Decision details

The Strategic Director: Resources and Mr Harvey from the Southern Internal Audit Partnership presented this item.

Mr Harvey updated the meeting that 54% of Audits were now finalised and a further eight (from 13) audit reviews were at or near draft report stage and would be published in the next week.  This gave confidence that the remaining audits would be completed and would inform the annual internal audit report and opinion.

The Strategic Director: Resources and Corporate Business Manager answered questions from Members as summarised below:

i.          The signing of leases by the Hampshire Cultural Trust was progressing and they had now appointed a new member of staff who would take responsibility for completion of the leases.

ii.         The overdue actions on Information Governance related to implementation of the Records Management Policy for the Council, which included a review of the Council’s retention schedule for documents.  As this involved automatic deletion of records that were older than set in the retention schedule, the Council was being cautious so as not to lose key documents in any disposal.

iii.        The eight pending actions for Business Continuity would be removed when the review of business critical functions took place.  This was imminent, and the actions would be completed before the next meeting of the Committee.

iv.        Officers responded to questions relating to Appendix 3 – LGA Peer Challenge – Follow up Action Plan, No1 – Develop evidence based approach to the Council’s understanding of the views and needs of the whole community – and how could it be demonstrated that resident’s views were actioned.  It was stated that Council did have a long tradition in responding to consultations and endeavoured to keep its website up to date by publishing the results of surveys and any action taken thereafter.  There was the Citizens Hub, the Residents Survey and the Young Persons Survey to inform the Council Strategy and it did take time to populate these pages on the website.  The Corporate Business Manager would also give this matter further consideration.

Councillor Ashton also referred to the ‘You said, We did’ initiative and communication involved on the output from consultation on the major projects, for example on the new Sport and Leisure Centre.  A solution to the points raised could be improved indexing on the website to indicate where to search for the outputs from consultation.

RESOLVED:

That the content of the Report and the progress against the Internal Audit Plan and Annual Governance Statement as set out in Appendices 1 and 2 of the Report be noted.