Agenda and minutes

Apologies for absence were received from Councillors Amanda Broom and Tony Lock.

In accordance with the Council's current Code of Conduct (as amended 26 February 2015), which includes all the provisions relating to Disclosable Pecuniary Interests (DPI), personal and prejudicial interests, Members are asked to declare any DPI and also any personal interests (and whether or not such personal interests are also "prejudicial") in relation to any matter on the Agenda for this meeting.

There were no declarations of interest.

There were no members of public present at the meeting.

There were no announcements made by the Chairman.

Members considered the reports within the District Executive agenda for 18 April 2017 and made the following comments:

SSDC Council Action Plan 2017-18 (Agenda item 5)

·           Some members questioned the process that had been gone through to establish the priorities and felt this needed to be improved upon in the future, particularly to know what projects or areas of work may not proceed or will be delayed.

·           The Committee felt that the Transformation Priority should be rephrased to also include Income Generation.

·           Members are unsure with regard to the phrasing of the last two priorities as these are not SMART and are more aspirational. Is it therefore right that these should be included as a priority particularly when they are not entirely in SSDC control?

·           Members feel the wording of priority 6 is very strong with the use of ‘ensure’ and ‘needs are met’.

·           Members appreciate that we still have the funds set aside for the superfast broadband.

·           There are * next to some of the names of services under the titles By Partnerships or Shared Services and Directly Provided by SSDC, these need explaining or removed.

·           Members questioned if Area Working will remain.

SSDC Transformation Project (Agenda item 6)

·         Members questioned the makeup of the redundancy provisions and the additional capital expenditure budget.

·         Members suggested that the graph shown in the member presentation with regard to the investment / headline business case was made available to all members for Full Council.

·         The contingency figures for Capital and Revenue appear very low.  Please can you explain what this provision is specifically for and if there is contingency provision elsewhere in the budget? If there isn’t enough contingency where would the additional funding come from?

·         Scrutiny would like to be involved in identifying the Key Performance Indicators for Transformation.

·         It was queried if the fourth director post was necessary.

·         Members sought reassurance what could be done if the underspends did not come forward towards the £1,100,000 for the redundancy reserve.

·         The risk assessment table has no recognised risk of the potential reputational impact of transformation on customers and partners, please can this be included.

·         Under the governance arrangements it should be made clear that the appointment to the High level steering group role is Scrutiny Chair and Vice Chair.

Capital Programme 2017/18 to2021/22 (Agenda item 7)

·         Paragraph 7 shows possible capital bids for the next 5 years estimated at 21.2 million yet we currently only have 17.6 million, should we be reviewing the capital strategy scoring methodology  to fit the more commercial investment vs corporate priorities?

Members noted the next meeting of the Scrutiny Committee would be held at 10.00amon 9 May 2017 in Council Chamber A at Brympton Way.

(Post meeting note: the May meeting of Scrutiny Committee was cancelled.)