Agenda item

Report by the Audit Partnership Manager

The Audit Partnership Manager introduced the report as circulated with the agenda. 

The report formed part of changes being introduced in order that the Audit Committee could monitor performance over the year, so that there would be no surprises at the time of the Annual Internal Audit Report.

He confirmed that the partnership had expanded to include West Oxfordshire with effect from the 1 November 2010 and was now called Audit Cotswolds.

Members were referred to item 3.2 of the covering report, a summary of the audit reviews concluded in the last quarter, from which there were no limited or low assurances.

He highlighted the audit of ‘Environment and Sustainability Management’, for which he had invited the Assistant Director Operations to provide more detail later in the meeting.

Item 3.4 detailed some of the other work Audit Cotswolds had undertaken in that time.

Appendix 1 (page 97 onwards), the Internal Audit Monitoring Report itself, contained a lot of detail, which he was hoping to reduce over time.

In relation to Performance Management (pages 98 and 99), he advised that this would ordinarily be measured against the national indicators, but these had been abandoned by the coalition government. 

The KPMG Public Interest Report follow-up had been subject to substantial internal audit and there were no areas of concern with the exception of ‘risk management and related training’, given that very little had been achieved.  It was established that risk management at CBC was undergoing some necessary changes, which had been compounded by budget restraints and staffing shortages. 

Councillor Massey commented that he felt the monitoring report contained the right amount of detail and would disagree that this needed to be scaled down.

The following responses were given to questions from members of the committee;

• The last paragraph of item 4.2 on page 95 did end abruptly, this was a mistake that had been rectified on the website and should have concluded…manage maternity absence.
• There was no assurance for the Depot Rationalization audit as this had been a mid point health check with no issues arising.
• The comments by Audit to SLT in response to the management response to the result of the Performance Management audit had been agreed.  SLT accepted that they had been fair comments and that performance data would need to be robust.

The Assistant Director Operations was not sure of the reasons behind the Audit Committee requesting the audit of ‘Environmental and Sustainability Management’ but was glad that they had.  He had found the process challenging but at the same time invigorating, it was approached in a constructive way and had involved a range of Officers and Members.

It had highlighted the authorities progress in carbon reduction and Member engagement and involvement with the Internal Carbon Reduction Group and an Overview and Scrutiny Working Group having been established. 

Some areas requiring more work, were, the various strategies which referred to sustainability and needed to be reviewed and joined up.   

Longer term sustainable measures were another issue.  In recent years the focus had been on short term gains, for which he felt he couldn’t apologise but accepted that there was a need to consider long term measures too.

Also raised, were questions about how sustainability linked with commissioning.  The Climate Change and Sustainability Officer, had done some really good work in creating the ‘Commissioning for the Council’s Community Objectives and Equalities assessment tool’.  The purpose of the assessment tool was to ensure that services were delivered in a way in which maximised the positive contribution and didn’t have a detrimental effect on the community objectives and outcomes, of which, enhancing and protecting the environment was one. 

Moving forward, he accepted that consideration needed to be given to the membership of the Internal Carbon Reduction Group, which currently included CBH, but would need to be widened. 

The following responses were given to questions from members of the committee;

• The budget would take account of projects with a longer term payback, the period had not been redefined, though, Officers were yet to resolve the issue of projects with a payback period longer than 10 years.
• The Climate Change and Green Space Strategies remained relevant documents, the issues were the action plans associated with those documents.  These needed to more realistic, with reduced numbers of actions, rather than discounting the strategies.