 70 million held as gilts, which are there to back the Brent Cross obligations. It's not surprised we have quite healthy money market fund balances this time of year. That was as expected. We are expecting that balance to wind down quite significantly over the next few months. I wanted just to raise a couple of points with the committee, firstly on page 46, which is section one. And what we've done on this page is we've just highlighted how the capital programme has, as reported, has changed since when we set our treasury management strategy statement, which we did based on the February 2024 capital programme information. So this information is based on the information that was provided to a cabinet in July. So you can see there, the line I'm most focused on is the borrowing line, where you see it had increased by 38.47 million. Now, I've had these numbers come through from the September cabinet information. And what we've seen there is actually these numbers will slip back again. And so it's not unusual that during the year there will be some variance within the information that's provided to us regarding the capital programme. But I think it is a is a key priority that we can get, I guess, more accurate forecast, because it does impact our strategic planning. The next section I just wanted to draw your particular attention to was on page 49, which is the capital financing budget. Now, there's a table on there which I think it'd just be worth walking through, if you can see that. So in twenty three, twenty four, the net capital financing budget was around twelve and a half million and the out turn last year by the actual expenditure relative to that budget. Thirteen point seven million. That was a one point two million pressure. Now, we've been working quite hard to work through what the impact on the capital financing budget will be this year. Now, the budget was increased from twelve point five million to around thirteen point three million. And an additional two million was added to the budget from contingency, taking the budget to thirteen point three. And we've worked through some provisional numbers. And so there's numbers we've given there and we're given a range. So even if there was no further borrowing undertaken, we project that the out turn would be nineteen point two million, which would be a pressure of around four million. And we've, as I explained, already taken seventy five million of borrowing. So that's a scenario that cannot be, cannot hold. If we was to fulfil the borrowing requirements as set out in the twenty four, twenty five, July twenty, twenty four capital programme sent to Canada. And that pressure would build to eight million. And so there's a quite large focus on this. And in the report, we've suggested from a Treasury perspective, some of the actions which need to be looked at to sort of help mitigate this. And there is a lot of work, particularly around the capital programme. Kevin can can can feed back on the work being done there. But also on the debtors position, there's quite a lot of money, frankly owed to the council. And obviously, if we can recover that cash, that will impel the Treasury position because we'll have more cash and therefore won't need to borrow as much. So that was my update. And just to take questions. OK. In terms of. Yeah, so it's so I have some I have some very high level analysis on this. It is quite a complex picture, so it's not it's just like five debtors owing us large monies. There are there are some debtors that are of significant sounds, particularly from the NHS. But perhaps Kevin can comment on that. But he does feed right the way through down the chain. So from the numbers I've seen, there's quite a lot of debtors just related to quite a significant number of small debtors that add up to a large number. And I'm not I'm not trying to dodge the question here, but it's not it's not the Treasury team's role to sort of oversee the debtors position. It's just obviously we've got keen interest on this because I think the feeling is that there is a is a large debtors position sort of evolving. I think if I can be helpful, that information is provided to the overview. So I don't want to proceed if you do want to go through the list. I think it says usually the biggest debtor the council has is a Fremantle NHS trust. Not entirely sure why, but it just always has been a big one. You know, I'm not necessarily asking for names of organizations. I was actually just trying to understand if it was council taxpayers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to make a general point to kick off with and alluded to it, but I want to say a little strongly so. Management of the council's budget goes through the cabinet, the cabinet manage things like capital financing costs and debt management and those sorts of things. So David's report is about Treasury management. I just wanted to make that clear to everybody. So don't think that David and others should be answering for the debt position or indeed capital financing position of the council because he clearly should not. His report is around Treasury management. I'm not saying there aren't very important questions to ask about that. There are. A number of them will go through the cabinet itself. We can bring a debt position. I've got, as the CFO at the moment of the council, a number of areas that I'm concerned about, and the extent of the council's debt is one. And the debt management procedures and practices in place is one that David has mentioned here, the capital financing budget overspend. And that's feeding into the overall out-term forecast, the revenue overspend that we're forecasting at the moment, order one and potentially increasing two. So there are a number of significant factors in there. We've already mentioned one tonight, that's the adult services overspend position, debt management. In fact, there are three of the very large areas that we are concerned about in terms of bringing back into a balanced position going forward. So we can bring debts to you. So there's some negotiation going on there with them about trying to level that up with both organizations. I think I've accepted that we need to regularly, and the debt one, as David says, sorry, the capital financing position, the borrowing position is one that there's a question in there. Is this linked to which I'd like to answer as well as I know that is that I've asked cabinet members to accept suggestion from me. I've got Councillor Radford, then Councillor Rose, then Councillor David. Just to respond quickly to I guess what Kevin just said, I think it was this committee last time that I was like, normally you set a budget and then operate within it, and that should include the capital budget as much. So as much as I think having that kind of emergency cap on, I think there might be a kind of a broader policy even in fat times as well as lean times that maybe could be worked up. Can I ask, in terms of how the capital program interacts with the treasury management function and how that is being integrated into one piece, is that something which could be kind of looked at and brought to the next committee? Because I think that's something which is sort of in terms of both like modeling for the rest of it too, because it's something which seems to come up a lot, but it'd be good to just see it in one place and have a discussion just about that if possible. And then I've got one other question which maybe I can ask at the same time, which is about the refinancing. Maybe this is more to David. So obviously we spent money backed by cash and then we've had to externalize, but we spent the money with cash when we had zero percent interest rates. We now don't have zero percent interest rates. In terms of the rates at which we're refinancing these things, what was the previous rate and what would the rate now be in terms of the shift in terms of the money actually going out of the bank account because of the difference in the interest rate? Do you want me to take that one first or Kevin, did you want to respond to the first one? Yeah, OK. So it's a really good question, the refinancing. Actually, last year, so last fiscal year, 20, 23, 24, towards the end of the year, we borrowed for what I call working capital purposes, i.e. we borrowed what we felt we needed for the capital program, but we still were short on cash. So we had a liquidity issue. And so we took a decision last year to borrow one year, which is the shortest time we can borrow under PWLB. PWLB allowed you to borrow for periods of up to one year or up to 50 years, sorry, down to one year. Now, last year, so that effectively meant we was borrowing at the base rates at the time. So we took that borrowing about five, five and a half percent. That would need to be refinanced in February and March this year, which will likely be a significantly lower rate. We won't need to re-borrow all of that money if we can recover cash because we think we needed to borrow that money largely because of our, potentially because of our debtor's position. But we've worked it through and I think there will be a saving to the capital financing cost centre because we will be refinancing that at a lower rate this year relative to last year. And that accounts for about 85 million. And then there's around 15 million of general purpose borrowing. And we broadly took our average rate year last year was broadly about three percent. So we will be refinancing that at a slightly higher rate than what we took that borrowing at, if that answers your question. On the point about who manages the capital program, the capital financing budget, that's very clearly on treasury management, the fact that the treasury management team undertake the borrowing and we hold the capital financing budget within finance, within my area of responsibility for the future. I guess I maybe to be more precise, I guess one of my questions is if you're looking at a capital project in the private sector, you think about what was my weighted cost of capital, that would include the cost which you're borrowing from in terms of the bank, whatever it might be. Considering there's a bit of a murky picture around what are we going to wind up borrowing when in terms of whether it's minimum revenue provisions, whether it's what interest rates are going to be, et cetera, et cetera, is the idea that that doesn't take place for individual capital? Or what do we use in terms of modelling it for individual capital projects? Or do we just say let's ignore that and then put in a kind of a hurdle at the macro position so you need to clear it by so much regardless of how much we try and anticipate what the borrowing cost would be? Does that make more sense? Does it make it more relevant to the treasury management side of things too? It makes more sense, but it's very different in the public sector and how we do things and you might be somewhat surprised at the way it's done. But in ideal terms, there's a review process for every capital project that comes forward. And a key, key question around that is how it links to the council's priorities and where the council wants to go ahead with and it meets the priorities of the council plan. And then therein is the question around funding. And how it should be is that the funding source comes with that and if we're going to, if we need to borrow, prudential borrowing for the project, then that needs to be identified. And the revenue implications, if there are any of any capital project, needs to go forward as part of the overall budget-setting process that goes then to cabinet onto full council. And then treasury management team will be divided with, because the council would have agreed a budget, capital financing costs, cost of borrowing, and under normal circumstances, if it's gone through the normal methodology, then that budget will be sufficient to meet those revenue costs based on the annual program. I hope that's clear enough. I'll be happy to discuss more with you outside if you want to. I fear that's sadly something we both might say yes to. But yeah, maybe that would be good at some point. I think maybe just to summarize, I think what would help me in terms of I think when I speak to residents and other things about it is given the financial position we find ourselves in over the last two or three years, what added things have we done in terms of around governance and risks and whatever when it comes to the capital project, when it comes to liquidity buffers, when it comes to all of this stuff in order to try and get ourselves in shape, both in terms of like the governance and the rules and the stuff we're doing around it to make sure we're being rigorous. Because I know we're talking about different bits and pieces, but I struggle to recall all of them at once, if that makes sense. So maybe there's just a kind of a list of since 2022, we've taken the following steps would just be really helpful to try and convey that to residents that we're having due regard, I suppose. I don't know if that's possible. I'd be very grateful if so. Do we want to take that as a paper to come to the committee at another time? Yes, absolutely. It's a challenge that we can certainly have a go. I think we're taking a note of that request. Maybe let's come back to that when we look at the forward programme. OK, Councillor Rose and then Councillor David. Two slightly less technical questions. The first one, on page 49, we're talking about potentially for longer term spend, for example, youth centres and preventative health. The second point was a more strategic question in terms of, you know. The first go David and then I'll follow up. Yes, so on the first question regarding the strategies, I must stress on the paper, these are saying these are the things that could be done to help soften the impact on the capital financing cost centre. So we're not saying that we should just sell all our assets, but if we did, then there would be a process that would be undertaken to sort of test the viability of that. So Kevin might want to explain more around what that process is, but there definitely would be a process. And this is really just to highlight some of the options that might be available on the second. Yeah, I mean, there are assets we have where, frankly, there might be best to sell them. There might be worth more for us to be sold than to be kept, just like any organisation will consider selling capital assets. So it doesn't always necessarily have to be in a financially distressed situation. I think there's always a review of the capital assets we have and there will be a strategy around that. On the second point regarding the strategic objectives. I mean, Kevin and I and more broadly have considered these at length. You raised this question and called over clearly. I think it's a very good point that perhaps in the next version of this, there should be just a sort of a comment on the effectiveness of what we've achieved, not just saying what they are. I think that would be a good idea. I think it's for us perhaps to consider internally whether there needs to be an independent view of that, because otherwise it's almost like we're marking our own homework. I think it's a good point to raise that we should just set the strategic objectives, we should monitor how successful they've been. Yeah, I fully agree with that. Yeah, really important that David emphasised, and I know you know this, but just some of the things that we could do, we've got to address that and maybe other things we're considering and it's pretty difficult for us to deliver as well. Thank you very much. Councillor David for the last question. So we definitely, it is under consideration whether we should make an interest charge to the NHS on outstanding debt. We don't do that at the moment. Then they don't charge us either. So there's a lot of negotiation involved. Okay, I'm going to take us to recommendations page 38, which are that the committee notes the Treasury management update for quarter one defined by the Treasury team for 24/25 and beyond. Note that the strategic priorities identified cut across the council's operations and so required by the Treasury management team. Is that noted? That's noted. Thank you very much. Move on to item number 10, 2023/4, corporate complaints, local government and social care ombudsman, LGSCO. Hi, everyone. The council is required to report the corporate complaints performance, LGSCO performance of the arms committee. This is a report of the monitoring officer. This report covers the period 1st of April 2023 to 31st of March 2024. And it includes a summary of our performance in relation to different stages of our corporate complaints and also social care ombudsman. Every July, the LGSCO issues. These are intended to further improve things. Therefore, they're often critical. Our last report highlighted a number of issues, including some delays in the inquiries. This year, they've highlighted the improvements in the processes. The annual report, I think it tells a story of our focus on improvements last year. And that is about people who use council services. And there are some positive things linked to that as well. So we've done quite an in-depth analysis of the data itself, just so that we don't take you on face value. It gives the reduced number of complaints, proportional complaints that help us reduce the escalations that have reduced as well. And fewer complaints that are escalated to the ombudsman and held by the ombudsman. The improvements we've made, including the accessibility of the service, the complaints process itself, as well as information about how to make a complaint, efficiency in how we deal with what we do with learning from complaints to improve services, and also the monitoring of our performance throughout the year through our new dashboards. In terms of key trends, I'll just touch on a few numbers. I imagine the reduced number of complaints has come down by 422 in comparison to last year. The lower proportion of them are upheld, so it's 37%. And they're all indicating that we are dealing with complaints earlier in the process to avoid costly escalations and further dissatisfaction by ourselves as well. The annual cost of compensation, obviously, in addition to the cost of investigating and resolving complaints, there are the compensations that have been paid. So they vary from year to year because you might have one or two complaints where you get higher value compensations paid. In 2023-24, it's gone down by 82%. OK. Does anybody have any questions? I always think it's difficult to judge a complaint sometimes, given the case of complaints coming down. I do think we always need to be vigilant about that, though, you know, the bilateral pressures that are on the council. I'm not expecting us to get as good a return next year. We will continue to work on it and do the best we can, keeping close. So far, we have seen recent trends, but we've got 12 complaints upheld by LGSE. I'm slightly intrigued as to why Street Scene has some slightly lopsided numbers in terms of very few partially upheld cases. Why that's so low in comparison to. Is it just the Street Scene cases are so transparently easy to know the potholes? Yes. So with Street Scene, we do find that they're quite cut and dried cases. We did they collected the bin or not. So it can be one or the other way. It tends to be partially upheld cases. It can be a mix of a staffing issue mixed within that. And obviously, we're unable to advise on that. And so we put in that issue and find that way. That being the case, I'd love to see some case studies on the partially upheld cases. They're probably the most interesting of the lot. Do any other committee have any questions? Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for your report. Recommendations are on page 58. Number one, to note and consider the 2023/2024 corporate complaints and the LGSEO's annual letter, which is Appendix A. Number two, to note and consider the LGSEO's annual letter to the council relevant lessons and actions, which are Appendices. B and C, I got that right. Number three, to note and agree the actions taken by the council to remedy issues, improve performance, which I think we have done in that brief discussion. Can I take those all as noted? Those are all agreed unanimously. Thank you. Right. My favourite item on tonight's agenda. Number 11, complaints about councillors. April 23 to March 24. Thank you, Chair. This is the annual report about complaints about councillors in the current annual report to the Garms Committee. So if I just tell you a bit about how we deal with complaints against elected members, what happens is the complaint comes into me. I then consult the councillor concerned, and I always consult the independent person. We've got five independent persons. They're all appointed by council and they will all refer it to informal group, which is standard working group, who I can take the matter to for further advice. And just to note as well that there are very few sanctions under the Localism Act, we can ask the councillor to apology sanctions under the Arrangements Localism Act. So for that period, we had six complaints. And you'll see there that one of which the resident didn't provide any details. I don't know if anyone has any questions for me. I'm very pleased that none of these have been about. I'm also pleased that Councillor Rhys, just a technical question about whether group WIPs are given not necessarily details, but an awareness that the group should be doing to consider the upstandings of their members. My practice is to let the group leader know about the complaint, but not the group WIPs, but I'm happy to change that practice. Well, I would have to cross that bridge. Who is the group WIP? OK, well, I think we've all been remarkably well made this year. I don't have the cake. Unless there are any further questions or serious points, recommendations on page 150, very serious. May wish to complain about me. I don't know. Recommendations on page 115 for the committee, note the complaints about Councillors. I think that's noted. Thank you. Right. Item number 12, internal on the exception recommendations report and Q1 progress report, 9th of May, 2024 to the 30th of June, 2020. Thank you, Chair. Committee, so you may recall at the last meeting when we bought the Q4 internal audit report, we actually took the report right up to the 8th of May. So the timing slightly after this Q1 report, because we've gone from 9th of May through to 30th of June, so much shorter period. But to take us back in line with quarterly reporting. And we did that last time because we had a number of audits that were still ongoing that we wanted to include the findings in the annual opinion. So just to remind members why we're slightly out on timeframe. So for this period, 9th of May to 30th of June, which concludes Q1, we have six reviews, which is 36% of our annual audit plan, which is above target of 25%. We have no limited or no assurance reports issued in this quarter. The details, summary details of the audits we've undertaken are included within the report, predominantly scores audits. There are a number of audits in progress, so I think we'll see quite a lot of outcomes coming through to Q2, which will be presented in November. So the substance of this report is really the follow-up work that we've undertaken in the internal audit team. So it's been quite a busy time. There's been quite a lot of prior priority and medium priority actions arising from previous audits that we followed up, and we followed up all of those. We put a breakdown in the report of what the outcomes of those are, and we put the schedule in there of what they are as well. So 26 actions were implemented, which is 47%, and 27 were in progress, which is 48%, and we've got three that were not yet implemented, so 5%. It's probably worth saying at this point that a substantive number of the actions were due to the business continuity audit. So you'll remember that we had that come, I think, two times ago, two meetings ago, and there were a number of high-priority actions within that. It shows you in there that most of them are implemented or on track, and there's going to be a much more detailed review of where we are with those, which PwC is just undertaking at the moment, which will be reported at the next meeting. But just to go to your earlier, Councillor Grover, it is documented within the schedule that there is a recommendation within that audit which talks about management oversight activities, exercising, and training. And that is marked as on track, and we'll get a fuller update for you next time. So that's really quite a brief update from internal audit for this quarter. Our new head of internal audit will be in post on the 4th of November, and he'll be here at the next meeting to present internal audit report. So we've appointed Adam Karmson, who is currently our PwC audit manager, who has got some history with Barnet, so is well aware of, you know, all of the work that we've been doing, and will take up the reins as head of internal audit on the 4th of November. And then online, we've got Ian Spears, who's been with the Council many years, and he is currently covering the vacant internal audit manager post. Have you got any really hard or technical questions for me? I'm going to defer to Ian this evening. But yeah, that's really what I wanted to update this evening. You know, I think we're going to let her know this as well. Right. Does anybody have any questions? Excellent, fine. Well, I'm going to go straight to page 120, where the recommendations are. Number one, that the Governance Audits Management and Standards Committee note the general work completed today of the internal audit Q1 report, 9th of May, 2024 to the 30th of June, 2020. And there are no high priority findings. Right. Enjoyable. Item number 13, external audit 2020/21, 2021. Good evening, Chair. You've got the update paper in front of you. It's not where we want it to be at this stage. I think the paper, I'll just pick out some key items out of the paper. So we continue to progress the work during July and August, towards the end of July. He informed us that he's going to get some, the Council is going to get some legal advice in the matter. So we're waiting in conclusion about legal advice, partners review, to make sure that the work that's on there is complete. As part of that process, we've identified some areas where we have follow-up queries on the work that we carried out previously. And I guess due to the length of time this audit's been going on, some of the people here that work on completion. And then the end of the process. So that work is in progress. We're meeting with the interim executive director of resources. Any questions? I have a number of questions, but I'll let members of the committee go first. OK, I mean, you said when you introduced your comments that it's not where we want to be, it's not where we want it to be for years now. You know, it not being where it's about, where it's wanting, it not being where we want it to be and moving it to somewhere that we want it to be are two entirely different things. And, you know, we have we haven't started the process of moving it. You've barely got the car keys out to move it. I have a list here that's been provided to me very helpfully by officers of a list of your outstanding queries, some of which really are quite mind boggling. You said that, you know, you've been making progress since July. Your query to us in July was Brookhill Nursery School's bank sort code. Which I gather we provided to you on the day has now been completed, so I'm hoping that that one's been done. But there's a series of other things here, which I just find astounding that you now need four years after you started doing this. There are requests for measurements for pot sizes. More stuff about bank accounts. You've asked us for audit committee minutes. Please provide minutes of the audit committee for the period September 2022 to July 2023. You were here for that. You were in the room. They're on the website. There's a recording. You know, this is pathetic. There are one or two items on the list which we have access to some of that information and we have corrected we have corrected that subsequently internally to make sure that we're only asking for information that's outstanding. OK, well. I honestly I don't know what to say. I mean, also, I know that there's a whole load of things coming on the 30th of September, which is a few days ago, in time to have some ready reasons to not have filed these for this meeting. I mean, how long how how give us a date, give us a date, tell us when you're going to sign this off. So when all of these smaller things are done, there's one piece of out there's one piece of outstanding work that needs doing fine. I accept that. But these other things should be done by now. All things that could have been dealt with over the last year that you've been coming here and telling me and my committee, oh, we're working on this. Oh, we're making progress on this. You could have asked for Brookhill Nursery School's sort code months ago. Years ago, in fact. Give us a date. As I've said, the backstop date that's been implemented by the government is the 13th of December. So all of these orders will be signed off by the 13th of December. That's a promise. That's cast in stone. But you are going to get everything done by the 13th of December. That's a requirement for the council to publish its accounts by the 13th of December. And we've got to complete our order between the meetings for that. Right. OK. You heard it here. We're going to minute it. And I'm sure in two years you could ask for the minutes. Chair, I think I will point out as part of that, we do have to consider what the form of the opinion will be as to whether that will be an unqualified opinion. A qualified opinion or a disclaimer opinion. And that we will have to make a decision over the course of the next month as to which area we're in, depending on where we get to on the pensions matter. Where we get to in terms of the outstanding information that we need to complete the order. Yeah. And for two whole years, those are going to be disclaimers, aren't they? Because. Right. OK. I think I've had my fill. Do members of the committee have any questions or expressions of exasperation? I'll go to Councillor Radcliffe and Councillor David. I mean, a noise might be better than a. But in terms of the statutory obligation. I take your point, but it's like being told you could have had their homework. You can scroll on it and have it and say you've done your homework. It's about doing a good job or as good a job as possible by the deadline. As much as to your point, then we can we have a qualified. You know, it's. I don't want to rehash what considering very eloquently said that if you're only getting sort codes, which we're getting stuff which are available on the Web site well down this line, doesn't give me a lot of faith. It's what? October about Christmas holidays, a couple of days of hangover for the Christmas bash. Are you really going to get a great job done if you don't have the basic. It just doesn't fill me with confidence. I mean, this evening we've talked so much about finance and information delayed and. This is what the audit is. I think the committee, you know, we've been shortchanged because the depth position and other matters that has arisen this evening would have been picked up. And most of the staff on the document are probably not here anymore. But it's just. You know, the continuous delay. I don't know what the value of the outcome would amount to. That's my take on this. I can only pay. I can only hope that we don't pay the same lack of alacrity and speed that you have handled our accounts unless anybody else has comments. They want to cancel the rise. Do you think if you'd included the same level of detail in your reports as you can of theirs that we might have come to some of these outstanding queries earlier? It's possible I wasn't here for the presentation of the feedback. OK, I'm going to take us to the recommendations on page 170. Committee note the audit progress and sector update number two committee provides any comments that they may have to make this matter. I think you know how we feel. I frankly think you've known how we feel for a year. And there's been so little progress. Outranged. Would we be able to change the recommendation to limited unsatisfactory progress? I take that that's agreed. Thank you. Right. Thank you. Right. We now turn to item number sorry. I've done the wrong recommendations. That was recommendations for that one was that the committee note the content of BDO's report on the progress towards a sign off. So I think I think Councilor Rose was seeking to amend that to lack of progress towards a sign off of the council's 2020/21 statement of accounts and up to. Limited and unsatisfactory. I will I will just take the vote again, just to be clear that that's the correct thing. Is that one agree? I think that's agreed. Thank you. Right. We now move on to the 2023/24 external audit progress report, which is from page 169 to 202. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you, Chair. So, yeah, you have a progress report. Obviously, you'll recall at the last meeting we presented value for money report. At this meeting, we have progress on the financial statements audit, which we commenced for 23/4 at the beginning of July. We've worked well with the finance team to to take forward the audit and this report. What we wanted to do for you is sort of set out a detailed analysis really of where we've got to. The report reflects where we are on issues identified, samples that have been processed, samples that are still with the council and some of the naughty matters that are coming up as part of the audit. And clearly. It is no surprise that obviously, given given the sort of history going into this audit, there's going to be things identified because time moves on or requirements move on, accounting requirements move on. So so there's obviously quite a few things we've identified and we're working with officers on. We've also identified we've also done some work on IT controls as well, which we've we've reported here in terms of our assessment there. So it's quite a comprehensive report, I think, in terms of where we are in terms of the way forward. There's a couple of key key things to consider. The next meeting of this committee, which I believe is towards the end of November. We will produce our audit findings report, which is a detailed report. And then we also have to play into into account the twenty three four backstop, which the recent legislation has committed everyone to the end of February twenty, twenty five, which is actually brought forward from the previous government's consultation, which had the end of May twenty five. So we'll obviously have to consider with the council what the right what the right meeting is to close off the twenty three four audit in whatever form, because we obviously have to take into account of the completion of the video years audits and how that plays out into our work on areas such as opening balances. So that that is quite complicated technical sort of thing to consider. We'll bring we'll bring an assessment of what that looks like to you at the next meeting. I think these things have to be taken in context. I think we're actually making more progress on it than we are most of the jobs that we've taken on recently. They are new to Grant Thornton. And that's thanks to colleagues in the finance department for the support in that process. So happy to take any questions, chair, from members of the committee on our approach report. Right. Thank you very much. Can I just check you're you're going to do things on time. You're going to complete your audit on time, right? So with your audit finance report to the next meeting, we have to sign this audit off by the statutory deadline of twenty eight for February. That's that's a requirement on us. I think the issue the only issue really about that is is not that we'll whether we'll finish by then because we have to. It will be the nature of our audit opinion, how much assurance we're able to give. I think we're able because we've done a lot of work that there will be some more assurance and councils had recently on recent years. But what that that the level of assurance is still open to the completion of audit procedures and our reflection on on the opening balances position. OK. And presumably you've got Brookhill Nursery School sort code. You're not going to come back to us in four years and ask that vital piece of information, right? Comment on that one. OK, excellent. Right. Does anybody else have any? You're welcome to if you want to. If you don't want to, that's fine. I don't really think I'm going to add to either Karen. All of said, although I did hear Paul Sager significant issue, I just thought when the members noticed he'd said that or just a question, I wouldn't mind asking Councillors chair for you. I'm going to go to the recommendations on page one hundred and seventy. The number one committee note the audit progress and sector update number two that the committee provides any comments that they may have done so. I think that's agreed. Right. We move on to item number 50, the committee forward work programme. I think we're going to have a very short discussion about this. I think we're looking for things to add to the programme. So do members have anything they want to add? I saw Councillor Rose first. Then I'll go to Councillor. All right. Oh, yeah. Just to whether we could consider bringing forward an audit of the Treasury management systems for next committee. We know that request, I think starts on the fourth of November, so maybe we talk to him about that when he starts. I think that's a very, very good idea. Councillor Radford had a comment earlier about the capital programme. What do you want to put on the forward work programme potentially? I mean, I guess just to get Kevin's point about what what kind of steps we're taking on to kind of get that within the balance. But if you balance, which and also particularly about how it might interact with management, so maybe there's an overlap out there in terms of how it's incorporated in terms of how is the repressures from the Treasury management actually sort of reflected in the decision making in terms of. May I ask if Councillor David would be happy with the report from the Adults Financial Sustainability Board, where they've been doing the deep dives that you've suggested we bring back feedback of what they've been doing there. There's an awful lot of statistics and work that's been done on that board. I think answers your question, but I wanted to make sure you're OK with that. It is definitely to do with Barnet. It's 100 percent Barnet. OK, thank you. I think that's the forward work programme discussed. There are no other urgent items that the chair decides are urgent. Oh, sorry. Just on item 15, I do need to advise the committee that the dates of the 2025 municipal year be moved and that the committee will be canvassed about their availability for dates in the next municipal year. Sorry. Oh, well, this year my birthday fell on the committee date. I couldn't I couldn't think of a finer group of people to celebrate one's birthday with. We did. We had cake. Yeah. There are no other urgent items, so I declare the meeting. Thank you all very much.

Transcript

My name is Councillor Arjun Mitra and I'm the chair of the Governance, Audit, Risk Management and Standards Committee. Welcome to all members of the committee. Please note that this meeting is being webcast by the Council and those present may be picked up in recordings. Can I please remind members and officers to use the microphone when speaking by pressing the middle speaker icon. Item number one, absence of members, if any. Richard Harbord, the independent member, has sent his apologies. I haven't had any general apologies from anyone else. Minutes of the previous meeting are on pages 5 to 18. We have an action which is on page 15, the computer reboots. So page one of the previous meeting, the quarterly risks report and the Open Door Homes acquisition programme. The committee were advised that officers would report back at the next meeting what the impact would be on the open response that we've had. The responses in the papers on page 15 was the quarterly risks report committee requested an update on the Barn Next Zero challenge, which was launched in November last year. Last, the information we circulated to members via email of successful applicants and what their ideas were saying that the sustainability team would be reprofiling the carbon offset fund risk and requested further information be provided to the next meeting. The next block was on page four, which is the internal exceptions recommendations. The committee held a discussion regarding legacy debts, noted that there were processes in place of debt recovery policies, legacy debts. The meeting was advised that final figure of the written-off debt would be detailed in the future report. The members also noted that action points relating to the cyber security, third-party security and awareness audit would be completed by 2024 and that the committee would receive a report detailing progress and the processes being devised to undertake this would be fed back at the next committee. So all of the responses are in the minutes there. I won't read the ones. I'll take too much time. The final one on the treasury management, I think we are awaiting today's committee if that's okay with members. Okay. That being the case, can I take it that members of the committee approved the minutes of the previous meeting held on the 23rd of July? Is that approved? Agreed. Thank you. Item number three. Do any members have anything they wish to declare? Item number four, dispensations by the monitoring officer, there are none. Item number five, deputations, there are none. Item number six, petitions, there are none. Item number seven, public questions and comments, there are none. Our anniversary today. Thank you, Chet. Today marks one year of Hamas' terror attack on the communities of southern Israel. Remember the 1,200 victims murdered in their homes, communities and at the Nova music festival. 250 taken hostage to Gaza and the thousands of innocent lives torn apart. We also remember the huge loss of innocent life that has occurred in the years since in Israel, Gaza and now Lebanon. At the party conference, I was privileged to meet the families of two of the over 100 hostages that remain in Hamas' captivity in Gaza. This includes a British citizen. I reaffirm the overwhelming rallying call to bring them all home now. Please to the committee to hold a minute's silence as we reflect on the deep pain of the past year for many of our residents, our twin town of Ramadan and to unite in our shared hope for a peaceful future. Thank you. Thank you very much. Councillor Rose. Apologies to Councillor Grover, I had meant to share that with you before the meeting. Right. Move on to items before we dive into questions. Thank you, Elaine. Hi, everybody. So this is the call to one report for 24/25. So the report presents an overview of the risks across the organisation. It focuses on the strategic risks, which are all the cross cutting risks that we manage and all the high level service risks. And so we're managing 202 risks currently across the organisation. And there are 22 high level risks that we focused on in the report and provided some more detailed information in there. More than happy to take questions on individual risks. I may have to take those questions away and feedback the answers. So bear with me. I'm happy to do that. Thank you very much. Do members of the committee have questions on this item? Councillor Grover, I know Councillor Rose does. Thank you, Chair. I just I'm kind of looking at the it's the introductory paragraphs and obviously one of the risks that are highlighted that is highlighted as being of zero risk. Elaine, do you want to take that? Let me just bring up the risk description and I'll explain it to you. Hold on one moment. Does anybody have the actual risk reference to have? Make it easy to find it. It is. Is it S.T.R. 031 that you're looking for? That might be it. No, not that one. 31. Hold on. Looking at 13. Yes, so that the actual description of the risk is about ensuring we get the necessary funds for the sustainability programme. So, yeah, it's it's the whole of the sustainability programme. So there is a question mark of getting the funds to fund the full sustainability programme. Yeah. So the risk itself is the inability to raise the funds for that programme. And what is the total amount of funding required for that programme? That I would have to take away and find out the answer to that. I don't have that information. I think it will have been I when you asked the question, I do remember reading it somewhere, but I could not remember off the top of my head. Do you have any follow up questions or any further questions? OK. Can I go to Councillor Rose, please? Thank you. On page 27 under health and safety, there's a section on latent effects identified in the build quality throughout the Colindale office. I was reassured to read that it's safe for us not asking our staff to work in unsafe environments. I was deeply concerned that a new building that the council is using and owns, I believe, has such serious defects. I want to know how we are trying to fix that, if that affects the value of the property and what we intend on doing it. Before I go to officers, Councillor Radford has a follow up point to that. Is there any way of recovering some costs associated with the fact that probably it wasn't our fault that it has latent defects as well? We have a response that might be helpful. This isn't my area, my service area, but I am aware of the issue in the building. And I've got some notes from Chris Smith, who's the assistant director for this area. So we're in dispute with a company that constructed the building. We've already sent them a letter of claim for compensation, pressing for them to remediate some of the defects. But we're also working to identify if there's any other defects that may not be immediately visible. So we've got the totality of what the issues are before we kind of proceed. So we're conducting some intrusive surveys and some further surveys ourselves. Our intention is to claim all costs back from the developer. They will likely contest some of that. We think it will be a long disputed commercial negotiation and meetings are ongoing at the moment. So I guess if you want any further information, I could ask Chris Smith to circulate that to the committee. Yes. I think updates that have come through to directors group, I think it's been going on for a very long time. Maybe I can add to that. Presumably, I mean, most of the time there's multiple projects which builders work with in a particular location. Slightly concerned that we may have found some defects that maybe other people might be unaware of. Do we know if there are other buildings, either for us or other people, which this builder's done? I'm thinking about like if you think about the rack scandal, right? It doesn't just affect one school. You know, I'm just kind of should we be worried that this isn't just the Collinsdale offices, I guess is mine. I'll pass that through to Chris and ask him to include that information in a briefing. OK, thank you. Does anybody else have any questions? All right. Yeah, go ahead. And then we'll go back to Council. I've got a few sporadic ones here. That's right on resource pressures affecting. What's it say? The second it's on page twenty six. And it is about resource pressures affecting service delivery and income collection for parking. I'm aware certainly in my ward, and I think this is kind of a wider problem, that there's been actually a rise in intimidation of our wardens, which might be affecting kind of essentially being able to tickets and collecting money on that. Could someone kind of report back on kind of if what reports we have got about intimidation of our wardens, whether that is affecting actually recovery and issuing of tickets and then recovering income from people? Obviously, we've had to have some joint patrols. That's clearly not sustainable way of doing things. Question around that sort of pause in between my questions. I think I don't think we'll have that information to hand, but I think we'll make a note of that request. Ask that to be put on our new action for next time. Thank you. And then probably from the minor to the micro to the macro, in terms of the Brent Cross program. You sort of talked a bit about last time round about what if interest rates were to rise and sort of curious as well, if we're to follow the Bank of England's projections for income, interest rates to come down. What does that actually look like in terms of the economics, I suppose, of Brent Cross, because that seems to be a sort of ongoing risk. It's interesting to look at it in the other direction potentially as well, because we're talking about affordability. It seems like what we've seen in the States, if the UK follows at all, we're hoping we're looking for interest rates drops rather than rising. I'm just wondering about how much cushion that provides us. I don't know whether you've done that analysis as part of the over 5 percent part. But we haven't. But it's a really good point. We probably should take that one away as well. Have a look at that. David's online may be able to add something over to David. Or do we need to take that one away? Yeah, I think we need to take that one away, Kevin. Thank you. Turning to adult social care, we talked about pressures obviously there. Do we know what other boroughs are? I mean, I guess my questions are, maybe this could be a request, I suppose, is are we actively asking other boroughs what everyone is having trouble with adult social care? Everyone has cost pressures. Feels like if we're doing our own homework, when we could be cribbing other peoples, this is a wasted opportunity. Is there sort of best practice we can learn from in terms of spending some time in Dagenham, in Enfield, in wherever, to try and work out how they're redesigning their adult social care program and potentially maybe if there is a kind of audit of the current program which could come back, that might be useful as well. What we're planning to do in terms of stopping these pressures in adult social care? I think I can try and answer that initially and then Kevin can give you a proper answer. The short answer is yes, there is always a lot of best practice sharing across the sector. We are not alone in being the only borough in London that has had a substantial increase in adult social care costs. As Councillor Radford well knows, these are really difficult costs to control because they are statutory expenditure. We know that cases are getting a lot more complex across the board, but in terms of a bit more detail about what the council is specifically doing, I think he wanted to come in on this. I was simply going to talk about the macro position across London which might interest Councillor Radford and I think if you want, we do have some steps. We're obviously not a service delivery committee so not all the relevant offices will be. I'm going to go back to Councillor Grove and then Councillor David. Just a brief one. So the risk rating in relation to business continuity is reduced, which is obviously good. How often do you have tabletop exercises to test those? When was the last time you had one? General business continuity exercises or cyber? Either. They tend to be cyber related these days, don't they? Most of them. One of the actions that came out of the internal audit into business continuity was to develop a more intensive training plan. That's in progress at the moment. We've got a much more update on business continuity. So that hasn't such an exercise taken place in the past six months or not? There's various kind of smaller exercises that would have taken place. I'm not sure if it's exactly the last six months, but I know it was this year. And that's really how the exercise for business continuity at the moment, because rather than kind of organisation, it's like what would happen if going through your plans step by step, you can do it on a desktop exercise. So there has been smaller cyber IT exercises and there's been a group exercises that take place in the borough as well. I would obviously I'm not an expert, but I would suggest that that's a gap in the reason preparedness. Just down the kind of councils IT operations. So, you know, that that that that's a fairly standard thing that most big organisations do. And that sounds like it's a bit of a gap in our preparedness. Yeah. And we have had a desktop exercise this year with senior officers and it was identified. I think that's a very timely comment, actually. My workplace has been a serious cyber attack on TFL calls. It wasn't for additional. Well, and also you tend to learn quite a lot through these exercises as well, which is which is kind of the point of having them. It's actually going to have all of these plans sitting somewhere, but it's actually when you go through the exercise that you learn something. Or even when you actually have a real life scenario, that's actually when you learn more than anything else, but testing is quite important. It's a very good point. Very well. Thanks. I've got two questions. And the first one is to do with the healthcare. I wonder if it's time that we do a kind of deep dive ourselves to see. Yeah, of money because the second one is looking at. Page 23. The strategic risks finance has got 68. Kind of obviously, and then statutory 76. Are they kind of related or are they just. Very high. I think on the first point. Yes, there is a lot of work that is going on at the council to reduce costs. We now have a cabinet member for finance whose job it is to make sure all of these other cabinet colleagues are drilling down on costs. I gather that there are very regular meetings to discuss. To discuss cost and managing the budget. I will hand over to Kevin. Again, to give you a more coherent answer. I'm sure I can do that chair, but that's pretty coherent. It was the point I mentioned. We haven't done an internal audit recently. I mean, that could be considered, of course, but there is a specific city, but I certainly wouldn't. If you're interested in getting those steps here and committee, we could good luck to bring some back. Right. Okay. Thank you, Councillor David. The current permission of the committee. I'd like to turn to the recommendations on page 19, which are committee note the status of the council's strategic and high level 15 plus service risks. Including the control mitigations in place to manage these risks. Is that agreed? That's agreed. Thank you. Turning to item nine, the treasury management performance update Q1 2024/25, which starts on page 37. We've got David here virtually to make that item and introduce it. Thank you. Thank you, chair. As Councillor Mitchell has said, this is a quarterly treasury report. It's part of a series of reports that is provided through GAMS. It documents the treasury activity over the period 1st of April 2024 to the 30th of June 2024. I have it starting on page 43. Oh, sorry, it's 37, but the page, perhaps where the report really starts is page 43, which is an appendix, which is on Barnet, Barnet format. If you could jump to that. I'm just going to note some of the points in the report, key points in the report, and then we can take questions. So over that quarter, 10 million of new was undertaken. That was taken very early in the quarter around 2nd of April. We'd actually applied for that borrowing in the previous financial year. Since then, over the summer, the council has borrowed a further 65 million, but that would be captured in the Q2 report that will be forthcoming. We are expecting to need to borrow significantly more than this to cover refinancing. There's about 100 million pounds of refinancing that's needed this year and also to fulfil the capital programme and use of reserves. Money market funds are around 100 million, and then we have a further 70 million held as gilts, which are there to back the Brent Cross obligations. It's not surprised we have quite healthy money market fund balances this time of year. That was as expected. We are expecting that balance to wind down quite significantly over the next few months. I wanted just to raise a couple of points with the committee, firstly on page 46, which is section one. And what we've done on this page is we've just highlighted how the capital programme has, as reported, has changed since when we set our treasury management strategy statement, which we did based on the February 2024 capital programme information. So this information is based on the information that was provided to a cabinet in July. So you can see there, the line I'm most focused on is the borrowing line, where you see it had increased by 38.47 million. Now, I've had these numbers come through from the September cabinet information. And what we've seen there is actually these numbers will slip back again. And so it's not unusual that during the year there will be some variance within the information that's provided to us regarding the capital programme. But I think it is a is a key priority that we can get, I guess, more accurate forecast, because it does impact our strategic planning. The next section I just wanted to draw your particular attention to was on page 49, which is the capital financing budget. Now, there's a table on there which I think it'd just be worth walking through, if you can see that. So in twenty three, twenty four, the net capital financing budget was around twelve and a half million and the out turn last year by the actual expenditure relative to that budget. Thirteen point seven million. That was a one point two million pressure. Now, we've been working quite hard to work through what the impact on the capital financing budget will be this year. Now, the budget was increased from twelve point five million to around thirteen point three million. And an additional two million was added to the budget from contingency, taking the budget to thirteen point three. And we've worked through some provisional numbers. And so there's numbers we've given there and we're given a range. So even if there was no further borrowing undertaken, we project that the out turn would be nineteen point two million, which would be a pressure of around four million. And we've, as I explained, already taken seventy five million of borrowing. So that's a scenario that cannot be, cannot hold. If we was to fulfil the borrowing requirements as set out in the twenty four, twenty five, July twenty, twenty four capital programme sent to Canada. And that pressure would build to eight million. And so there's a quite large focus on this. And in the report, we've suggested from a Treasury perspective, some of the actions which need to be looked at to sort of help mitigate this. And there is a lot of work, particularly around the capital programme. Kevin can can can feed back on the work being done there. But also on the debtors position, there's quite a lot of money, frankly owed to the council. And obviously, if we can recover that cash, that will impel the Treasury position because we'll have more cash and therefore won't need to borrow as much. So that was my update. And just to take questions. OK. In terms of. Yeah, so it's so I have some I have some very high level analysis on this. It is quite a complex picture, so it's not it's just like five debtors owing us large monies. There are there are some debtors that are of significant sounds, particularly from the NHS. But perhaps Kevin can comment on that. But he does feed right the way through down the chain. So from the numbers I've seen, there's quite a lot of debtors just related to quite a significant number of small debtors that add up to a large number. And I'm not I'm not trying to dodge the question here, but it's not it's not the Treasury team's role to sort of oversee the debtors position. It's just obviously we've got keen interest on this because I think the feeling is that there is a is a large debtors position sort of evolving. I think if I can be helpful, that information is provided to the overview. So I don't want to proceed if you do want to go through the list. I think it says usually the biggest debtor the council has is a Fremantle NHS trust. Not entirely sure why, but it just always has been a big one. You know, I'm not necessarily asking for names of organizations. I was actually just trying to understand if it was council taxpayers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to make a general point to kick off with and alluded to it, but I want to say a little strongly so. Management of the council's budget goes through the cabinet, the cabinet manage things like capital financing costs and debt management and those sorts of things. So David's report is about Treasury management. I just wanted to make that clear to everybody. So don't think that David and others should be answering for the debt position or indeed capital financing position of the council because he clearly should not. His report is around Treasury management. I'm not saying there aren't very important questions to ask about that. There are. A number of them will go through the cabinet itself. We can bring a debt position. I've got, as the CFO at the moment of the council, a number of areas that I'm concerned about, and the extent of the council's debt is one. And the debt management procedures and practices in place is one that David has mentioned here, the capital financing budget overspend. And that's feeding into the overall out-term forecast, the revenue overspend that we're forecasting at the moment, order one and potentially increasing two. So there are a number of significant factors in there. We've already mentioned one tonight, that's the adult services overspend position, debt management. In fact, there are three of the very large areas that we are concerned about in terms of bringing back into a balanced position going forward. So we can bring debts to you. So there's some negotiation going on there with them about trying to level that up with both organizations. I think I've accepted that we need to regularly, and the debt one, as David says, sorry, the capital financing position, the borrowing position is one that there's a question in there. Is this linked to which I'd like to answer as well as I know that is that I've asked cabinet members to accept suggestion from me. I've got Councillor Radford, then Councillor Rose, then Councillor David. Just to respond quickly to I guess what Kevin just said, I think it was this committee last time that I was like, normally you set a budget and then operate within it, and that should include the capital budget as much. So as much as I think having that kind of emergency cap on, I think there might be a kind of a broader policy even in fat times as well as lean times that maybe could be worked up. Can I ask, in terms of how the capital program interacts with the treasury management function and how that is being integrated into one piece, is that something which could be kind of looked at and brought to the next committee? Because I think that's something which is sort of in terms of both like modeling for the rest of it too, because it's something which seems to come up a lot, but it'd be good to just see it in one place and have a discussion just about that if possible. And then I've got one other question which maybe I can ask at the same time, which is about the refinancing. Maybe this is more to David. So obviously we spent money backed by cash and then we've had to externalize, but we spent the money with cash when we had zero percent interest rates. We now don't have zero percent interest rates. In terms of the rates at which we're refinancing these things, what was the previous rate and what would the rate now be in terms of the shift in terms of the money actually going out of the bank account because of the difference in the interest rate? Do you want me to take that one first or Kevin, did you want to respond to the first one? Yeah, OK. So it's a really good question, the refinancing. Actually, last year, so last fiscal year, 20, 23, 24, towards the end of the year, we borrowed for what I call working capital purposes, i.e. we borrowed what we felt we needed for the capital program, but we still were short on cash. So we had a liquidity issue. And so we took a decision last year to borrow one year, which is the shortest time we can borrow under PWLB. PWLB allowed you to borrow for periods of up to one year or up to 50 years, sorry, down to one year. Now, last year, so that effectively meant we was borrowing at the base rates at the time. So we took that borrowing about five, five and a half percent. That would need to be refinanced in February and March this year, which will likely be a significantly lower rate. We won't need to re-borrow all of that money if we can recover cash because we think we needed to borrow that money largely because of our, potentially because of our debtor's position. But we've worked it through and I think there will be a saving to the capital financing cost centre because we will be refinancing that at a lower rate this year relative to last year. And that accounts for about 85 million. And then there's around 15 million of general purpose borrowing. And we broadly took our average rate year last year was broadly about three percent. So we will be refinancing that at a slightly higher rate than what we took that borrowing at, if that answers your question. On the point about who manages the capital program, the capital financing budget, that's very clearly on treasury management, the fact that the treasury management team undertake the borrowing and we hold the capital financing budget within finance, within my area of responsibility for the future. I guess I maybe to be more precise, I guess one of my questions is if you're looking at a capital project in the private sector, you think about what was my weighted cost of capital, that would include the cost which you're borrowing from in terms of the bank, whatever it might be. Considering there's a bit of a murky picture around what are we going to wind up borrowing when in terms of whether it's minimum revenue provisions, whether it's what interest rates are going to be, et cetera, et cetera, is the idea that that doesn't take place for individual capital? Or what do we use in terms of modelling it for individual capital projects? Or do we just say let's ignore that and then put in a kind of a hurdle at the macro position so you need to clear it by so much regardless of how much we try and anticipate what the borrowing cost would be? Does that make more sense? Does it make it more relevant to the treasury management side of things too? It makes more sense, but it's very different in the public sector and how we do things and you might be somewhat surprised at the way it's done. But in ideal terms, there's a review process for every capital project that comes forward. And a key, key question around that is how it links to the council's priorities and where the council wants to go ahead with and it meets the priorities of the council plan. And then therein is the question around funding. And how it should be is that the funding source comes with that and if we're going to, if we need to borrow, prudential borrowing for the project, then that needs to be identified. And the revenue implications, if there are any of any capital project, needs to go forward as part of the overall budget-setting process that goes then to cabinet onto full council. And then treasury management team will be divided with, because the council would have agreed a budget, capital financing costs, cost of borrowing, and under normal circumstances, if it's gone through the normal methodology, then that budget will be sufficient to meet those revenue costs based on the annual program. I hope that's clear enough. I'll be happy to discuss more with you outside if you want to. I fear that's sadly something we both might say yes to. But yeah, maybe that would be good at some point. I think maybe just to summarize, I think what would help me in terms of I think when I speak to residents and other things about it is given the financial position we find ourselves in over the last two or three years, what added things have we done in terms of around governance and risks and whatever when it comes to the capital project, when it comes to liquidity buffers, when it comes to all of this stuff in order to try and get ourselves in shape, both in terms of like the governance and the rules and the stuff we're doing around it to make sure we're being rigorous. Because I know we're talking about different bits and pieces, but I struggle to recall all of them at once, if that makes sense. So maybe there's just a kind of a list of since 2022, we've taken the following steps would just be really helpful to try and convey that to residents that we're having due regard, I suppose. I don't know if that's possible. I'd be very grateful if so. Do we want to take that as a paper to come to the committee at another time? Yes, absolutely. It's a challenge that we can certainly have a go. I think we're taking a note of that request. Maybe let's come back to that when we look at the forward programme. OK, Councillor Rose and then Councillor David. Two slightly less technical questions. The first one, on page 49, we're talking about potentially for longer term spend, for example, youth centres and preventative health. The second point was a more strategic question in terms of, you know. The first go David and then I'll follow up. Yes, so on the first question regarding the strategies, I must stress on the paper, these are saying these are the things that could be done to help soften the impact on the capital financing cost centre. So we're not saying that we should just sell all our assets, but if we did, then there would be a process that would be undertaken to sort of test the viability of that. So Kevin might want to explain more around what that process is, but there definitely would be a process. And this is really just to highlight some of the options that might be available on the second. Yeah, I mean, there are assets we have where, frankly, there might be best to sell them. There might be worth more for us to be sold than to be kept, just like any organisation will consider selling capital assets. So it doesn't always necessarily have to be in a financially distressed situation. I think there's always a review of the capital assets we have and there will be a strategy around that. On the second point regarding the strategic objectives. I mean, Kevin and I and more broadly have considered these at length. You raised this question and called over clearly. I think it's a very good point that perhaps in the next version of this, there should be just a sort of a comment on the effectiveness of what we've achieved, not just saying what they are. I think that would be a good idea. I think it's for us perhaps to consider internally whether there needs to be an independent view of that, because otherwise it's almost like we're marking our own homework. I think it's a good point to raise that we should just set the strategic objectives, we should monitor how successful they've been. Yeah, I fully agree with that. Yeah, really important that David emphasised, and I know you know this, but just some of the things that we could do, we've got to address that and maybe other things we're considering and it's pretty difficult for us to deliver as well. Thank you very much. Councillor David for the last question. So we definitely, it is under consideration whether we should make an interest charge to the NHS on outstanding debt. We don't do that at the moment. Then they don't charge us either. So there's a lot of negotiation involved. Okay, I'm going to take us to recommendations page 38, which are that the committee notes the Treasury management update for quarter one defined by the Treasury team for 24/25 and beyond. Note that the strategic priorities identified cut across the council's operations and so required by the Treasury management team. Is that noted? That's noted. Thank you very much. Move on to item number 10, 2023/4, corporate complaints, local government and social care ombudsman, LGSCO. Hi, everyone. The council is required to report the corporate complaints performance, LGSCO performance of the arms committee. This is a report of the monitoring officer. This report covers the period 1st of April 2023 to 31st of March 2024. And it includes a summary of our performance in relation to different stages of our corporate complaints and also social care ombudsman. Every July, the LGSCO issues. These are intended to further improve things. Therefore, they're often critical. Our last report highlighted a number of issues, including some delays in the inquiries. This year, they've highlighted the improvements in the processes. The annual report, I think it tells a story of our focus on improvements last year. And that is about people who use council services. And there are some positive things linked to that as well. So we've done quite an in-depth analysis of the data itself, just so that we don't take you on face value. It gives the reduced number of complaints, proportional complaints that help us reduce the escalations that have reduced as well. And fewer complaints that are escalated to the ombudsman and held by the ombudsman. The improvements we've made, including the accessibility of the service, the complaints process itself, as well as information about how to make a complaint, efficiency in how we deal with what we do with learning from complaints to improve services, and also the monitoring of our performance throughout the year through our new dashboards. In terms of key trends, I'll just touch on a few numbers. I imagine the reduced number of complaints has come down by 422 in comparison to last year. The lower proportion of them are upheld, so it's 37%. And they're all indicating that we are dealing with complaints earlier in the process to avoid costly escalations and further dissatisfaction by ourselves as well. The annual cost of compensation, obviously, in addition to the cost of investigating and resolving complaints, there are the compensations that have been paid. So they vary from year to year because you might have one or two complaints where you get higher value compensations paid. In 2023-24, it's gone down by 82%. OK. Does anybody have any questions? I always think it's difficult to judge a complaint sometimes, given the case of complaints coming down. I do think we always need to be vigilant about that, though, you know, the bilateral pressures that are on the council. I'm not expecting us to get as good a return next year. We will continue to work on it and do the best we can, keeping close. So far, we have seen recent trends, but we've got 12 complaints upheld by LGSE. I'm slightly intrigued as to why Street Scene has some slightly lopsided numbers in terms of very few partially upheld cases. Why that's so low in comparison to. Is it just the Street Scene cases are so transparently easy to know the potholes? Yes. So with Street Scene, we do find that they're quite cut and dried cases. We did they collected the bin or not. So it can be one or the other way. It tends to be partially upheld cases. It can be a mix of a staffing issue mixed within that. And obviously, we're unable to advise on that. And so we put in that issue and find that way. That being the case, I'd love to see some case studies on the partially upheld cases. They're probably the most interesting of the lot. Do any other committee have any questions? Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for your report. Recommendations are on page 58. Number one, to note and consider the 2023/2024 corporate complaints and the LGSEO's annual letter, which is Appendix A. Number two, to note and consider the LGSEO's annual letter to the council relevant lessons and actions, which are Appendices. B and C, I got that right. Number three, to note and agree the actions taken by the council to remedy issues, improve performance, which I think we have done in that brief discussion. Can I take those all as noted? Those are all agreed unanimously. Thank you. Right. My favourite item on tonight's agenda. Number 11, complaints about councillors. April 23 to March 24. Thank you, Chair. This is the annual report about complaints about councillors in the current annual report to the Garms Committee. So if I just tell you a bit about how we deal with complaints against elected members, what happens is the complaint comes into me. I then consult the councillor concerned, and I always consult the independent person. We've got five independent persons. They're all appointed by council and they will all refer it to informal group, which is standard working group, who I can take the matter to for further advice. And just to note as well that there are very few sanctions under the Localism Act, we can ask the councillor to apology sanctions under the Arrangements Localism Act. So for that period, we had six complaints. And you'll see there that one of which the resident didn't provide any details. I don't know if anyone has any questions for me. I'm very pleased that none of these have been about. I'm also pleased that Councillor Rhys, just a technical question about whether group WIPs are given not necessarily details, but an awareness that the group should be doing to consider the upstandings of their members. My practice is to let the group leader know about the complaint, but not the group WIPs, but I'm happy to change that practice. Well, I would have to cross that bridge. Who is the group WIP? OK, well, I think we've all been remarkably well made this year. I don't have the cake. Unless there are any further questions or serious points, recommendations on page 150, very serious. May wish to complain about me. I don't know. Recommendations on page 115 for the committee, note the complaints about Councillors. I think that's noted. Thank you. Right. Item number 12, internal on the exception recommendations report and Q1 progress report, 9th of May, 2024 to the 30th of June, 2020. Thank you, Chair. Committee, so you may recall at the last meeting when we bought the Q4 internal audit report, we actually took the report right up to the 8th of May. So the timing slightly after this Q1 report, because we've gone from 9th of May through to 30th of June, so much shorter period. But to take us back in line with quarterly reporting. And we did that last time because we had a number of audits that were still ongoing that we wanted to include the findings in the annual opinion. So just to remind members why we're slightly out on timeframe. So for this period, 9th of May to 30th of June, which concludes Q1, we have six reviews, which is 36% of our annual audit plan, which is above target of 25%. We have no limited or no assurance reports issued in this quarter. The details, summary details of the audits we've undertaken are included within the report, predominantly scores audits. There are a number of audits in progress, so I think we'll see quite a lot of outcomes coming through to Q2, which will be presented in November. So the substance of this report is really the follow-up work that we've undertaken in the internal audit team. So it's been quite a busy time. There's been quite a lot of prior priority and medium priority actions arising from previous audits that we followed up, and we followed up all of those. We put a breakdown in the report of what the outcomes of those are, and we put the schedule in there of what they are as well. So 26 actions were implemented, which is 47%, and 27 were in progress, which is 48%, and we've got three that were not yet implemented, so 5%. It's probably worth saying at this point that a substantive number of the actions were due to the business continuity audit. So you'll remember that we had that come, I think, two times ago, two meetings ago, and there were a number of high-priority actions within that. It shows you in there that most of them are implemented or on track, and there's going to be a much more detailed review of where we are with those, which PwC is just undertaking at the moment, which will be reported at the next meeting. But just to go to your earlier, Councillor Grover, it is documented within the schedule that there is a recommendation within that audit which talks about management oversight activities, exercising, and training. And that is marked as on track, and we'll get a fuller update for you next time. So that's really quite a brief update from internal audit for this quarter. Our new head of internal audit will be in post on the 4th of November, and he'll be here at the next meeting to present internal audit report. So we've appointed Adam Karmson, who is currently our PwC audit manager, who has got some history with Barnet, so is well aware of, you know, all of the work that we've been doing, and will take up the reins as head of internal audit on the 4th of November. And then online, we've got Ian Spears, who's been with the Council many years, and he is currently covering the vacant internal audit manager post. Have you got any really hard or technical questions for me? I'm going to defer to Ian this evening. But yeah, that's really what I wanted to update this evening. You know, I think we're going to let her know this as well. Right. Does anybody have any questions? Excellent, fine. Well, I'm going to go straight to page 120, where the recommendations are. Number one, that the Governance Audits Management and Standards Committee note the general work completed today of the internal audit Q1 report, 9th of May, 2024 to the 30th of June, 2020. And there are no high priority findings. Right. Enjoyable. Item number 13, external audit 2020/21, 2021. Good evening, Chair. You've got the update paper in front of you. It's not where we want it to be at this stage. I think the paper, I'll just pick out some key items out of the paper. So we continue to progress the work during July and August, towards the end of July. He informed us that he's going to get some, the Council is going to get some legal advice in the matter. So we're waiting in conclusion about legal advice, partners review, to make sure that the work that's on there is complete. As part of that process, we've identified some areas where we have follow-up queries on the work that we carried out previously. And I guess due to the length of time this audit's been going on, some of the people here that work on completion. And then the end of the process. So that work is in progress. We're meeting with the interim executive director of resources. Any questions? I have a number of questions, but I'll let members of the committee go first. OK, I mean, you said when you introduced your comments that it's not where we want to be, it's not where we want it to be for years now. You know, it not being where it's about, where it's wanting, it not being where we want it to be and moving it to somewhere that we want it to be are two entirely different things. And, you know, we have we haven't started the process of moving it. You've barely got the car keys out to move it. I have a list here that's been provided to me very helpfully by officers of a list of your outstanding queries, some of which really are quite mind boggling. You said that, you know, you've been making progress since July. Your query to us in July was Brookhill Nursery School's bank sort code. Which I gather we provided to you on the day has now been completed, so I'm hoping that that one's been done. But there's a series of other things here, which I just find astounding that you now need four years after you started doing this. There are requests for measurements for pot sizes. More stuff about bank accounts. You've asked us for audit committee minutes. Please provide minutes of the audit committee for the period September 2022 to July 2023. You were here for that. You were in the room. They're on the website. There's a recording. You know, this is pathetic. There are one or two items on the list which we have access to some of that information and we have corrected we have corrected that subsequently internally to make sure that we're only asking for information that's outstanding. OK, well. I honestly I don't know what to say. I mean, also, I know that there's a whole load of things coming on the 30th of September, which is a few days ago, in time to have some ready reasons to not have filed these for this meeting. I mean, how long how how give us a date, give us a date, tell us when you're going to sign this off. So when all of these smaller things are done, there's one piece of out there's one piece of outstanding work that needs doing fine. I accept that. But these other things should be done by now. All things that could have been dealt with over the last year that you've been coming here and telling me and my committee, oh, we're working on this. Oh, we're making progress on this. You could have asked for Brookhill Nursery School's sort code months ago. Years ago, in fact. Give us a date. As I've said, the backstop date that's been implemented by the government is the 13th of December. So all of these orders will be signed off by the 13th of December. That's a promise. That's cast in stone. But you are going to get everything done by the 13th of December. That's a requirement for the council to publish its accounts by the 13th of December. And we've got to complete our order between the meetings for that. Right. OK. You heard it here. We're going to minute it. And I'm sure in two years you could ask for the minutes. Chair, I think I will point out as part of that, we do have to consider what the form of the opinion will be as to whether that will be an unqualified opinion. A qualified opinion or a disclaimer opinion. And that we will have to make a decision over the course of the next month as to which area we're in, depending on where we get to on the pensions matter. Where we get to in terms of the outstanding information that we need to complete the order. Yeah. And for two whole years, those are going to be disclaimers, aren't they? Because. Right. OK. I think I've had my fill. Do members of the committee have any questions or expressions of exasperation? I'll go to Councillor Radcliffe and Councillor David. I mean, a noise might be better than a. But in terms of the statutory obligation. I take your point, but it's like being told you could have had their homework. You can scroll on it and have it and say you've done your homework. It's about doing a good job or as good a job as possible by the deadline. As much as to your point, then we can we have a qualified. You know, it's. I don't want to rehash what considering very eloquently said that if you're only getting sort codes, which we're getting stuff which are available on the Web site well down this line, doesn't give me a lot of faith. It's what? October about Christmas holidays, a couple of days of hangover for the Christmas bash. Are you really going to get a great job done if you don't have the basic. It just doesn't fill me with confidence. I mean, this evening we've talked so much about finance and information delayed and. This is what the audit is. I think the committee, you know, we've been shortchanged because the depth position and other matters that has arisen this evening would have been picked up. And most of the staff on the document are probably not here anymore. But it's just. You know, the continuous delay. I don't know what the value of the outcome would amount to. That's my take on this. I can only pay. I can only hope that we don't pay the same lack of alacrity and speed that you have handled our accounts unless anybody else has comments. They want to cancel the rise. Do you think if you'd included the same level of detail in your reports as you can of theirs that we might have come to some of these outstanding queries earlier? It's possible I wasn't here for the presentation of the feedback. OK, I'm going to take us to the recommendations on page 170. Committee note the audit progress and sector update number two committee provides any comments that they may have to make this matter. I think you know how we feel. I frankly think you've known how we feel for a year. And there's been so little progress. Outranged. Would we be able to change the recommendation to limited unsatisfactory progress? I take that that's agreed. Thank you. Right. Thank you. Right. We now turn to item number sorry. I've done the wrong recommendations. That was recommendations for that one was that the committee note the content of BDO's report on the progress towards a sign off. So I think I think Councilor Rose was seeking to amend that to lack of progress towards a sign off of the council's 2020/21 statement of accounts and up to. Limited and unsatisfactory. I will I will just take the vote again, just to be clear that that's the correct thing. Is that one agree? I think that's agreed. Thank you. Right. We now move on to the 2023/24 external audit progress report, which is from page 169 to 202. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you, Chair. So, yeah, you have a progress report. Obviously, you'll recall at the last meeting we presented value for money report. At this meeting, we have progress on the financial statements audit, which we commenced for 23/4 at the beginning of July. We've worked well with the finance team to to take forward the audit and this report. What we wanted to do for you is sort of set out a detailed analysis really of where we've got to. The report reflects where we are on issues identified, samples that have been processed, samples that are still with the council and some of the naughty matters that are coming up as part of the audit. And clearly. It is no surprise that obviously, given given the sort of history going into this audit, there's going to be things identified because time moves on or requirements move on, accounting requirements move on. So so there's obviously quite a few things we've identified and we're working with officers on. We've also identified we've also done some work on IT controls as well, which we've we've reported here in terms of our assessment there. So it's quite a comprehensive report, I think, in terms of where we are in terms of the way forward. There's a couple of key key things to consider. The next meeting of this committee, which I believe is towards the end of November. We will produce our audit findings report, which is a detailed report. And then we also have to play into into account the twenty three four backstop, which the recent legislation has committed everyone to the end of February twenty, twenty five, which is actually brought forward from the previous government's consultation, which had the end of May twenty five. So we'll obviously have to consider with the council what the right what the right meeting is to close off the twenty three four audit in whatever form, because we obviously have to take into account of the completion of the video years audits and how that plays out into our work on areas such as opening balances. So that that is quite complicated technical sort of thing to consider. We'll bring we'll bring an assessment of what that looks like to you at the next meeting. I think these things have to be taken in context. I think we're actually making more progress on it than we are most of the jobs that we've taken on recently. They are new to Grant Thornton. And that's thanks to colleagues in the finance department for the support in that process. So happy to take any questions, chair, from members of the committee on our approach report. Right. Thank you very much. Can I just check you're you're going to do things on time. You're going to complete your audit on time, right? So with your audit finance report to the next meeting, we have to sign this audit off by the statutory deadline of twenty eight for February. That's that's a requirement on us. I think the issue the only issue really about that is is not that we'll whether we'll finish by then because we have to. It will be the nature of our audit opinion, how much assurance we're able to give. I think we're able because we've done a lot of work that there will be some more assurance and councils had recently on recent years. But what that that the level of assurance is still open to the completion of audit procedures and our reflection on on the opening balances position. OK. And presumably you've got Brookhill Nursery School sort code. You're not going to come back to us in four years and ask that vital piece of information, right? Comment on that one. OK, excellent. Right. Does anybody else have any? You're welcome to if you want to. If you don't want to, that's fine. I don't really think I'm going to add to either Karen. All of said, although I did hear Paul Sager significant issue, I just thought when the members noticed he'd said that or just a question, I wouldn't mind asking Councillors chair for you. I'm going to go to the recommendations on page one hundred and seventy. The number one committee note the audit progress and sector update number two that the committee provides any comments that they may have done so. I think that's agreed. Right. We move on to item number 50, the committee forward work programme. I think we're going to have a very short discussion about this. I think we're looking for things to add to the programme. So do members have anything they want to add? I saw Councillor Rose first. Then I'll go to Councillor. All right. Oh, yeah. Just to whether we could consider bringing forward an audit of the Treasury management systems for next committee. We know that request, I think starts on the fourth of November, so maybe we talk to him about that when he starts. I think that's a very, very good idea. Councillor Radford had a comment earlier about the capital programme. What do you want to put on the forward work programme potentially? I mean, I guess just to get Kevin's point about what what kind of steps we're taking on to kind of get that within the balance. But if you balance, which and also particularly about how it might interact with management, so maybe there's an overlap out there in terms of how it's incorporated in terms of how is the repressures from the Treasury management actually sort of reflected in the decision making in terms of. May I ask if Councillor David would be happy with the report from the Adults Financial Sustainability Board, where they've been doing the deep dives that you've suggested we bring back feedback of what they've been doing there. There's an awful lot of statistics and work that's been done on that board. I think answers your question, but I wanted to make sure you're OK with that. It is definitely to do with Barnet. It's 100 percent Barnet. OK, thank you. I think that's the forward work programme discussed. There are no other urgent items that the chair decides are urgent. Oh, sorry. Just on item 15, I do need to advise the committee that the dates of the 2025 municipal year be moved and that the committee will be canvassed about their availability for dates in the next municipal year. Sorry. Oh, well, this year my birthday fell on the committee date. I couldn't I couldn't think of a finer group of people to celebrate one's birthday with. We did. We had cake. Yeah. There are no other urgent items, so I declare the meeting. Thank you all very much.

Transcript

My name is Councillor Arjun Mitra and I'm the chair of the Governance, Audit, Risk Management and Standards Committee. Welcome to all members of the committee. Please note that this meeting is being webcast by the Council and those present may be picked up in recordings. Can I please remind members and officers to use the microphone when speaking by pressing the middle speaker icon. Item number one, absence of members, if any. Richard Harbord, the independent member, has sent his apologies. I haven't had any general apologies from anyone else. Minutes of the previous meeting are on pages 5 to 18. We have an action which is on page 15, the computer reboots. So page one of the previous meeting, the quarterly risks report and the Open Door Homes acquisition programme. The committee were advised that officers would report back at the next meeting what the impact would be on the open response that we've had. The responses in the papers on page 15 was the quarterly risks report committee requested an update on the Barn Next Zero challenge, which was launched in November last year. Last, the information we circulated to members via email of successful applicants and what their ideas were saying that the sustainability team would be reprofiling the carbon offset fund risk and requested further information be provided to the next meeting. The next block was on page four, which is the internal exceptions recommendations. The committee held a discussion regarding legacy debts, noted that there were processes in place of debt recovery policies, legacy debts. The meeting was advised that final figure of the written-off debt would be detailed in the future report. The members also noted that action points relating to the cyber security, third-party security and awareness audit would be completed by 2024 and that the committee would receive a report detailing progress and the processes being devised to undertake this would be fed back at the next committee. So all of the responses are in the minutes there. I won't read the ones. I'll take too much time. The final one on the treasury management, I think we are awaiting today's committee if that's okay with members. Okay. That being the case, can I take it that members of the committee approved the minutes of the previous meeting held on the 23rd of July? Is that approved? Agreed. Thank you. Item number three. Do any members have anything they wish to declare? Item number four, dispensations by the monitoring officer, there are none. Item number five, deputations, there are none. Item number six, petitions, there are none. Item number seven, public questions and comments, there are none. Our anniversary today. Thank you, Chet. Today marks one year of Hamas' terror attack on the communities of southern Israel. Remember the 1,200 victims murdered in their homes, communities and at the Nova music festival. 250 taken hostage to Gaza and the thousands of innocent lives torn apart. We also remember the huge loss of innocent life that has occurred in the years since in Israel, Gaza and now Lebanon. At the party conference, I was privileged to meet the families of two of the over 100 hostages that remain in Hamas' captivity in Gaza. This includes a British citizen. I reaffirm the overwhelming rallying call to bring them all home now. Please to the committee to hold a minute's silence as we reflect on the deep pain of the past year for many of our residents, our twin town of Ramadan and to unite in our shared hope for a peaceful future. Thank you. Thank you very much. Councillor Rose. Apologies to Councillor Grover, I had meant to share that with you before the meeting. Right. Move on to items before we dive into questions. Thank you, Elaine. Hi, everybody. So this is the call to one report for 24/25. So the report presents an overview of the risks across the organisation. It focuses on the strategic risks, which are all the cross cutting risks that we manage and all the high level service risks. And so we're managing 202 risks currently across the organisation. And there are 22 high level risks that we focused on in the report and provided some more detailed information in there. More than happy to take questions on individual risks. I may have to take those questions away and feedback the answers. So bear with me. I'm happy to do that. Thank you very much. Do members of the committee have questions on this item? Councillor Grover, I know Councillor Rose does. Thank you, Chair. I just I'm kind of looking at the it's the introductory paragraphs and obviously one of the risks that are highlighted that is highlighted as being of zero risk. Elaine, do you want to take that? Let me just bring up the risk description and I'll explain it to you. Hold on one moment. Does anybody have the actual risk reference to have? Make it easy to find it. It is. Is it S.T.R. 031 that you're looking for? That might be it. No, not that one. 31. Hold on. Looking at 13. Yes, so that the actual description of the risk is about ensuring we get the necessary funds for the sustainability programme. So, yeah, it's it's the whole of the sustainability programme. So there is a question mark of getting the funds to fund the full sustainability programme. Yeah. So the risk itself is the inability to raise the funds for that programme. And what is the total amount of funding required for that programme? That I would have to take away and find out the answer to that. I don't have that information. I think it will have been I when you asked the question, I do remember reading it somewhere, but I could not remember off the top of my head. Do you have any follow up questions or any further questions? OK. Can I go to Councillor Rose, please? Thank you. On page 27 under health and safety, there's a section on latent effects identified in the build quality throughout the Colindale office. I was reassured to read that it's safe for us not asking our staff to work in unsafe environments. I was deeply concerned that a new building that the council is using and owns, I believe, has such serious defects. I want to know how we are trying to fix that, if that affects the value of the property and what we intend on doing it. Before I go to officers, Councillor Radford has a follow up point to that. Is there any way of recovering some costs associated with the fact that probably it wasn't our fault that it has latent defects as well? We have a response that might be helpful. This isn't my area, my service area, but I am aware of the issue in the building. And I've got some notes from Chris Smith, who's the assistant director for this area. So we're in dispute with a company that constructed the building. We've already sent them a letter of claim for compensation, pressing for them to remediate some of the defects. But we're also working to identify if there's any other defects that may not be immediately visible. So we've got the totality of what the issues are before we kind of proceed. So we're conducting some intrusive surveys and some further surveys ourselves. Our intention is to claim all costs back from the developer. They will likely contest some of that. We think it will be a long disputed commercial negotiation and meetings are ongoing at the moment. So I guess if you want any further information, I could ask Chris Smith to circulate that to the committee. Yes. I think updates that have come through to directors group, I think it's been going on for a very long time. Maybe I can add to that. Presumably, I mean, most of the time there's multiple projects which builders work with in a particular location. Slightly concerned that we may have found some defects that maybe other people might be unaware of. Do we know if there are other buildings, either for us or other people, which this builder's done? I'm thinking about like if you think about the rack scandal, right? It doesn't just affect one school. You know, I'm just kind of should we be worried that this isn't just the Collinsdale offices, I guess is mine. I'll pass that through to Chris and ask him to include that information in a briefing. OK, thank you. Does anybody else have any questions? All right. Yeah, go ahead. And then we'll go back to Council. I've got a few sporadic ones here. That's right on resource pressures affecting. What's it say? The second it's on page twenty six. And it is about resource pressures affecting service delivery and income collection for parking. I'm aware certainly in my ward, and I think this is kind of a wider problem, that there's been actually a rise in intimidation of our wardens, which might be affecting kind of essentially being able to tickets and collecting money on that. Could someone kind of report back on kind of if what reports we have got about intimidation of our wardens, whether that is affecting actually recovery and issuing of tickets and then recovering income from people? Obviously, we've had to have some joint patrols. That's clearly not sustainable way of doing things. Question around that sort of pause in between my questions. I think I don't think we'll have that information to hand, but I think we'll make a note of that request. Ask that to be put on our new action for next time. Thank you. And then probably from the minor to the micro to the macro, in terms of the Brent Cross program. You sort of talked a bit about last time round about what if interest rates were to rise and sort of curious as well, if we're to follow the Bank of England's projections for income, interest rates to come down. What does that actually look like in terms of the economics, I suppose, of Brent Cross, because that seems to be a sort of ongoing risk. It's interesting to look at it in the other direction potentially as well, because we're talking about affordability. It seems like what we've seen in the States, if the UK follows at all, we're hoping we're looking for interest rates drops rather than rising. I'm just wondering about how much cushion that provides us. I don't know whether you've done that analysis as part of the over 5 percent part. But we haven't. But it's a really good point. We probably should take that one away as well. Have a look at that. David's online may be able to add something over to David. Or do we need to take that one away? Yeah, I think we need to take that one away, Kevin. Thank you. Turning to adult social care, we talked about pressures obviously there. Do we know what other boroughs are? I mean, I guess my questions are, maybe this could be a request, I suppose, is are we actively asking other boroughs what everyone is having trouble with adult social care? Everyone has cost pressures. Feels like if we're doing our own homework, when we could be cribbing other peoples, this is a wasted opportunity. Is there sort of best practice we can learn from in terms of spending some time in Dagenham, in Enfield, in wherever, to try and work out how they're redesigning their adult social care program and potentially maybe if there is a kind of audit of the current program which could come back, that might be useful as well. What we're planning to do in terms of stopping these pressures in adult social care? I think I can try and answer that initially and then Kevin can give you a proper answer. The short answer is yes, there is always a lot of best practice sharing across the sector. We are not alone in being the only borough in London that has had a substantial increase in adult social care costs. As Councillor Radford well knows, these are really difficult costs to control because they are statutory expenditure. We know that cases are getting a lot more complex across the board, but in terms of a bit more detail about what the council is specifically doing, I think he wanted to come in on this. I was simply going to talk about the macro position across London which might interest Councillor Radford and I think if you want, we do have some steps. We're obviously not a service delivery committee so not all the relevant offices will be. I'm going to go back to Councillor Grove and then Councillor David. Just a brief one. So the risk rating in relation to business continuity is reduced, which is obviously good. How often do you have tabletop exercises to test those? When was the last time you had one? General business continuity exercises or cyber? Either. They tend to be cyber related these days, don't they? Most of them. One of the actions that came out of the internal audit into business continuity was to develop a more intensive training plan. That's in progress at the moment. We've got a much more update on business continuity. So that hasn't such an exercise taken place in the past six months or not? There's various kind of smaller exercises that would have taken place. I'm not sure if it's exactly the last six months, but I know it was this year. And that's really how the exercise for business continuity at the moment, because rather than kind of organisation, it's like what would happen if going through your plans step by step, you can do it on a desktop exercise. So there has been smaller cyber IT exercises and there's been a group exercises that take place in the borough as well. I would obviously I'm not an expert, but I would suggest that that's a gap in the reason preparedness. Just down the kind of councils IT operations. So, you know, that that that that's a fairly standard thing that most big organisations do. And that sounds like it's a bit of a gap in our preparedness. Yeah. And we have had a desktop exercise this year with senior officers and it was identified. I think that's a very timely comment, actually. My workplace has been a serious cyber attack on TFL calls. It wasn't for additional. Well, and also you tend to learn quite a lot through these exercises as well, which is which is kind of the point of having them. It's actually going to have all of these plans sitting somewhere, but it's actually when you go through the exercise that you learn something. Or even when you actually have a real life scenario, that's actually when you learn more than anything else, but testing is quite important. It's a very good point. Very well. Thanks. I've got two questions. And the first one is to do with the healthcare. I wonder if it's time that we do a kind of deep dive ourselves to see. Yeah, of money because the second one is looking at. Page 23. The strategic risks finance has got 68. Kind of obviously, and then statutory 76. Are they kind of related or are they just. Very high. I think on the first point. Yes, there is a lot of work that is going on at the council to reduce costs. We now have a cabinet member for finance whose job it is to make sure all of these other cabinet colleagues are drilling down on costs. I gather that there are very regular meetings to discuss. To discuss cost and managing the budget. I will hand over to Kevin. Again, to give you a more coherent answer. I'm sure I can do that chair, but that's pretty coherent. It was the point I mentioned. We haven't done an internal audit recently. I mean, that could be considered, of course, but there is a specific city, but I certainly wouldn't. If you're interested in getting those steps here and committee, we could good luck to bring some back. Right. Okay. Thank you, Councillor David. The current permission of the committee. I'd like to turn to the recommendations on page 19, which are committee note the status of the council's strategic and high level 15 plus service risks. Including the control mitigations in place to manage these risks. Is that agreed? That's agreed. Thank you. Turning to item nine, the treasury management performance update Q1 2024/25, which starts on page 37. We've got David here virtually to make that item and introduce it. Thank you. Thank you, chair. As Councillor Mitchell has said, this is a quarterly treasury report. It's part of a series of reports that is provided through GAMS. It documents the treasury activity over the period 1st of April 2024 to the 30th of June 2024. I have it starting on page 43. Oh, sorry, it's 37, but the page, perhaps where the report really starts is page 43, which is an appendix, which is on Barnet, Barnet format. If you could jump to that. I'm just going to note some of the points in the report, key points in the report, and then we can take questions. So over that quarter, 10 million of new was undertaken. That was taken very early in the quarter around 2nd of April. We'd actually applied for that borrowing in the previous financial year. Since then, over the summer, the council has borrowed a further 65 million, but that would be captured in the Q2 report that will be forthcoming. We are expecting to need to borrow significantly more than this to cover refinancing. There's about 100 million pounds of refinancing that's needed this year and also to fulfil the capital programme and use of reserves. Money market funds are around 100 million, and then we have a further 70 million held as gilts, which are there to back the Brent Cross obligations. It's not surprised we have quite healthy money market fund balances this time of year. That was as expected. We are expecting that balance to wind down quite significantly over the next few months. I wanted just to raise a couple of points with the committee, firstly on page 46, which is section one. And what we've done on this page is we've just highlighted how the capital programme has, as reported, has changed since when we set our treasury management strategy statement, which we did based on the February 2024 capital programme information. So this information is based on the information that was provided to a cabinet in July. So you can see there, the line I'm most focused on is the borrowing line, where you see it had increased by 38.47 million. Now, I've had these numbers come through from the September cabinet information. And what we've seen there is actually these numbers will slip back again. And so it's not unusual that during the year there will be some variance within the information that's provided to us regarding the capital programme. But I think it is a is a key priority that we can get, I guess, more accurate forecast, because it does impact our strategic planning. The next section I just wanted to draw your particular attention to was on page 49, which is the capital financing budget. Now, there's a table on there which I think it'd just be worth walking through, if you can see that. So in twenty three, twenty four, the net capital financing budget was around twelve and a half million and the out turn last year by the actual expenditure relative to that budget. Thirteen point seven million. That was a one point two million pressure. Now, we've been working quite hard to work through what the impact on the capital financing budget will be this year. Now, the budget was increased from twelve point five million to around thirteen point three million. And an additional two million was added to the budget from contingency, taking the budget to thirteen point three. And we've worked through some provisional numbers. And so there's numbers we've given there and we're given a range. So even if there was no further borrowing undertaken, we project that the out turn would be nineteen point two million, which would be a pressure of around four million. And we've, as I explained, already taken seventy five million of borrowing. So that's a scenario that cannot be, cannot hold. If we was to fulfil the borrowing requirements as set out in the twenty four, twenty five, July twenty, twenty four capital programme sent to Canada. And that pressure would build to eight million. And so there's a quite large focus on this. And in the report, we've suggested from a Treasury perspective, some of the actions which need to be looked at to sort of help mitigate this. And there is a lot of work, particularly around the capital programme. Kevin can can can feed back on the work being done there. But also on the debtors position, there's quite a lot of money, frankly owed to the council. And obviously, if we can recover that cash, that will impel the Treasury position because we'll have more cash and therefore won't need to borrow as much. So that was my update. And just to take questions. OK. In terms of. Yeah, so it's so I have some I have some very high level analysis on this. It is quite a complex picture, so it's not it's just like five debtors owing us large monies. There are there are some debtors that are of significant sounds, particularly from the NHS. But perhaps Kevin can comment on that. But he does feed right the way through down the chain. So from the numbers I've seen, there's quite a lot of debtors just related to quite a significant number of small debtors that add up to a large number. And I'm not I'm not trying to dodge the question here, but it's not it's not the Treasury team's role to sort of oversee the debtors position. It's just obviously we've got keen interest on this because I think the feeling is that there is a is a large debtors position sort of evolving. I think if I can be helpful, that information is provided to the overview. So I don't want to proceed if you do want to go through the list. I think it says usually the biggest debtor the council has is a Fremantle NHS trust. Not entirely sure why, but it just always has been a big one. You know, I'm not necessarily asking for names of organizations. I was actually just trying to understand if it was council taxpayers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to make a general point to kick off with and alluded to it, but I want to say a little strongly so. Management of the council's budget goes through the cabinet, the cabinet manage things like capital financing costs and debt management and those sorts of things. So David's report is about Treasury management. I just wanted to make that clear to everybody. So don't think that David and others should be answering for the debt position or indeed capital financing position of the council because he clearly should not. His report is around Treasury management. I'm not saying there aren't very important questions to ask about that. There are. A number of them will go through the cabinet itself. We can bring a debt position. I've got, as the CFO at the moment of the council, a number of areas that I'm concerned about, and the extent of the council's debt is one. And the debt management procedures and practices in place is one that David has mentioned here, the capital financing budget overspend. And that's feeding into the overall out-term forecast, the revenue overspend that we're forecasting at the moment, order one and potentially increasing two. So there are a number of significant factors in there. We've already mentioned one tonight, that's the adult services overspend position, debt management. In fact, there are three of the very large areas that we are concerned about in terms of bringing back into a balanced position going forward. So we can bring debts to you. So there's some negotiation going on there with them about trying to level that up with both organizations. I think I've accepted that we need to regularly, and the debt one, as David says, sorry, the capital financing position, the borrowing position is one that there's a question in there. Is this linked to which I'd like to answer as well as I know that is that I've asked cabinet members to accept suggestion from me. I've got Councillor Radford, then Councillor Rose, then Councillor David. Just to respond quickly to I guess what Kevin just said, I think it was this committee last time that I was like, normally you set a budget and then operate within it, and that should include the capital budget as much. So as much as I think having that kind of emergency cap on, I think there might be a kind of a broader policy even in fat times as well as lean times that maybe could be worked up. Can I ask, in terms of how the capital program interacts with the treasury management function and how that is being integrated into one piece, is that something which could be kind of looked at and brought to the next committee? Because I think that's something which is sort of in terms of both like modeling for the rest of it too, because it's something which seems to come up a lot, but it'd be good to just see it in one place and have a discussion just about that if possible. And then I've got one other question which maybe I can ask at the same time, which is about the refinancing. Maybe this is more to David. So obviously we spent money backed by cash and then we've had to externalize, but we spent the money with cash when we had zero percent interest rates. We now don't have zero percent interest rates. In terms of the rates at which we're refinancing these things, what was the previous rate and what would the rate now be in terms of the shift in terms of the money actually going out of the bank account because of the difference in the interest rate? Do you want me to take that one first or Kevin, did you want to respond to the first one? Yeah, OK. So it's a really good question, the refinancing. Actually, last year, so last fiscal year, 20, 23, 24, towards the end of the year, we borrowed for what I call working capital purposes, i.e. we borrowed what we felt we needed for the capital program, but we still were short on cash. So we had a liquidity issue. And so we took a decision last year to borrow one year, which is the shortest time we can borrow under PWLB. PWLB allowed you to borrow for periods of up to one year or up to 50 years, sorry, down to one year. Now, last year, so that effectively meant we was borrowing at the base rates at the time. So we took that borrowing about five, five and a half percent. That would need to be refinanced in February and March this year, which will likely be a significantly lower rate. We won't need to re-borrow all of that money if we can recover cash because we think we needed to borrow that money largely because of our, potentially because of our debtor's position. But we've worked it through and I think there will be a saving to the capital financing cost centre because we will be refinancing that at a lower rate this year relative to last year. And that accounts for about 85 million. And then there's around 15 million of general purpose borrowing. And we broadly took our average rate year last year was broadly about three percent. So we will be refinancing that at a slightly higher rate than what we took that borrowing at, if that answers your question. On the point about who manages the capital program, the capital financing budget, that's very clearly on treasury management, the fact that the treasury management team undertake the borrowing and we hold the capital financing budget within finance, within my area of responsibility for the future. I guess I maybe to be more precise, I guess one of my questions is if you're looking at a capital project in the private sector, you think about what was my weighted cost of capital, that would include the cost which you're borrowing from in terms of the bank, whatever it might be. Considering there's a bit of a murky picture around what are we going to wind up borrowing when in terms of whether it's minimum revenue provisions, whether it's what interest rates are going to be, et cetera, et cetera, is the idea that that doesn't take place for individual capital? Or what do we use in terms of modelling it for individual capital projects? Or do we just say let's ignore that and then put in a kind of a hurdle at the macro position so you need to clear it by so much regardless of how much we try and anticipate what the borrowing cost would be? Does that make more sense? Does it make it more relevant to the treasury management side of things too? It makes more sense, but it's very different in the public sector and how we do things and you might be somewhat surprised at the way it's done. But in ideal terms, there's a review process for every capital project that comes forward. And a key, key question around that is how it links to the council's priorities and where the council wants to go ahead with and it meets the priorities of the council plan. And then therein is the question around funding. And how it should be is that the funding source comes with that and if we're going to, if we need to borrow, prudential borrowing for the project, then that needs to be identified. And the revenue implications, if there are any of any capital project, needs to go forward as part of the overall budget-setting process that goes then to cabinet onto full council. And then treasury management team will be divided with, because the council would have agreed a budget, capital financing costs, cost of borrowing, and under normal circumstances, if it's gone through the normal methodology, then that budget will be sufficient to meet those revenue costs based on the annual program. I hope that's clear enough. I'll be happy to discuss more with you outside if you want to. I fear that's sadly something we both might say yes to. But yeah, maybe that would be good at some point. I think maybe just to summarize, I think what would help me in terms of I think when I speak to residents and other things about it is given the financial position we find ourselves in over the last two or three years, what added things have we done in terms of around governance and risks and whatever when it comes to the capital project, when it comes to liquidity buffers, when it comes to all of this stuff in order to try and get ourselves in shape, both in terms of like the governance and the rules and the stuff we're doing around it to make sure we're being rigorous. Because I know we're talking about different bits and pieces, but I struggle to recall all of them at once, if that makes sense. So maybe there's just a kind of a list of since 2022, we've taken the following steps would just be really helpful to try and convey that to residents that we're having due regard, I suppose. I don't know if that's possible. I'd be very grateful if so. Do we want to take that as a paper to come to the committee at another time? Yes, absolutely. It's a challenge that we can certainly have a go. I think we're taking a note of that request. Maybe let's come back to that when we look at the forward programme. OK, Councillor Rose and then Councillor David. Two slightly less technical questions. The first one, on page 49, we're talking about potentially for longer term spend, for example, youth centres and preventative health. The second point was a more strategic question in terms of, you know. The first go David and then I'll follow up. Yes, so on the first question regarding the strategies, I must stress on the paper, these are saying these are the things that could be done to help soften the impact on the capital financing cost centre. So we're not saying that we should just sell all our assets, but if we did, then there would be a process that would be undertaken to sort of test the viability of that. So Kevin might want to explain more around what that process is, but there definitely would be a process. And this is really just to highlight some of the options that might be available on the second. Yeah, I mean, there are assets we have where, frankly, there might be best to sell them. There might be worth more for us to be sold than to be kept, just like any organisation will consider selling capital assets. So it doesn't always necessarily have to be in a financially distressed situation. I think there's always a review of the capital assets we have and there will be a strategy around that. On the second point regarding the strategic objectives. I mean, Kevin and I and more broadly have considered these at length. You raised this question and called over clearly. I think it's a very good point that perhaps in the next version of this, there should be just a sort of a comment on the effectiveness of what we've achieved, not just saying what they are. I think that would be a good idea. I think it's for us perhaps to consider internally whether there needs to be an independent view of that, because otherwise it's almost like we're marking our own homework. I think it's a good point to raise that we should just set the strategic objectives, we should monitor how successful they've been. Yeah, I fully agree with that. Yeah, really important that David emphasised, and I know you know this, but just some of the things that we could do, we've got to address that and maybe other things we're considering and it's pretty difficult for us to deliver as well. Thank you very much. Councillor David for the last question. So we definitely, it is under consideration whether we should make an interest charge to the NHS on outstanding debt. We don't do that at the moment. Then they don't charge us either. So there's a lot of negotiation involved. Okay, I'm going to take us to recommendations page 38, which are that the committee notes the Treasury management update for quarter one defined by the Treasury team for 24/25 and beyond. Note that the strategic priorities identified cut across the council's operations and so required by the Treasury management team. Is that noted? That's noted. Thank you very much. Move on to item number 10, 2023/4, corporate complaints, local government and social care ombudsman, LGSCO. Hi, everyone. The council is required to report the corporate complaints performance, LGSCO performance of the arms committee. This is a report of the monitoring officer. This report covers the period 1st of April 2023 to 31st of March 2024. And it includes a summary of our performance in relation to different stages of our corporate complaints and also social care ombudsman. Every July, the LGSCO issues. These are intended to further improve things. Therefore, they're often critical. Our last report highlighted a number of issues, including some delays in the inquiries. This year, they've highlighted the improvements in the processes. The annual report, I think it tells a story of our focus on improvements last year. And that is about people who use council services. And there are some positive things linked to that as well. So we've done quite an in-depth analysis of the data itself, just so that we don't take you on face value. It gives the reduced number of complaints, proportional complaints that help us reduce the escalations that have reduced as well. And fewer complaints that are escalated to the ombudsman and held by the ombudsman. The improvements we've made, including the accessibility of the service, the complaints process itself, as well as information about how to make a complaint, efficiency in how we deal with what we do with learning from complaints to improve services, and also the monitoring of our performance throughout the year through our new dashboards. In terms of key trends, I'll just touch on a few numbers. I imagine the reduced number of complaints has come down by 422 in comparison to last year. The lower proportion of them are upheld, so it's 37%. And they're all indicating that we are dealing with complaints earlier in the process to avoid costly escalations and further dissatisfaction by ourselves as well. The annual cost of compensation, obviously, in addition to the cost of investigating and resolving complaints, there are the compensations that have been paid. So they vary from year to year because you might have one or two complaints where you get higher value compensations paid. In 2023-24, it's gone down by 82%. OK. Does anybody have any questions? I always think it's difficult to judge a complaint sometimes, given the case of complaints coming down. I do think we always need to be vigilant about that, though, you know, the bilateral pressures that are on the council. I'm not expecting us to get as good a return next year. We will continue to work on it and do the best we can, keeping close. So far, we have seen recent trends, but we've got 12 complaints upheld by LGSE. I'm slightly intrigued as to why Street Scene has some slightly lopsided numbers in terms of very few partially upheld cases. Why that's so low in comparison to. Is it just the Street Scene cases are so transparently easy to know the potholes? Yes. So with Street Scene, we do find that they're quite cut and dried cases. We did they collected the bin or not. So it can be one or the other way. It tends to be partially upheld cases. It can be a mix of a staffing issue mixed within that. And obviously, we're unable to advise on that. And so we put in that issue and find that way. That being the case, I'd love to see some case studies on the partially upheld cases. They're probably the most interesting of the lot. Do any other committee have any questions? Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for your report. Recommendations are on page 58. Number one, to note and consider the 2023/2024 corporate complaints and the LGSEO's annual letter, which is Appendix A. Number two, to note and consider the LGSEO's annual letter to the council relevant lessons and actions, which are Appendices. B and C, I got that right. Number three, to note and agree the actions taken by the council to remedy issues, improve performance, which I think we have done in that brief discussion. Can I take those all as noted? Those are all agreed unanimously. Thank you. Right. My favourite item on tonight's agenda. Number 11, complaints about councillors. April 23 to March 24. Thank you, Chair. This is the annual report about complaints about councillors in the current annual report to the Garms Committee. So if I just tell you a bit about how we deal with complaints against elected members, what happens is the complaint comes into me. I then consult the councillor concerned, and I always consult the independent person. We've got five independent persons. They're all appointed by council and they will all refer it to informal group, which is standard working group, who I can take the matter to for further advice. And just to note as well that there are very few sanctions under the Localism Act, we can ask the councillor to apology sanctions under the Arrangements Localism Act. So for that period, we had six complaints. And you'll see there that one of which the resident didn't provide any details. I don't know if anyone has any questions for me. I'm very pleased that none of these have been about. I'm also pleased that Councillor Rhys, just a technical question about whether group WIPs are given not necessarily details, but an awareness that the group should be doing to consider the upstandings of their members. My practice is to let the group leader know about the complaint, but not the group WIPs, but I'm happy to change that practice. Well, I would have to cross that bridge. Who is the group WIP? OK, well, I think we've all been remarkably well made this year. I don't have the cake. Unless there are any further questions or serious points, recommendations on page 150, very serious. May wish to complain about me. I don't know. Recommendations on page 115 for the committee, note the complaints about Councillors. I think that's noted. Thank you. Right. Item number 12, internal on the exception recommendations report and Q1 progress report, 9th of May, 2024 to the 30th of June, 2020. Thank you, Chair. Committee, so you may recall at the last meeting when we bought the Q4 internal audit report, we actually took the report right up to the 8th of May. So the timing slightly after this Q1 report, because we've gone from 9th of May through to 30th of June, so much shorter period. But to take us back in line with quarterly reporting. And we did that last time because we had a number of audits that were still ongoing that we wanted to include the findings in the annual opinion. So just to remind members why we're slightly out on timeframe. So for this period, 9th of May to 30th of June, which concludes Q1, we have six reviews, which is 36% of our annual audit plan, which is above target of 25%. We have no limited or no assurance reports issued in this quarter. The details, summary details of the audits we've undertaken are included within the report, predominantly scores audits. There are a number of audits in progress, so I think we'll see quite a lot of outcomes coming through to Q2, which will be presented in November. So the substance of this report is really the follow-up work that we've undertaken in the internal audit team. So it's been quite a busy time. There's been quite a lot of prior priority and medium priority actions arising from previous audits that we followed up, and we followed up all of those. We put a breakdown in the report of what the outcomes of those are, and we put the schedule in there of what they are as well. So 26 actions were implemented, which is 47%, and 27 were in progress, which is 48%, and we've got three that were not yet implemented, so 5%. It's probably worth saying at this point that a substantive number of the actions were due to the business continuity audit. So you'll remember that we had that come, I think, two times ago, two meetings ago, and there were a number of high-priority actions within that. It shows you in there that most of them are implemented or on track, and there's going to be a much more detailed review of where we are with those, which PwC is just undertaking at the moment, which will be reported at the next meeting. But just to go to your earlier, Councillor Grover, it is documented within the schedule that there is a recommendation within that audit which talks about management oversight activities, exercising, and training. And that is marked as on track, and we'll get a fuller update for you next time. So that's really quite a brief update from internal audit for this quarter. Our new head of internal audit will be in post on the 4th of November, and he'll be here at the next meeting to present internal audit report. So we've appointed Adam Karmson, who is currently our PwC audit manager, who has got some history with Barnet, so is well aware of, you know, all of the work that we've been doing, and will take up the reins as head of internal audit on the 4th of November. And then online, we've got Ian Spears, who's been with the Council many years, and he is currently covering the vacant internal audit manager post. Have you got any really hard or technical questions for me? I'm going to defer to Ian this evening. But yeah, that's really what I wanted to update this evening. You know, I think we're going to let her know this as well. Right. Does anybody have any questions? Excellent, fine. Well, I'm going to go straight to page 120, where the recommendations are. Number one, that the Governance Audits Management and Standards Committee note the general work completed today of the internal audit Q1 report, 9th of May, 2024 to the 30th of June, 2020. And there are no high priority findings. Right. Enjoyable. Item number 13, external audit 2020/21, 2021. Good evening, Chair. You've got the update paper in front of you. It's not where we want it to be at this stage. I think the paper, I'll just pick out some key items out of the paper. So we continue to progress the work during July and August, towards the end of July. He informed us that he's going to get some, the Council is going to get some legal advice in the matter. So we're waiting in conclusion about legal advice, partners review, to make sure that the work that's on there is complete. As part of that process, we've identified some areas where we have follow-up queries on the work that we carried out previously. And I guess due to the length of time this audit's been going on, some of the people here that work on completion. And then the end of the process. So that work is in progress. We're meeting with the interim executive director of resources. Any questions? I have a number of questions, but I'll let members of the committee go first. OK, I mean, you said when you introduced your comments that it's not where we want to be, it's not where we want it to be for years now. You know, it not being where it's about, where it's wanting, it not being where we want it to be and moving it to somewhere that we want it to be are two entirely different things. And, you know, we have we haven't started the process of moving it. You've barely got the car keys out to move it. I have a list here that's been provided to me very helpfully by officers of a list of your outstanding queries, some of which really are quite mind boggling. You said that, you know, you've been making progress since July. Your query to us in July was Brookhill Nursery School's bank sort code. Which I gather we provided to you on the day has now been completed, so I'm hoping that that one's been done. But there's a series of other things here, which I just find astounding that you now need four years after you started doing this. There are requests for measurements for pot sizes. More stuff about bank accounts. You've asked us for audit committee minutes. Please provide minutes of the audit committee for the period September 2022 to July 2023. You were here for that. You were in the room. They're on the website. There's a recording. You know, this is pathetic. There are one or two items on the list which we have access to some of that information and we have corrected we have corrected that subsequently internally to make sure that we're only asking for information that's outstanding. OK, well. I honestly I don't know what to say. I mean, also, I know that there's a whole load of things coming on the 30th of September, which is a few days ago, in time to have some ready reasons to not have filed these for this meeting. I mean, how long how how give us a date, give us a date, tell us when you're going to sign this off. So when all of these smaller things are done, there's one piece of out there's one piece of outstanding work that needs doing fine. I accept that. But these other things should be done by now. All things that could have been dealt with over the last year that you've been coming here and telling me and my committee, oh, we're working on this. Oh, we're making progress on this. You could have asked for Brookhill Nursery School's sort code months ago. Years ago, in fact. Give us a date. As I've said, the backstop date that's been implemented by the government is the 13th of December. So all of these orders will be signed off by the 13th of December. That's a promise. That's cast in stone. But you are going to get everything done by the 13th of December. That's a requirement for the council to publish its accounts by the 13th of December. And we've got to complete our order between the meetings for that. Right. OK. You heard it here. We're going to minute it. And I'm sure in two years you could ask for the minutes. Chair, I think I will point out as part of that, we do have to consider what the form of the opinion will be as to whether that will be an unqualified opinion. A qualified opinion or a disclaimer opinion. And that we will have to make a decision over the course of the next month as to which area we're in, depending on where we get to on the pensions matter. Where we get to in terms of the outstanding information that we need to complete the order. Yeah. And for two whole years, those are going to be disclaimers, aren't they? Because. Right. OK. I think I've had my fill. Do members of the committee have any questions or expressions of exasperation? I'll go to Councillor Radcliffe and Councillor David. I mean, a noise might be better than a. But in terms of the statutory obligation. I take your point, but it's like being told you could have had their homework. You can scroll on it and have it and say you've done your homework. It's about doing a good job or as good a job as possible by the deadline. As much as to your point, then we can we have a qualified. You know, it's. I don't want to rehash what considering very eloquently said that if you're only getting sort codes, which we're getting stuff which are available on the Web site well down this line, doesn't give me a lot of faith. It's what? October about Christmas holidays, a couple of days of hangover for the Christmas bash. Are you really going to get a great job done if you don't have the basic. It just doesn't fill me with confidence. I mean, this evening we've talked so much about finance and information delayed and. This is what the audit is. I think the committee, you know, we've been shortchanged because the depth position and other matters that has arisen this evening would have been picked up. And most of the staff on the document are probably not here anymore. But it's just. You know, the continuous delay. I don't know what the value of the outcome would amount to. That's my take on this. I can only pay. I can only hope that we don't pay the same lack of alacrity and speed that you have handled our accounts unless anybody else has comments. They want to cancel the rise. Do you think if you'd included the same level of detail in your reports as you can of theirs that we might have come to some of these outstanding queries earlier? It's possible I wasn't here for the presentation of the feedback. OK, I'm going to take us to the recommendations on page 170. Committee note the audit progress and sector update number two committee provides any comments that they may have to make this matter. I think you know how we feel. I frankly think you've known how we feel for a year. And there's been so little progress. Outranged. Would we be able to change the recommendation to limited unsatisfactory progress? I take that that's agreed. Thank you. Right. Thank you. Right. We now turn to item number sorry. I've done the wrong recommendations. That was recommendations for that one was that the committee note the content of BDO's report on the progress towards a sign off. So I think I think Councilor Rose was seeking to amend that to lack of progress towards a sign off of the council's 2020/21 statement of accounts and up to. Limited and unsatisfactory. I will I will just take the vote again, just to be clear that that's the correct thing. Is that one agree? I think that's agreed. Thank you. Right. We now move on to the 2023/24 external audit progress report, which is from page 169 to 202. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you, Chair. So, yeah, you have a progress report. Obviously, you'll recall at the last meeting we presented value for money report. At this meeting, we have progress on the financial statements audit, which we commenced for 23/4 at the beginning of July. We've worked well with the finance team to to take forward the audit and this report. What we wanted to do for you is sort of set out a detailed analysis really of where we've got to. The report reflects where we are on issues identified, samples that have been processed, samples that are still with the council and some of the naughty matters that are coming up as part of the audit. And clearly. It is no surprise that obviously, given given the sort of history going into this audit, there's going to be things identified because time moves on or requirements move on, accounting requirements move on. So so there's obviously quite a few things we've identified and we're working with officers on. We've also identified we've also done some work on IT controls as well, which we've we've reported here in terms of our assessment there. So it's quite a comprehensive report, I think, in terms of where we are in terms of the way forward. There's a couple of key key things to consider. The next meeting of this committee, which I believe is towards the end of November. We will produce our audit findings report, which is a detailed report. And then we also have to play into into account the twenty three four backstop, which the recent legislation has committed everyone to the end of February twenty, twenty five, which is actually brought forward from the previous government's consultation, which had the end of May twenty five. So we'll obviously have to consider with the council what the right what the right meeting is to close off the twenty three four audit in whatever form, because we obviously have to take into account of the completion of the video years audits and how that plays out into our work on areas such as opening balances. So that that is quite complicated technical sort of thing to consider. We'll bring we'll bring an assessment of what that looks like to you at the next meeting. I think these things have to be taken in context. I think we're actually making more progress on it than we are most of the jobs that we've taken on recently. They are new to Grant Thornton. And that's thanks to colleagues in the finance department for the support in that process. So happy to take any questions, chair, from members of the committee on our approach report. Right. Thank you very much. Can I just check you're you're going to do things on time. You're going to complete your audit on time, right? So with your audit finance report to the next meeting, we have to sign this audit off by the statutory deadline of twenty eight for February. That's that's a requirement on us. I think the issue the only issue really about that is is not that we'll whether we'll finish by then because we have to. It will be the nature of our audit opinion, how much assurance we're able to give. I think we're able because we've done a lot of work that there will be some more assurance and councils had recently on recent years. But what that that the level of assurance is still open to the completion of audit procedures and our reflection on on the opening balances position. OK. And presumably you've got Brookhill Nursery School sort code. You're not going to come back to us in four years and ask that vital piece of information, right? Comment on that one. OK, excellent. Right. Does anybody else have any? You're welcome to if you want to. If you don't want to, that's fine. I don't really think I'm going to add to either Karen. All of said, although I did hear Paul Sager significant issue, I just thought when the members noticed he'd said that or just a question, I wouldn't mind asking Councillors chair for you. I'm going to go to the recommendations on page one hundred and seventy. The number one committee note the audit progress and sector update number two that the committee provides any comments that they may have done so. I think that's agreed. Right. We move on to item number 50, the committee forward work programme. I think we're going to have a very short discussion about this. I think we're looking for things to add to the programme. So do members have anything they want to add? I saw Councillor Rose first. Then I'll go to Councillor. All right. Oh, yeah. Just to whether we could consider bringing forward an audit of the Treasury management systems for next committee. We know that request, I think starts on the fourth of November, so maybe we talk to him about that when he starts. I think that's a very, very good idea. Councillor Radford had a comment earlier about the capital programme. What do you want to put on the forward work programme potentially? I mean, I guess just to get Kevin's point about what what kind of steps we're taking on to kind of get that within the balance. But if you balance, which and also particularly about how it might interact with management, so maybe there's an overlap out there in terms of how it's incorporated in terms of how is the repressures from the Treasury management actually sort of reflected in the decision making in terms of. May I ask if Councillor David would be happy with the report from the Adults Financial Sustainability Board, where they've been doing the deep dives that you've suggested we bring back feedback of what they've been doing there. There's an awful lot of statistics and work that's been done on that board. I think answers your question, but I wanted to make sure you're OK with that. It is definitely to do with Barnet. It's 100 percent Barnet. OK, thank you. I think that's the forward work programme discussed. There are no other urgent items that the chair decides are urgent. Oh, sorry. Just on item 15, I do need to advise the committee that the dates of the 2025 municipal year be moved and that the committee will be canvassed about their availability for dates in the next municipal year. Sorry. Oh, well, this year my birthday fell on the committee date. I couldn't I couldn't think of a finer group of people to celebrate one's birthday with. We did. We had cake. Yeah. There are no other urgent items, so I declare the meeting. Thank you all very much.

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