The report of the Head of Policy and Governance is attached.

Contact: Barry Hanson 07990 086409

The Committee received the report of the Head of Policy and Governance which provided members with an update of work undertaken by Internal Audit in the final two and a half months of the 2024/25 Internal Audit Plan.

He reported that 96% of the revised plan had been completed (set out in Appendix A, Table 1), which was in line with previous deliver records (95% in 2023/24 and 94% in 2022/23).  The 11 final reports (listed at paragraph 8.5 of the report) contained 109 recommendations, one of which was fundamental.  He queried whether the Committee wished to seek any further assurances on any limited or unsatisfactory areas.

A query was raised as to whether the decrease in higher level assurances and the corresponding increase in lower assurance levels was cause for concern.  In response, the Head of Policy and Governance explained that all of the assurances fed into his year end opinion but that it was hard to pinpoint any insight for this at the current time.  Concern was raised that there appeared to be some cultural issues or something else happening within the organisation which meant they weren’t getting these assurances.  In response, the Head of Policy and Governance accepted that it had been a challenging year for the Internal Audit team due to different pressures within the organisation including the financial challenges, the transformation objectives, which had led to a lot of change, and which put a lot of pressure on the team when competing with those priorities in delivering the Internal Audit work.

It was commented that the number of audit days had reduced over the last four years from 2000 days to 1200 days which reflected some of the resource issues that had been happening.  A query was then raised as to whether the outstanding audits were at a higher or lower level than a year ago.  In response, the Internal Audit Manager informed the Committee that there was no significant difference, and in fact it was possibly marginally better as last year they had a particularly challenging external contractor delivering work for them that was severely delayed. 

She went on to explain that the Council’s priority had been financial survivability, there had been the process of voluntary redundancy, transformational change along with limited staff which could be a contributing factor however, Internal Audit could not directly improve the control environment, that was for the organisation to do, but what it could do, was to highlight any control weaknesses, report them to the Audit Committee and provide that challenge to the rest of the organisation, but it was acknowledged that things were not working as well as they would like. 

The Chairman suggested that the Committee receive further reports on Agency and Consultancy Staff, which received an unsatisfactory assurance level, and Children’s Social Care Budget Management which had received a limited assurance.

RESOLVED:

To note the contents of the report and to receive further reports to a future meeting on Agency and Consultancy Staff, and Children’s Social Care Budget Management.