Agenda item

This report provides an overview of the council’s performance at the end of the financial year with respect to its ongoing annual plan 2024/25 actions, key performance indicators, corporate risks, committee risks, and annual governance statement actions.

The Committee received a report that provided an overview of the council’s performance at the end of the financial year with respect to its ongoing annual plan 2024/25 actions, key performance indicators, corporate risks, and annual governance statement actions.

There were a number of detailed member questions about the risk register items to which a response would be sought after the meeting.  The questions can be found in the appendix to these minutes.

The following matters were considered:

a)             Officers at Committee: The Assistant Director for Corporate Services explained that officers present at a committee may not be service experts so councillors’ questions may not receive an answer at committee. He therefore urged councillors where possible to provide questions in advance of the meeting to ensure an answer could be given at the meeting. A Member disagreed and stated that officers should be in attendance to answer questions and wanted assurance that his questions would receive an answer and also wanted those responses to be made public. The Assistant Director for Corporate Services stated that as issues covered the whole council it was not proportionate or reasonable to expect all heads of service to be here to answer questions which may or may not materialise. He also stated that Democratic Services had a good record of capturing questions to be responded to.

b)             Risk DST10 - failing to respond to complaints effectively: A Member pointed out that this was a red risk at 12, and the response was tolerate. The risk had not changed. In the ombudsman report later in the agenda it stated that this council was the second worst, for complaints per 100,000 capita in Surrey. Going forward, the Members stated it would be useful to understand how this will be mitigated given we are second in Surrey for upheld complaints per 100,000 capita.

c)             PCN Response Rates: A Member asked what was being done to prevent the 37% drop in response rates due to staff being deployed to end of year tasks and asked why this was treated as an unexpected reason for slippage instead of a predictable staffing bottleneck.  He asked what cross-training or temporary resourcing measures were planned to prevent this drop in Q4 next year. The Assistant Director for Corporate Services responded that this part of the Council not only deals with penalty charge notice appeals but with a lot of other things such as parking permits and garden waste renewals etcetera which happen at a particular time of the year. So, it's not unexpected. The question to ask is should we resource for that time of the year to increase capacity but with our financial pressures, we chose not to do that. What we do is to prioritise those things which have to happen, like car park renewals. He also pointed out that even at the 10 working days this considerably better than what the statutory requirement was. So, the council were far more than its statutory obligation in terms of still dealing with these tasks in the way it does. As soon as end of year period is over, anything that is a backlog will be cleared.

d)             HC9 and HC13 – homelessness budget overspend: A member asked why the residual score of 16 for the homelessness budget overspend was the same as the inherent risk score despite a long list of controls.  The Assistant Director for Corporate Services explained that the risk remained unchanged at 16 as it was a reflection of the homelessness rising numbers over the past 2-3 years, the additional activities and staff mitigation measures but despite that the numbers were not getting better.  If they were, then there would be a lower residual risk.

Another Member spoke about the work that had been done to try to reduce numbers of homelessness including strategies and action plan which apart from modular homes was either green or blue yet the numbers and costs were rising exponentially. He went on to say that the financial outturn allocation of funding for temporary accommodation was significantly short of the money spent last year and therefore questioned whether a balanced budget was set in February.

Following consideration, the Committee resolved to (4 for, 1 against and 2 abstentions):

(1)       Note and comment on the performance and risk information located at Appendix 1.