To approve the updated financial procedure rules attached at appendix 1 and contract procedure rules at appendix 5. The rules were last updated and approved by the committee in November 2018.

The chief finance officer presented the report and highlighted the following:

·         There were a number of changes and there were documents attached to the report which showed the tracked changes [appendices 2 and 6]

·         The changes do pick up the arrangements for partnerships. 

·         There was a move from budget holders to project managers / capital programme director for items in the capital programme.    For smaller projects, project managers would be approving expenditure and for larger projects the capital programme manager would approve. 

·         For the revenue side of the council, there were budget holders in place as they run the day to day. 

Following queries from members of the committee, the following points were confirmed:

·         The corporate and directorate risk registers would be amended to reflect the mitigating factors in connection with these changes. 

·         Grant Thornton would be looking at these arrangements as part of their audit

·         An interim capital programme director had been appointed.

·         There is a multi-layered approached and, if necessary, there will be further changes. 

·         The summary page for the financial procedure rules did not include everything.

·         Portfolio holder and cabinet member were the same.

·         New capital schemes are signed off by council but there will be a cabinet / cabinet member report before the spend is incurred.  The reason for this was that a cabinet member could sign off a report if it sat within their portfolio area and cabinet would sign off it was across 2 or more portfolio areas. 

·         The petty cash and imprest elements of the financial procedure rules would be reviewed.

·         Other organisations could join a framework agreement and this included sole traders or a set of providers.    A framework enabled a mini tendering process to be run which made it a simpler procurement process.  

·         That a major project could be audited against the 13 recommendations of the Blue School House audits in order to provide assurance to the committee that these recommendations had been embedded and implemented.   The chief finance officer did not believe this was unreasonable given the visibility of the audit. 

·         That exemptions and waivers were signed off by the solicitor to the council.   This was an acknowledgement that the risk had been taken on board and was reflected in the report. 

·         With regard to exceeding a cost centre estimate, the director can notify the chief finance officer if they consider it to be significant.   It was acknowledged that there were no parameters for what was significant as it was a judgement but the chief finance officer agreed to provide clarity on what would be considered significant. 

·         The council could improve visibility of contracts which local providers could tender for.   A large proportion of the council spend was local but more could be done.   The cabinet member for commissioning, procurement and assets was keen to further promote this.

·         The council’s policy was pay invoices within 30 days and the chief finance officer agreed to provide details to the committee.

RESOLVED that:

(a)  The contract procedure rules and finance procedure rules  ...  view the full minutes text for item 421