320 Pages, Plenty of Questions – Now We Wait to See What Sandwell’s Audit Committee Actually Said

I had hoped to keep a live eye on Sandwell Council’s Audit & Risk Assurance Committee meeting on 27 July 2026, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend.

That means I couldn’t give the usual live updates, listen to the questions being asked, hear the answers given by officers and auditors, or pick up on those little exchanges that very often tell you far more than the carefully written committee report ever does.

So, for the avoidance of any doubt, this article is based on the papers councillors had in front of them before the meeting.

And there were rather a lot of them.

The agenda pack ran to a staggering:

320 PAGES

Yes. Three hundred and twenty pages for one Audit & Risk Assurance Committee meeting.

I have gone through them because buried amongst the accounting language, risk matrices, action plans, audit terminology and reassuring management commentary are some issues that I think deserve considerably more attention.

We now have to wait for the draft minutes to see what members actually did with all that information.

And, judging by the way these things tend to work, I am not exactly holding my breath for those minutes to appear overnight.

There could well be a significant wait before the draft record becomes publicly available.

As soon as I receive or see the minutes, I will update this review.

Because what was put before councillors is only half the story.

The other half is:

What did they actually ask about it?

First things first – Sandwell isn't going bankrupt

Let's knock that one on the head before somebody decides that is what this article says.

It doesn't.

The papers do not suggest Sandwell Council is about to run out of money.

The General Fund position is, in many respects, relatively resilient.

But having reserves and balancing the books is not the same thing as having robust systems, good controls and reliable independent assurance.

And assurance is where this 320-page monster becomes very interesting indeed.

Because underneath all those wonderfully comforting phrases such as:

“Reasonable Assurance”

“Progress is being made”

“Actions are ongoing”

and the absolute council classic:

“Members are asked to note…”

there are some pretty hefty warning signs.

Another disclaimed audit opinion

Grant Thornton's papers indicate that Sandwell is expected to receive another disclaimed audit opinion for 2025/26.

Let's explain that properly because it is very easy to sensationalise.

It does not mean Grant Thornton has declared Sandwell's accounts fraudulent.

It does not necessarily mean the accounts are wrong.

A disclaimer essentially means the auditor has not been able to obtain sufficient reliable evidence to give an audit opinion.

But let's not go too far the other way and pretend that doesn't matter either.

It matters.

A lot.

The anticipated route back to normality appears to be:

2024/25 – Disclaimed

2025/26 – Another disclaimer expected

2026/27 – Qualified opinion anticipated

2027/28 – Hopefully back to an unmodified, or clean, opinion

Hopefully.

Because that is a recovery trajectory rather than a guarantee.

My question would therefore have been very simple:

What exactly has to happen over the next two years for Sandwell to get back to a clean audit opinion?

Closely followed by:

What could go wrong and knock that recovery off course?

That's the sort of answer I shall be looking for in the minutes.

“Reasonable Assurance” – lovely. Now turn the page.

The overall Internal Audit opinion is Reasonable Assurance.

Sounds nice.

But I have long since learned that you should never stop reading a council report when you reach the reassuring bit.

There were 25 assurance-rated audits.

Of those:

3 received Substantial Assurance

16 received Reasonable Assurance

and

6 received Limited Assurance

And those six weren't reviews of the office stationery cupboard.

They included:

SEND placement costs

Sandwell Children's Trust financial outturn

Procurement and contract compliance

Payroll

Boscobel Tenant Management Organisation

Housing electrical safety inspections

That is quite a list.

Then we get to the recommendations.

There were nine Fundamental recommendations.

The clue might just be in the word Fundamental.

Surely those should be receiving serious committee attention?

Here's the figure that really made me sit up

Internal Audit tested 103 previous recommendations.

How many had been fully implemented?

56.

Another 23 were only partly completed or remained ongoing.

And 22 had not been actioned.

Therein lies one of my biggest bugbears with council reports.

We constantly read statements along the lines of:

“Management has accepted the recommendations.”

Fantastic.

Give everybody a biscuit.

Accepting a recommendation isn't fixing the problem.

You can accept recommendations until the cows come home.

The important questions are:

Has it been done?

When was it done?

Who checked it?

And has Internal Audit gone back and independently verified that it actually works?

Anything less and we are simply creating another action plan to go into another committee report.

Procurement – keep your eye on this one

Procurement and Contract Compliance received Limited Assurance.

A follow-up of previous work found that 7 out of 10 recommendations remained unactioned.

Seven.

Out of ten.

The latest audit also raised issues around incomplete audit trails, declarations of interests, missing documentation, the contract register and instances involving exemptions and awards above £1 million not being formally reported as required.

Now let me be absolutely clear.

That is not evidence of corruption or wrongdoing.

But neither should anyone dismiss it as paperwork.

Procurement is where very large amounts of taxpayers' money leave the building.

The controls around that money ought to be watertight.

The contracts should be recorded.

The declarations should be complete.

The approvals should be there.

The reporting should happen.

It shouldn't require Internal Audit repeatedly telling people to do it.

What happened to the Children's Trust problems?

This is one I particularly want to see reflected in the minutes.

At the previous Audit Committee meeting members received a pretty uncomfortable report concerning Sandwell Children's Trust's 2024/25 financial outturn.

Internal Audit awarded Limited Assurance.

Amongst the findings were three substantial manual payment runs totalling around:

£2.732 MILLION

These were processed outside the main financial system and had not been properly reflected in the general ledger.

There were also weaknesses around reconciliations, reporting and financial controls.

We were told corrective action was being taken.

The committee requested regular updates.

Excellent.

So where is the update?

Did members ask for one on 27 July?

Has Internal Audit gone back in?

Have the reconciliations been tested?

Have the manual payment controls been tested?

Have the Oracle-related problems been properly resolved?

Or have we moved from:

“There is a problem”

to:

“Management tells us the problem is fixed”

without reaching the important third stage:

“Internal Audit has checked and agrees it is fixed.”

I shall be watching the minutes very carefully for that.

A £2.741 million underspend – sounds good doesn't it?

The overall General Fund position shows an underspend of around £2.741 million.

Good news.

But don't stop reading.

Children & Education overspent by around £2.921 million.

Adult Social Care & Health overspent by around £2.881 million.

Those pressures were absorbed by underspends elsewhere.

So rather than simply shouting:

“£2.7 million underspend!”

perhaps we should ask what is happening underneath it.

Are the same services repeatedly under financial pressure?

Are those pressures structural?

Can the compensating underspends elsewhere be repeated?

And what happens if they can't?

Much less exciting than a headline, granted.

But considerably more useful.

SEND – another flashing warning light

The Dedicated Schools Grant recorded an in-year overspend of around £11.6 million.

The cumulative deficit was around £6.3 million.

The High Needs block is a major factor.

Demand is increasing.

Complexity is increasing.

Specialist placements cost serious money.

And remember what else appeared in the same 320-page pack?

SEND Placement Costs – Limited Assurance.

This is exactly why councillors need to read across reports.

The accounts tell you there is financial pressure.

Internal Audit tells you there are control issues.

The risk framework tells you whether management believes that exposure is being controlled.

Put the three together and you start getting the real picture.

£56 million of capital spending didn't happen when planned

Here's another cracker.

General Fund capital spending was around £26 million below the revised programme.

The Housing Revenue Account programme was around £30.2 million below.

Combined:

MORE THAN £56 MILLION

of planned capital activity wasn't delivered during the year.

Now we get the lovely phrase “reprofiling”.

One of those council words that sounds so much better.

Reprofiling.

It sounds almost sophisticated.

In plain English it often means:

“We planned to spend it this year, but the project has slipped into another year.”

There will obviously be legitimate reasons for some projects moving.

But £56 million is not loose change.

Which schemes slipped?

Why?

Procurement delays?

Contractor problems?

Staff shortages?

Planning?

Project management?

Schemes not ready when the budget was approved?

And most importantly, does all of this simply pile additional pressure into the following year's programme?

Those are the questions.

Housing – Amber? Really?

Sandwell remains under a C3 judgement from the Regulator of Social Housing.

There has been improvement and I have no problem whatsoever acknowledging that.

But improvement does not mean the job is finished.

Within this same Audit pack we have a Limited Assurance audit covering electrical safety inspections.

There is also substantial Housing Revenue Account capital slippage.

Yet Housing Improvement sits on the Strategic Risk Register at Amber.

It might be entirely defensible.

But I'd certainly ask:

Why isn't it Red?

And more importantly:

What evidence demonstrates that Amber is the correct residual risk?

Don't just give members a coloured box.

Explain why it is that colour.

Then comes the Annual Governance Statement

This is another of those documents where you have to admire the language.

The overall conclusion is that the Council's governance arrangements remain effective.

Excellent.

But then we are presented with six areas requiring significant governance attention.

These include:

companies, partnerships and arm's-length bodies;

compliance with governance procedures;

financial sustainability and transformation;

housing governance and regulation;

organisational capacity;

and member development and governance capability.

Let's put that alongside everything else.

Six Limited Assurance audits.

Nine Fundamental recommendations.

Another expected external audit disclaimer.

Housing C3.

SEND pressure.

Children's Trust control failures.

Procurement weaknesses.

And six significant governance issues.

Yet overall governance remains effective.

Perhaps that conclusion is absolutely correct.

But surely the role of Audit Committee members is to ask:

Show us why.

Not just accept the sentence because it is written near the end of an official report.

PFI – easily missed amongst 320 pages

Four PFI financial models were undergoing specialist review.

At the time the draft accounts were produced the potential accounting adjustment could not yet be quantified.

Maybe nothing particularly dramatic will emerge.

It might be a technical accounting exercise.

But until the work is finished, surely somebody ought to ask:

Could this materially alter the final accounts?

And:

Could any adjustments reach backwards into previous financial years?

Again, hopefully the minutes will tell us whether anybody did.

Audit Committee shouldn't be about politics

I have said this before.

The Audit & Risk Assurance Committee ought to be one of the least party-political committees at Sandwell Council.

I couldn't care less whether the person asking the awkward question is Reform, Labour, Green or Independent.

Ask the bloody question.

This is public money.

Public services.

Public assets.

Financial controls.

Contracts.

Risk.

Governance.

Housing safety.

Children's services.

The committee's job isn't to cheerlead the administration.

Nor should it be somewhere for the opposition to manufacture cheap political points.

Its job is to scrutinise.

Properly.

Ask what went wrong.

Ask why.

Ask who's responsible for fixing it.

Ask for a deadline.

And then make sure somebody comes back and proves it was fixed.

That's audit.

Not:

“Thank you for the comprehensive report.”

followed by:

“Noted.”

Unfortunately, I couldn't be there

I wasn't able to attend the 27 July meeting.

That is frustrating because I would have liked to listen to the debate firsthand and report live on what members were actually asking.

You cannot always get the flavour of a meeting from the eventual minutes.

Who pushed?

Who followed up?

Who challenged an answer?

Who sat silently?

Did an officer hesitate?

Did the auditor add a qualification that doesn't eventually make it into two lines of minutes?

Those things matter.

But I couldn't be there, so I'm not going to pretend I know what happened in the room.

I don't.

What I do know is what was sitting in those 320 pages before councillors entered the chamber.

And there was plenty there to keep them occupied.

Now comes the wait for the minutes

And no doubt this is where patience will be required.

I don't expect a detailed draft record to magically appear the morning after the meeting.

There can be a significant delay between a council meeting taking place and the draft minutes becoming publicly available.

That is frustrating when the issues being discussed are current and the public quite reasonably wants to know what happened.

So for now this remains my pre-minutes review.

As soon as I receive the draft minutes, or they are published, I will update this article.

And then we can compare the two.

What was in the papers?

against

What was actually scrutinised?

Did members pursue the expected audit disclaimer?

Did they ask about those nine Fundamental recommendations?

What happened with Children's Trust?

Was procurement challenged?

Did somebody ask why Housing remains Amber?

Was the £56 million capital slippage properly explored?

Were SEND pressures discussed?

Was the PFI uncertainty questioned?

And did anybody ask how six significant governance issues sit alongside the conclusion that overall governance remains effective?

Maybe they did.

I genuinely hope they did.

Until we get the minutes, we simply don't know.

But when they arrive, I'll be going through them against the 320-page agenda pack and the issues I've highlighted here.

Because publishing hundreds of pages does not create transparency by itself.

Holding a committee meeting does not automatically create scrutiny either.

The test is what councillors actually did with the information.

And, ultimately, whether anything changes as a result.

Watch this space.

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