Issue - meetings

To provide an update on the Council’s current strategic risks (report of the Assistant Director – Governance enclosed).

Consideration was given to the report of the Assistant Director - Governance which provided an update on the Council’s current strategic risks across three registers for the Q4 period.

The Business Intelligence and Change Manager introduced the report and highlighted the following points:

• The report did not show any changes to the risk scoring from Q2 to Q4;
• A breakdown of the following risks was relayed:
  • For the Council’s Strategic Risks: 1 was in the Low category, 12 in the Medium and 9 in the High;
  • For the Partnership Risk Register: 5 were Medium and 3 High; and
  • For the Housing Revenue Account (HRA) Register: 3 were Medium and 10 High.
• There were no Critical Risk Levels reported for the period;
• The following context for the introduction of the HRA Risk Register was relayed to the Committee:
  • Since the introduction of legislation in 2024, the council’s Housing Landlord Service was required to meet the Regulator of Social Housing Consumer Standards;
  • To achieve this, a Housing Landlord Strategy and service improvement programme had been introduced;
  • As part of the governance review of this area, a new HRA Risk Register had been integrated into the Risk Reporting Framework; and
  • When inspected by the Regulator, the Council would need to demonstrate that the risks were being managed pro-actively and that Councillors had been made aware of the requirements.

Members considered the update and made the following comments:

• Members asked how quickly it was anticipated that high risk areas would achieve lower risk scores.
  • The Business Intelligence and Change Manager responded that each risk had been assessed against principal options and stated that:
    • Some risks, such as an IT risk, were deemed to be in the ‘Tolerate’ category as despite adequate mitigations being in place, any impact would usually be great; most high risk areas were graded within this category; and
    • A number of risks were in the ‘Treat’ category which indicated that risk mitigation work was in progress; although ‘Treat’ risks were not shown in the report, a breakdown would be provided to the Committee.

AGREED:

That the report and appendices be noted by the Governance and Audit Committee.