Agenda item

Strategic Risk Management Progress Report for 2020/21 - Review 2

Minutes:

The Committee considered a report of the Corporate Director of Resources which highlighted the strategic risks facing the Council and to give an insight into the work carried out by the Corporate Risk Management Group between June and September 2020 (for copy see file of minutes).

 

Councillor Robinson asked what the governance arrangements were for the Local Resilience Forum which had had a major role during the pandemic.  The Strategic Manager - Executive Support confirmed that the LRF was overseen by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government but each individual organisation had their own scrutiny arrangement so with regards to the Council this would be Audit and Scrutiny Committees and there were also links into the Safe Durham Partnership.

 

Councillor O Temple referred to paragraph 17 of the report and asked whether the Council and the County Durham and Darlington LRF had been stood-up once again with their respective Brexit task and finish group arrangements.  The Strategic Manager - Executive Support confirmed that the LRF had been stood-up in relation to COVID-19 since the beginning of February and the prospect of a no trade agreement was being treated as a concurrent risk.  The Council had reviewed the additional impact of failing to agree a deal combined with COVID-19 to enable council to respond if needs be.  The report had been prepared in mid-October and the latest position was that negotiations were still ongoing, however, since then more positive progress had been made on state aid.  Should a technical agreement on a draft trade agreement be made, it would still need to go through UK and EU Parliament.  The LRF was dealing with risks regarding Brexit and the Council also had their own internal planning arrangements.

 

In response to comments from Councillor Shuttleworth with regards to road slippage on the A690, the Risk, Insurance & Governance Manager confirmed that the assessment of risk was based on factors such as technical assessments on any movement by specialists, funding, planning and whether the level of risk required it to be addressed in the short term or long term, however he would seek further clarification from the service and feed this back to Members.

 

C Robinson referred to the key risks in the report which were almost exclusively long term, specifically items 5 and 6 – protecting children and adults from harm as he did not feel assured that the proposed actions were adequate to mitigate the risk.  The Risk, Insurance & Governance Manager confirmed that these two risks were kept on the key risk register even if considered unlikely to occur as CMT and Audit Committee wanted to monitor them to ensure they did not increase.  Although the likelihood of the risk occurring had increased due to COVID-19 and extra measures were in place to try and deal with that, the overall assessment of the risk and the appropriateness of the measures in place remained the same.  However he would seek a response from the Service and feed this back to Members.

 

I Rudd asked for more details relating to the new risk on climate change emergency and penalties should the Council not succeed in meeting targets.  The Risk, Insurance & Governance Manager advised that there could be a variety of impacts including financial, reputation and impact on the wider community, which are likely to change over the period up to 2050.  In addition, the Council will be expected to meets its targets and consequently lead by example to other sectors of the business community.  The programme of work to achieve this objective covers 30 years, but it will be broken down and managed within numerous projects over that period, including up to 100 projects in the next few years.

 

Resolved:

 

That the report be agreed.

Supporting documents: