Agenda item

James Deane introduced the report advising that this would be the last report in this format, as following the report that came to Cabinet in October last year and that in the next six weeks or so there will be a facilitated workshop with MAZARS, Cabinet, Leader of the Opposition and Chief Officer Group to repopulate the strategic risk register for the year ahead, following which the monitoring of that will be done by Audit Committee.

Councillor Griffiths enquired that if there were any challenges anywhere and it wasn’t brought to Cabinet by the Chief Finance Officer, how would they know about it.

Sally Marshall advised that Audit Committee would be providing the function of scrutiny of risk management (and that that was all that had changed) and it would then be presented to Cabinet. Risk management is an executive function and therefore is the responsibility of Cabinet.

Councillor Williams enquired as to whether they do that now.

James Deane advised that it was currently being done by the Finance & Resources Overview & Scrutiny.

Councillor Griffiths confirmed that they were looking to get this completed within the next 6 weeks.

James Deane advised that this was correct and that the issue was trying to get everyone together, he further added that they had looked at potentially the next Cabinet meeting or the next Portfolio Holder / COG, but that Councillor Tindall would need to be contacted to check on his availability.

Councillor G Sutton noted that C3 & M1 duplicate each other and enquired if this was something that would be looked at and addressed at the workshop.

Mark Gaynor advised that one was to do with failure to get the required amount of regeneration and the other is ensuring we make full use of the £30 million that we have made available, and that in due course these could be brought together in a single updated risk.

James Deane confirmed that was exactly what the workshop would be for.

Councillor Harden commented that at Scrutiny there doesn’t appear to be many question asked around the risk register, and went on to enquire that apart from the conversation at the workshop that will be had, is this going to try and make this a more user friendly document, that will encourage Scrutiny to ask more questions.

James Deane advised that he hoped the lack of scrutiny will be addressed by moving it to the Audit committee and went on to say that in terms of scrutiny of the operational risks, there is marginally more questioning. He went on to add that there is more Officers can do to stimulate further scrutiny, further adding that there is to be a meeting next week with the Assistant Directors who manage the Operational Risk Registers, and that he intends to go through the template with them and how they should be populating it to best effect.

For example, establishing the thread between Service objectives, the risks on the

register which threaten delivery of those objectives, how the controls put in place by officers reduce those risks, and how performance indicators that show how successful we have been with the risk prevention that we have put in place.  Once this is in place, then officers can present the risk registers more thoroughly, which will hopefully encourage more scrutiny.

Councillor Griffiths suggested that this needs to be part of the training schedule for new Councillors.

James Deane confirmed it would be.

The report was noted by Cabinet.