Issue - meetings

Note: In the minutes, reference is made to P1, P2 and P3 recommendations. This refers to Priority One, Priority Two and Priority Three recommendations made by the Internal Audit Team—with Priority One being the most urgent.

The Internal Audit Progress report updated Members concerning the work undertaken by the Internal Audit Team since the previous meeting held on 4th June 2019. Members were briefed concerning the progress made in implementing the previous P1 recommendations and were alerted to new P1 recommendations that had since appeared.

The Assistant Director for Highways attended the meeting to update the Committee concerning the recommendations that had been made following the audit of the Highways Maintenance Contract. 

Members were concerned because the audit of the Highways Maintenance Contract had resulted in 3 new P1 recommendations as well as 2 P2 recommendations. Because of this, the overall audit opinion was ‘Limited’.

Management attention was required in various areas, including:

·  The selection process of highways for the major works programme

·  Management and delivery of the agreed highways schemes

·  Controls relating to Crossovers

Members were concerned to note that with respect to 4/4 of the sampled carriageways incorporated in the Highways Investment Schemes, the total cost of highways maintenance was £305,921, but there was no documented evidence for the rationale regarding the expenditure. Back up information was not retained and there were no written procedure notes that could be referred to. Further deficiencies had been identified in respect of the management of the delivery of the agreed Highways Investment Scheme, as noted in the report.

It had also been identified in the audit that there was no documented procedure to manage requests for the reconstruction and widening of crossovers. Greater formality was needed. The Assistant Director acknowledged that better processes for dealing with documentation and record keeping were required. He felt that the Sharepoint system should be used going forward to store data such as survey records. The data would then be easier to access and manage as it would be stored in a central location.

The Chairman mentioned issues that had arisen previously with respect to fraud relating to crossovers. The Assistant Director assured that all of the payments relating to the crossovers in the report could be evidenced. Five members of the public received a quote, three had the work done, but two did not take up the quote.  Members of the public sometimes asked for a quote on the day. The engineer would then provide a written quotation, and if the customer wanted the work to go ahead, they would contact Liberata and make a card payment. The Assistant Director agreed that a record of this quotation should be kept, even if it was a photo taken on a mobile phone.

A Member commented that it would have been useful to have some sort or record of the state of the roads when the surveys were undertaken included in the PDS Committee papers, as otherwise it made it difficult to compare schemes and whether  ...  view the full minutes text for item 21