Issue - meetings

The report outlines the progress of the Council’s Internal Audit service against the approved Internal Audit Plan for 2024/25 from 1 April 2024.

[10 Minutes]

Upon the invitation of the Chair, the Audit Manager for Southern Internal Audit Partnership (SIAP), presented the report to the Committee. He highlighted Section 3, the Performance Dashboard, shown on page 78. This showed good progress on the audit plan for this year, and he was pleased to update that all reviews were now underway. He updated that the rolling programme on Section 7 (page 80) had moved on since the report had been prepared. Final reports had been issued on payroll and climate strategy and both assessed as reasonable. SIAP were working on the final report on community safety, which looked at anti-social behaviour, and was currently being agreed with officers. The draft report for neighbourhood services which focussed on the housing consumer standards, was due to be shared with key contacts very shortly. Fieldwork was underway for fees and charges in technical services and the IT disaster recover review was also being undertaken. The procurement review was at draft terms of reference stage, with fieldwork due to be undertaken in March. Taxi licencing would also be undertaken in March and responsive and emergency repairs was scheduled for March into April. The HR review would focus on equality, diversity and inclusion and was currently being scoped. He was confident that SIAP would be in a strong position to produce the annual report and opinion at the end of the year.

Action tracking was shown in Section 4, page 79 of the pack. SIAP remained comfortable as there were very few actions running over the target date, none of which were a high priority. Where actions were overdue, SIAP were satisfied for the reasons.

There were no questions from Members.

The Committee noted the report.