Issue - meetings

Report of the Chair of the Audit, Compliance and Governance Committee

The Chair of Audit, Compliance and Governance Committee introduced the report, which he felt provided a useful insight into the work of the committee, highlighting the excellent work of finance and audit colleagues, risk management, counter fraud and enforcement, cyber security and governance matters.  He thanked them and officers for their input to the report, and councillor colleagues for their contributions and questions. He explained that the apparent late sign-off of the 2022-23 and 2023-24 accounts was not due to any tardiness of the accounts team, but to a massive national external audit backlog – it will be a couple of years until this is back on track.

No vote was required, but he hoped that Members found the report useful, and was happy to help with any points of clarification.

A Member thanked the Chair of Audit, Compliance and Governance Committee for an excellent job in  chairing the committee over the last year, dealing with dense and technical material with focus and moving through the agendas efficiently.  Another Member of the committee commented that he always particularly enjoys the reports of the Counter Fraud and Enforcement Unit, who do a huge amount of work to prevent public money from being syphoned off, and also the cyber security team for their really important work.  He thanked the Chair and all the officers for their hard work.

As set out in the Recommendation, no vote was required but Council noted the Audit, Compliance and Governance Annual Report 2024-25