To enable the committee to receive the closure report from SWAP in respect of the recommendations made in the audit findings report regarding the joint customer services hub capital report presented to the committee in September 2017.

The S151 officer and chief executive presented the report.

The committee expressed their concern and disappointment with the lack of progress as only 2 of the 13 recommendations from the original SWAP audit in 2017 had been completed.  

The chief executive explained that as soon as the issue of the overspend had been raised, a SWAP special investigation had been requested, an internal control improvement board had been established, a Local Government Association (LGA) corporate peer challenge had been arranged.  It was felt that this was the greatest scale of response.     The failures in the system had been identified and that the approach was to move the solutions forward. 

The committee appreciated that work was being undertaken to progress the recommendations, however there was a lack of progress on 11 out of 13 and this was concerning to the committee.    The following points were used as examples:

·         Agreeing to compensation events without the necessary paperwork being completed.

·         The chief executive providing only verbal agreement for the project control system to go live with no formal record this action.  

·         The testers of the project control system only being undertaken by directorate business users in recent months and that before this it had been done by the designer and the builder of the software. 

With regard to the project management system, it was noted that there was a project management plan in place.   The project management system had been developed and more than 50 projects had been loaded onto the system.   There had been some glitches in the system so the roll out was currently paused to ensure that the right system was being implemented. 

The chief executive assured the committee that this was an area which had the full attention of the senior management team to ensure that there was an effective and strong project management system in place.  

A member of the committee reiterated the disappointment with the report and asked what reassurance could the committee give members of the public that the systems and processes are in place.   The issue was that there was a culture of being able to ignore rules and the committee needed the confidence to be able to say that there are proper processes in place to prevent this from re-occurring in the future.     

It was agreed that SWAP would re-audit against the original recommendations and report back to the committee.   The S151 officer indicated that the actions should be completed by the end of the calendar year.  It was agreed that the full re-audit report would form part of the regular SWAP report and would not be a summary of the audit findings.   The S151 officer and SWAP to liaise as to ensure that the re-audit is prioritised in the work plan for early in quarter 4. 

The committee requested the following:

·         more detail when a recommendation was marked in progress as to level of progress being made. 

·         assurance that the gaps on page 34 of the agenda pack had been addressed and there are no longer gaps

RESOLVED

That the members working group is stood down and that this item is reverted to the full committee’s attention and a report brought to a committee meeting at the earliest opportunity.