Agenda item

The purpose of this report is to provide members of the Audit Committee with an update on risk management across the Council.

Moira Mackie (Head of Internal Audit) introduced the report.  She said that following a review of the Risk Management Strategy 2025- 2028 in March 2025, the Corporate Risk Register was refreshed to rationalise and consolidate some of the risks.  Having enhanced the understanding of the directors on the need to identify and manage the risks, the Corporate Risk Register was updated and presented to the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) on 1 October (please see page 485 and the heat map), and the update was on-going.  She added that the Corporate Risk Register would be presented with identified mitigation actions as this was one of the external auditor’s improved recommendations.

Councillor Callum Nimmo asked about the latest development around the Fair Funding Reform 2026/27 as there had been a lot of speculations. Sukvinder Kalsi (Executive Director of Finance & Corporate Services) responded that local authorities would not be notified of the grant funding for the next three years until around late November when the Chancellor delivered her budget speech. Nevertheless, Sukvinder said he hoped the central government would take a pragmatic and considered view about the excellent services provided by this council and continue to incentivise the LBHF with the needed resources which would be very well-manged, as evidenced by the external auditor’s findings earlier. Hopefully, the eventual proposals would just be slight modification, and the Committee could discuss this further at the next meeting in December.

Councillor Rowan Ree (Cabinet Member for Finance and Reform) highlighted that lots of behind-the-scenes work with lobbying groups of London councils and LBHF residents had been done to make sure that this borough would not be unfairly punished for its past hard work. He said LBHF’s contributions far exceeded the returns it received, for instance, in terms of business rates, growth generated through innovative industrial strategy etc.  He really hoped that this borough would be in the best possible position to continue to grow the economy for LBHF and across the country.

Councillor Adrian Pascu-Tulbure said he was glad to note there was cross-party aligned lobbying to make sure the LBHF had its fair share because it had done a lot. 

Charlotte Moar (Independent Member) referred to Risk 18 on management of complaints etc. and noted the combined inherent impact and inherent likelihood at the heat map remained at level 16 in November 2024, March and June 2025. She asked about the target date for the figure to come down to 12 or below, given the next annual complaints report might come up soon.

Sukvinder Kalsi highlighted the council’s intention to provide the best services without attracting any complaints. However, the council did go through a period of difficulty when its complaints arrangements were reviewed under the Housing Ombudsman P49 Report on Hammersmith and Fulham in March 2024.  In summer this year, the Ombudsman was satisfied with the progress and discharged the recommendations. Going forward, appropriate responses to complaints would be provided within the time scales and there would be regular focus on complaints performance by the Chief Executive and SLT.

Councillor Rowan Ree remarked the council had adopted a straight-forward approach to provide all details of complaints arrangements with a view to identifying the problems early. He said the same issue attracted a cluster of complaints which, once resolved, would help reduce the number of complaints and hence the heat map figure.  He believed it took time to work through the system.

The Chair recalled that the Committee had received the Housing Ombudsman report and discussed stage one and stage two complaints.  The council had acknowledged its mistakes around handling housing-related complaints and proceeded to simplify the complaints procedures and deal with the backlog.  He believed the SLT had taken the matter as a priority. While it took time to improve the complaint situation, it might take longer for the heat map figure to reflect the improvements made.

Sukvinder Kalsi remarked that it was absolutely a matter of priority as the Chief Executive, subsequent to the Housing Ombudsman report, had held weekly meetings to look at all the backlog and on-time complaints. He agreed to bring the annual complaints report back at some point.

Sharon Lea (Chief Executive) expressed that the council welcomed complaints as they provided learning to the organisation.  The SLT had been working on housing services which had made improvements over time.  She understood complaints related to housing and other areas met the target timescales and there was no backlog.  She said the next job was to bring the volume of on-time complaints down.

The Chair asked about the escalation of departmental risks which were managed within the departmental framework to the Corporate Risk Register. Moira Mackie noted there had been a lot of discussions with Directors and Executive Directors before drawing up the Corporate Risk Register. Some departmental risks were escalated where appropriate, but not all would need to be included in the Corporate Risk Register.    SLT did challenge the Executive Directors to share their registers to make sure each risk hit the right level. Sharon Lea added that SLT did deep dives with each Directorate so there was transparency on mitigations.

As regards consistency across departments, Moira Mackie noted some departments might have more challenges than others due to the nature of the services they provided, whilst some others needed more learning.  As such, a training toolkit was being developed to help colleagues understand that there was no fear of reporting a risk. The Chair echoed and considered it the best practice to share risk which was something faced by every employee.

RESOLVED

That the Committee agreed to note the report.