Issue - meetings

Housing Rent Income - Audit Wales

Meeting: 17/11/2021 - Governance and Audit Committee (Item 33)

33 Housing Rent Income - Audit Wales pdf icon PDF 92 KB

Additional documents:

Decision:

That the report be noted.

Minutes:

The Revenues & Procurement Manager presented a report on the findings of an Audit Wales review on housing rent income which had been commissioned by the Council due to strategic risks around increasing rent arrears and changes to Universal Credit.  The report and its recommendations had been accepted by Cabinet and the Corporate Resources Overview & Scrutiny Committee as part of the agreed protocol for external regulatory reports.

 

The report acknowledged the level of work undertaken across the Council to stabilise the increase in rent arrears by March 2020 and made two minor recommendations to strengthen existing arrangements on supporting tenants and additional performance reporting on write-off levels and former tenant arrears.  Progress was underway in implementing actions through the introduction of a review panel to manage complex cases and investment in new technology.

 

When asked by Sally Ellis about steps to improve support for tenants, the Revenues & Procurement Manager said that a more co-ordinated approach involving different teams was already proving effective in targeting interventions.  On benchmarking, he spoke about the Council’s involvement in national initiatives to compare performance with other authorities.

 

On comparison with the other Audit Wales report on the agenda, the Internal Audit, Performance & Risk Manager explained that details of actions were not included in this report due to the timing of the reporting cycle, however there was an expectation for an action plan to accompany future Audit Wales reports to give assurance of the response and associated actions.

 

Following Allan Rainford’s comments on the use of meaningful data for benchmarking, officers said that the Council’s systems would improve and simplify data collection.

 

The recommendation was moved and seconded by Councillors Janet Axworthy and Joe Johnson.

 

The Committee welcomed the findings of audit work on a data-matching exercise of Covid-19 grants distributed by the Revenues team during the pandemic which had identified no duplicate payments.

 

RESOLVED:

 

That the report be noted.