Agenda item

Prior to consideration of this item a member challenged the proposal that certain information relating to the report had been provided to the Committee as exempt information.  He suggested that it was in the public interest for the information to be considered with the public and press present.

The Chairman requested advice from the Monitoring Officer.  He explained that the Access to Information Rules enabled him to exclude access by the public to the whole or part of a report which he considered were subject to exclusion in accordance with certain categories of exempt information, as set out in the constitution.  One of these categories was 'information relating to the financial or business affairs of any particular person' and the document issued to Committee members had not been published in advance of the meeting because in his view that there were a number of items where such information would be revealed.  If the Committee wished to do so it could resolve to go into 'exempt session' and exclude the public and press, having considered whether the public interest was better met by discussing in public or not.  A minority of Council business was carried out in exempt session and sometimes it was handled by having a hybrid approach to the information where a public report was issued, as in this case, with the exempt information as a separate appendix.

Having considered the advice of the Monitoring Officer the Committee agreed that the exempt part of the report should remain so and not be made available to the public.  However the Committee's debate of the report was held in public.

The report had been produced in response to the Committee's request for information about the Evesham Abbey Bridge and Bromsgrove Railway Station projects.  Officers had expanded on this to include other items which had emerged from audit reports.

In the ensuing debate, the following principal points were raised:

·       For the capital schemes, whether there was a skills gap in the relevant department.  John Hobbs, Director of Economy and Infrastructure, responded that following a period where there had been few capital schemes, there had been an increase in large scale projects in recent years.  For a transitional period there had been a lack of capacity in supporting these but the current head of service was appropriately qualified and staffing for this was now significantly different. He was confident that the department now 'had a grip' on dealing with capital projects.

·       Whether lessons learned from the Abbey Bridge and Bromsgrove railway station projects had been shared effectively.  John Hobbs responded that he had sought audits of both schemes to learn from them to prevent any repeat of errors and his concern was specifically about major capital projects which his department delivered.  Abbey Bridge had been an innovative design and build project which had been difficult to assess at tender stage.  He did not consider that issues encountered during this project nor Bromsgrove railway station were systematic.  Members suggested that future project management should include commercial, finance and legal expertise from across the Council to support clear governance of capital schemes. 

·       Committee members also referred to comments in the external auditors' report which indicated that the way commissioning had been approached was a risk for achieving value for money for the Council.  The view was expressed that whilst learning corporately from capital projects was necessary, issues raised in the auditors' report referred to corporate issues and there was a distinction between commissioning capital/infrastructure projects and services. However, it was also suggested that governance, pricing and contract management were common themes to both types of commissioning.

·       Helen Lillington, Grant Thornton, explained that the external auditors considered commissioning from a high level corporate perspective.  Whilst there had been successes at the County Council, it had not been clear why other initiatives had not succeeded.  It was important that arrangements were clear and that the lessons learned from successful commissioning were shared as good practice.  In all commercial contracts there was an element of risk and this should be balanced against the price as part of governance of commissioning a project.

·       Some members expressed the view that the reputational risk to the Council of unsuccessful commissioning should be part of the consideration of projects.  Michael Hudson reported that lessons learned from the implementation of Babcock and Liberata contracts were being applied to the current live procurement of a replacement software package used for recording care packages and reputational risk was part of that.

RESOLVED that the issues arising from internal audits on commissioning are noted.