Agenda item

To receive and agree the reports from the Committee Chairs.

These reports were deferred from the Council meeting held on 27 February 2025.

Council considered the Chairs’ reports which outlined the matters their Committees had considered since the last Council meeting.

The Chair of the Audit Committee, Councillor Button made the following statement:

It was agreed at the last audit committee meeting that I would inform members of the work of the audit committee over the last few months.  I had intended to deliver this update at the last council meeting, but as you know the meeting was cut short.

You will be aware that up until the end of last year, we had not received an external audit report since 2017/18 – that’s 6 years.  We are not alone in this; nationally there were nearly 1,000 outstanding audits of local authorities.  There are many reasons for this, including lack of qualified auditors, and the increased complexity of local authority accounts.  Also, in Spelthorne KPMG took a very long time to sign off the 2017/18 audit.  Last year the government enacted legislation to clear the backlog: so that all outstanding audits for years up to 2022/23 had to be completed by December last year. This has resulted in “disclaimed” opinions, which basically means that the auditor was unable to offer an opinion on the accounts, due to the lack of time they had to carry out a full audit. Obviously this is unsatisfactory, as we councillors rely on independent, external audit opinions to give us confidence in the annual accounts.  But it has cleared the backlog, allowing us to receive timely, full audits going forwards. We received 5 “disclaimed” opinions from the external auditor for the 5 years up to 2022/23. 

For the year 2023/24, our external auditor Grant Thornton has also issued a disclaimed opinion, but has produced an extensive annual audit report, which was published in January this year. This highlighted many issues: both at a detailed accounting level, and higher level issues regarding governance, financial stability and efficiency and effectiveness of the council. As a result of this report, officers and members of the audit committee created an action plan to address the issues, which will be reviewed and updated at every audit committee meeting going forward.  This has since been updated to include issues from other external reports, including the PIR from October 2022, the CIPFA report and the recent BVI report, as many of the issues appear in more than one of these reports, and tracking them is much easier if they are all in one report.

The committee was heartened to hear the finance team has already taken up many of the recommendations from the external audit report, including extra training and the appointment of a new chief accountant. The draft statement of accounts has been updated accordingly. The expectation is that the audit report for the year 2024/25 will be far shorter as most of the issues will have been addressed.  As a result of the improvements already being shown, the committee felt able to sign off the statement of accounts for 2023/24”.

Council resolved to note the statement of the Chair of the Audit Committee and the Chair’s reports.