Issue - meetings

Report of the Cabinet Member Corporate Services

Resolved that the Corporate Risk Register as at 3 May 2011 be noted with no further risks identified and the proposals for the new regime were noted. 

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The Cabinet Member Corporate Services introduced the report which had been circulated with the agenda. The council had acknowledged that members need to be aware of the corporate risks which may impact on the council and the decisions it takes.  The risk register had been updated by the Senior Leadership Team at their meeting on 3 May 2011 and set out progress against mitigating actions.

He highlighted that under the current system the risk register reviewed at Cabinet and by the scrutiny committee was often out of date. Therefore he was proposing a new regime which would overcome this.  Cabinet Members would continue to review risks in their regular meetings with their relevant directors. The public overview of the risk register would be carried out by the Economy and Business Improvement Overview and Scrutiny Committee (EBI O&S) and any significant comments from that scrutiny would be reported to the next meeting of the Cabinet.  It would then be the role of Cabinet to determine if appropriate actions had been put in place to address the concerns raised by the scrutiny committee. The Cabinet Member intended to highlight the new regime with the council’s auditors at the Audit Committee on Wednesday but he was confident they would be satisfied with the new proposals.    

He provided the following additional updates on specific risks commented on by the EBI O&S committee and he assured the Cabinet that all the risks identified were now being managed responsibly.

• Risk 1 - At that time there had been huge pressure on payroll resources but since then contingency plans had been put in place to reduce the risk score from 20 to 12.
• Risk 5 – a significant amount of work has already been done to ensure the council has robust business continuity plans for all its services but the team was aware of a weakness in the testing of ICT systems. A major exercise is being planned in the summer to test the recovery of 25 major systems which would include ICT and the service teams and recovery of the GO systems hosted by Cheltenham.
• Risk 9 – the dependence between the waste project and GO had been identified and further work is being done and was addressed in the report for agenda item 11.
• Risk 23 – acknowledged that an ‘emerging’ car parking strategy was too vague and deadlines for finalising the strategy need to be included. This was now timetabled for a Cabinet report in October.
• Risk 32 – at the time, Gloucestershire airport was in the final stages of completing the deal regarding Blenheim House which was delaying the project.  This deal has now been concluded satisfactorily and so work at the airport could now get started. This had reduced the score from 8 to 6. 

Resolved that the Corporate Risk Register as at 3 May 2011 be noted with no further risks identified and the proposals for the new regime were noted.