Agenda item

Report by Director of Law and Governance

The Audit & Governance Committee has the responsibility of approving the Council’s Annual Governance Statement (AGS) each year. 

Local authorities are required to prepare an AGS to be transparent about their compliance with good governance principles.  This includes reporting on how they have monitored and evaluated the effectiveness of their governance arrangements in the previous year and setting out any planned changes in the coming period.

The Audit & Governance Committee is RECOMMENDED to approve the Annual Governance Statement 2022/23, subject to the Monitoring Officer making any necessary amendments in the light of comments made by the Committee, after consultation with the Leader of the Council, the Chief Executive, and the Section 151 officer.

The Monitoring Officer, Anita Bradley, presented the Annual Governance Statement 2022/23 to the Committee. The Monitoring Officer highlighted the key differences taken to the approach this year. As a result of the new Chief Executive being appointed, the opportunity was taken for the Strategic Leadership Team to assure themselves of each service area and their responsibilities. A new section called Service Issues, had been brought forward. The Committee were reminded that the document was a backward look up to 31 March 2023 and would be presented with the Statement of Accounts in January 2024. The Monitoring Officer reassured the Committee that a very thorough assurance process had been followed in the Council and the action plan produced as a result, which would feed into the actions for 2023/24. The action plan was an opportunity to have an honest look of what needed to be addressed to do even better.

The following points were raised by the Committee:

·       For future years, could the points be numbered, as they had for 2023/24. This would be very useful for comparing the actions going forward.

·       The actions within the Strategic Plan would be monitored as these were part of the framework of the governance of the organisation. The performance against the priorities and the performance indicators was always reported in the business management and monitoring report.

·       That the entire process was Officer led with no input from Members except for sign off by the Leader. The members of the Council’s Governance Assurance Group were only Officers too, headed by the Monitoring Officer and invited Officers from across the Council to answer questions when required. In terms of challenge of whether the corrects things were being looked at, it was always part of the governance processes and ensuring that any signs were spotted, and due diligence was undertaken before entering any new contracts.

·       The Annual Governance Statement was a key document in demonstrating that the Council was complying with the best value duty and in understanding areas of weaknesses that needed to be addressed in terms of governance. The government had recently published a new best value standards and intervention guidance document stressing the importance of the Annual Governance Statement.

·       That a lot of what was in the Annual Governance Statement was already being done and it seemed that Procurement on new highways on track, had been extremely poor but there was confidence that improvements would be seen in the new contract from the lessons learnt.

·       That there had been a substantial increase in complaints which was likely to continue. Mitigations had been put into place to address the problem as it was impacted the Council. A lot of work was being done in this area, picking up complaints at the earliest possible point and dealing with them fully as stage one complaints. A lot of work was being put into improving the quality of the contact with the public and the first response.

·       With respect to the FOI requests and the case management software, which was a module of the current complaints management system. The system was being used to capture and log all the requests and the stage they were at, in one central place. The number of FOI and Subject Access Requests had both increased in the last few years for all local authorities.

·       That the Capital Governance Team was at full capacity. The implementation of the governance that had been agreed was already in function but there was more to be done. The reporting from that was presented to Cabinet and was very finance focussed but the Team were working towards making it more about project deliverables and outcome based. Specifically, around the financial management code and in terms of services, benchmarking had been carried out to see if the Council were offering value for money. This was much more based around service comparison rather than social value and policy. The Senior Leadership Team were aware of all work being carried out and the Chief Executive had been briefed on the work. In terms of output, any recommendations would be presented to the Committee and then Council.

·       Value for Money (VfM) needed to be considered across the entire organisation.

·       That the HR policy review had major significance and was for the six main HR policies, considering the lessons learnt from working patterns, flexibility and the agile working policy and ensuring that the HR policies matched the workforce strategy.

·       Member oversight on the policies, could all the policies listed be back on the working group agenda as it would be good to have Member involvement and oversight.

·       Cherwell-Oxfordshire Decoupling Programme was the only one remaining and was being reviewed on an annual basis every Autumn.

·       The Committee commented that the new layout was very well presented but asked for an extra column for who was responsible for oversight, Cabinet, Committee or the Working Group.

Resolved: that the Audit & Governance Committee approved the Annual Governance Statement 2022/23, subject to the Monitoring Officer making any necessary amendments in the light of comments made by the Committee, after consultation with the Leader of the Council, the Chief Executive, and the Section 151 officer.