To seek the views of the committee as to whether the draft annual governance statement 2018/19 properly reflects the risk environment the council is operating in and the appropriateness of any actions required to improve it.

The head of corporate governance presented the report and highlighted:

·         That the annual governance statement was the first draft;

·         As the year end was 31 March 2019, there are a number of pieces of information which are not yet available.  

·         The draft statement will be updated before it is published at the end of May 2019 which is in line with statutory deadlines. 

·         The document was a high level statement of the council’s arrangement and the assessment of the current performance against it. 

·         The committee will have an opportunity to comment on the document at its July 2019 before it is published. 

·         An action plan would form part of the statement which would be presented to the July meeting and a progress report would be presented at the January 2020 meeting. 

Following a query from a member of the committee, it was confirmed that any changes to the arrangements for dealing with code of conduct complaints should form part of a future report.   It was noted that a working group had recently made recommendations to the monitoring officer for changes to these arrangements.   The head of corporate governance reported that since October 2018 to 19 March 2019, there had been no instances of code of conduct complaints being rejected without the views of the independent person being sought.   As stated in the annual governance statement, this issue was considered to be low risk. 

A member of the committee suggested that the lack of consultation on the capital programme should be looked at as part of the internal audit work programme.  

Following a query from a member of the committee, it was confirmed that each time internal audit undertake a review, they do look at the strategies, policies relevant to that area and do make recommendations.    

RESOLVED

That the committee notes the draft annual governance statement at appendix 1.