12
The Committee received report ES/2022 of the Cabinet Member with responsibility for Resources and Value for Money and the Assistant Cabinet Member for Resources and Value for Money.
Councillor Langdon-Morris stated that three new risks had been added to the register, political risk, business continuity and backlog of audits. The Chair of the Audit and Governance Committee and the relevant Cabinet Members were now invited to horizon scanning sessions when risks were discussed and identified. There were twenty seven risks on the register, four red, eighteen amber and five green.
Councillor Speca asked what was the risk of leaving risks as they were, and of not having identified future risks, and whether we understood whether these mitigating actions were sufficient to change the status of the risk and make them less likely to occur, or were they actions that were being taken as a result of the risk existing and there would be little chance of changing their score. The Head of Digital, Programme Management and Customer Services stated this had been taken into account, and some target risk scores matched the current risk score as there would be little chance of any action changing these. The target actions column summarised additional actions that could be taken to further reduce the risk in the future.
Councillor Speca stated he was unclear on whether the mitigating or targeting actions were sufficient, and asked for more information on how these actions had been decided upon and whether they were actually effective. The Chief Executive stated that capturing active risk management was a difficult thing to do, and the risk register was being discussed constantly by the leadership team. In the public sector quite a lot of risk had to be tolerated and some issues could not be eliminated. This was an ongoing discussion, but that the six monthly reports were not going to capture discussions and changes that were happening weekly.
Councillor Speca commented that some actions (for example failure to deliver against carbon neutral targets), seemed over ambitious considering the actions that were noted. There needed to be a connection between how an action would resulted in that outcome. The Chief Executive stated that discussions did consider whether the Council could mitigate impact or likelihood, and sometimes only one of these could be dealt with.
Councillor Speca stated that there was a lot of information in the report, but it was still unclear why certain risks had been given a certain score and why certain actions were being taken. The Chair stated that he understood that there might be some missing information, but was unsure how this additional information could be presented without additional workload. The Performance and Risk Officer stated that the Risk Management Strategy report which the Committee received annually did provide some of this information on how risks were identified.
The Chair asked a report be received at the next meeting so the Committee could understand the risk indicators that were used and how actions and risk scores were arrived at.
The Chair stated that the Corporate Risk Management Update did need to include some more information on the thought processes behind the scores to help Councillors who did not deal with this on a day to day basis understand the report.
On the proposal of Councillor Reeves, seconded by Councillor Back it was
RESOLVED
That Audit and Governance Committee:
1. Members noted and commented upon the corporate strategic risks from the Council’s current Corporate Risk Register (CRR) which was governed and monitored by the Corporate Leadership Team (CLT).