The Chief Internal Auditor, Mark Niblock, introduced his Annual report for 2017/18 which provided an overall opinion as to the effectiveness of the Council’s control environment. He directed the Committee’s attention to Sections 4 and 5 of the report that set out the Audit Outcomes for 2017/18 and the Effectiveness of Internal Audit for the same period. He stated that his overall opinion was that:

“On the basis of our programme of work last year, I can provide good assurance overall that there is a generally sound system of internal control, designed to meet the Council’s objectives, and controls are generally being applied consistently.

However some weaknesses in the design and inconsistent application of controls put the achievement of some key objectives at risk. The key governance, risk and internal control issues of which the Chief Internal Auditor was made aware during the year and that impact on the overall opinion are included within Sections 3 and 4 of this report.”

Responding to comments from Members, Mark Niblock stated that with regard to compliance with Council Policy on absence management and other corporate systems there had clearly been underlying issues experienced during the year and that action was now being taken by senior management to address these that included the Director of Finance and Investments (Section 151 officer) leading an officer group to identify and implement actions required to improve arrangements.

The Director of Finance and Investment, Shaer Halewood, then responded to further questions from Members and her comments included:

·  The Transformation programme was discussed in the Medium Term Financial Strategy report later in the agenda and had been reset. The Transformation savings of nearly £40m, some now wouldn’t be delivered in the way they were due to be delivered and a comprehensive process had been set in place to found out why this was.

·  A review of spending was now in place, not a ‘spending freeze’, this was nothing to do with not being able to balance the budget, the first quarter report had just been presented to Cabinet, which showed a slight overspend currently of £617,000 on a £301m budget for the year.

·  Plans were in place to mitigate this overspend and two spending panels were in place, one for vacancies and one for expenditure with three separate people on each, no spends had as yet been rejected but examples of best practice had been found which would lead to efficiencies across the Council.

·  There was a £37.8m programme for transformation savings over 3 years within five areas: Leisure and Cultural review due to be delivered in 2021; Access Wirral due to be delivered in 2021, some savings to come out earlier than that; Adult Social Care Integration due to be delivered over three years, fully on target and all these savings would be delivered; Children’s Services savings due to be delivered over three years were on target; Community Safety, the Safer Wirral Hub savings to be delivered by 2021 but hoping to deliver earlier, so the majority of these savings were on target.

·  For 2018/19 there was one off funding of £10m from capital receipts which the Government had enabled the Council to use for revenue funding as long as it could be demonstrated that it was transforming a service.

·  The re-basing of transformation savings was undertaken in February, 2017 at £37.8m and a report would be going to Cabinet in December, so a report could be brought back to this Committee on how the programme was being managed and the savings realised.

Resolved – That the report be noted.