Five significant governance issues have been found at Southampton City Council over the last financial year.

The draft annual governance statement for 2023/24 outlined a series of gaps or weaknesses in the local authority’s system of rules, practices and processes.

Members of the council’s audit committee were talked through the issues by risk and insurance manager Peter Rogers.

The significant concerns identified related to:

  • Finance and financial management
  • Resourcing of the transformation plan and a potential reliance on key staff
  • An action from an informal peer review for a workshop on decision-making not being completed yet
  • Business continuity arrangements, with more work from home and reliance on IT systems since Covid
  • The rollout and embedding of the new business planning process.

Mr Rogers outlined the plans in place for the current financial year to address these issues.

Summarising the purpose of the annual governance statement, he said: “The intention is it represents an accurate review of the council’s corporate governance arrangements that were in place for that period and formally identifies any significant gaps or weaknesses in those arrangements.”

In relation to the decision-making workshops, Mr Rogers said this had been deferred from last year due to the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny’s (CfGS) work programme being refocussed to support other authorities.

The workshops from the CfGS and Local Government Association are now due to take place over autumn.

Cllr Pat Evemy asked how officers were going to show that the actions taken had an impact.

Mr Rogers said: “The challenge with governance is it does comprise a lot of things coming together. It is a lot of different strategies, actions, reports.

“A lot of different things come together to create our governance environment.

“It is not a single document, which is why it has referenced different things, and we have to rely on the individual committees and groups to be monitoring it and having their own governance arrangements within their own strictures. That’s how it should work.”

Mr Rogers told councillors the draft annual governance statement is likely to be updated and evolve before it is in its final version and signed off.