One Call-In, £7.6 Million and a Cupboard Full of Unfinished Business: Sandwell Scrutiny Goes Back to Work

One Call-In, £7.6 Million and a Cupboard Full of Unfinished Business: Sandwell Scrutiny Goes Back to Work

Budget & Corporate Scrutiny Management Board – 20 August 2026

LONG READ WARNING: This one is not a three-paragraph Facebook rant. Put the kettle on. Possibly make sandwiches. If you make it as far as the Disabled Facilities Grant, give yourself a biscuit. If you survive SEND, the HRA, FOIs and procurement as well, congratulations — you are now probably qualified to sit on a scrutiny committee.

And unlike some glossy Council publications, there are actual numbers in this.

The Budget and Corporate Scrutiny Management Board meets at Sandwell Council House at 6pm on Thursday 20 August.

Despite this being Sandwell's overarching scrutiny board — responsible for finances, information management, HR, ICT and the wider scrutiny work programme — there is just one substantive item on the agenda after the formalities and approval of the March minutes.

And it is a big one.

The Board will consider a call-in of the Reform Cabinet's 15 July decision concerning the Crisis and Resilience Fund 2026/27–2028/29.

So before wandering into the rather large cupboard marked Unfinished Sandwell Business, let's start with the matter actually on Thursday's agenda.

£7.599 million — and some awkward questions

The Crisis and Resilience Fund is Government money intended to help residents facing financial crisis while also trying to tackle some of the causes that keep dragging people back into crisis.

Sandwell has approximately £7.599 million for 2026/27.

The July Cabinet plan allocates £1.451m for housing payments, £1.335m for crisis payments, £1.850m for other crisis support, £494,000 for additional Welfare Rights staff and software, £2m for new resilience pilot projects and £469,000 for administration.

On the face of it, there are some perfectly sensible ideas here.

Prevent homelessness. Help people with debt. Maximise benefits. Improve food security. Help people into training and employment. Stop repeatedly handing somebody a sticking plaster if you can help deal with the wound.

Nothing particularly outrageous there.

Unfortunately, local government tends to become interesting when you get past the Executive Summary.

And this one gets interesting quite quickly.

The school holiday voucher row

Under the previous Household Support Fund, eligible families had received help including school holiday food vouchers.

Sandwell's July report considered continuing that system but rejected it, saying blanket provision did not sufficiently fit the new Fund's emphasis on crisis intervention and longer-term resilience.

This has now become one of the central grounds for the call-in.

It is important, however, not to turn this into political pantomime.

The Government guidance does not say councils must continue blanket free-school-meal holiday vouchers.

But — and this is rather important — it does not forbid them either.

The Department for Work and Pensions explicitly says councils should decide how best to ensure the poorest children do not go hungry during school holidays and that this may or may not involve blanket vouchers for children receiving free school meals. It also encourages councils to link provision with schools, Family Hubs and the Holiday Activities and Food programme.

So the sensible question is not:

“Are vouchers compulsory?”

They aren't.

The sensible question is:

“What evidence shows the replacement arrangement will reach the children and families who actually need help?”

How many Sandwell families previously received automatic support?

How many are expected to receive help under the new application system?

What level of non-take-up has been modelled?

What happens to the parent who isn't technically in an immediate “financial shock” but suddenly has children at home for six weeks and an extra food bill?

And what happens to those people who simply don't apply?

Those are scrutiny questions.

Welcome to crisis support. Please create an account...

The new model is largely application based.

Again, that isn't automatically wrong. DWP actually expects Crisis and Housing Payments to be mostly delivered through application-based schemes.

But the same guidance also says councils should proactively find vulnerable people who may never come forward themselves, that application methods must be accessible, and that councils must provide a non-digital offer, not merely stick a form online and wish everyone the best of British.

Now look at Sandwell's live Crisis Payments page.

It says:

“You will need a MySandwell account to apply.”

It also tells applicants that a payment or voucher can take up to 14 days, although it says applications are usually dealt with more quickly.

Meanwhile DWP guidance says that for urgent needs, authorities should aim to deliver Crisis Payments within 48 hours of a completed application and should consider what happens outside ordinary working hours.

That does not necessarily mean Sandwell is breaching the guidance.

There may be a perfectly good urgent triage system operating behind the scenes.

Fine.

Show it to scrutiny.

What constitutes urgent?

How many applications are dealt with within 48 hours?

What happens on Friday night?

What if somebody fleeing domestic abuse cannot provide the documentary evidence neatly requested by an online system?

What if somebody has no smartphone, email address, data allowance or MySandwell account?

The Cabinet report itself says face-to-face assistance will be available. Good.

The question is whether a frightened, skint or digitally excluded resident can actually find that route when they need it.

A service is not accessible merely because somewhere, in paragraph 37 of something, somebody has written the word “accessible”.

The Equality Impact Assessment that was going to happen

The call-in also points out that an Equality Impact Assessment had not been published.

More interestingly, the Cabinet report itself says:

“An Equality Impact Assessment will be undertaken.”

“Will be.”

The decision was being taken on 15 July.

That does not automatically make the decision unlawful. The Public Sector Equality Duty is more complicated than simply asking whether a document with “EIA” written on the front exists.

But it certainly generates an obvious question:

What equality analysis was actually before Cabinet when Cabinet made the decision?

Because changing from broadly automatic provision to an application-and-assessment model may affect disabled people, carers, people with poor literacy, people with mental health problems, people experiencing domestic abuse and digitally excluded residents differently.

If all that work was done beforehand, excellent.

Publish it.

Scrutiny should not need a séance to discover what evidence Cabinet considered.

Consultation — technically optional, politically rather more interesting

The report says there was no statutory requirement for public consultation.

That is correct as far as the Council's published position goes.

It says there was engagement with internal services, partners and operational stakeholders.

But the call-in points out something rather obvious.

The people whose support arrangements were actually changing apparently weren't directly consulted.

Legality and good decision-making are not always identical twins.

You can legally decide something without asking residents.

That doesn't necessarily make it wise.

Especially when the people concerned are low-income families and you are changing support shortly before the school summer holidays.

The call-in also says June's Cabinet meeting had been cancelled and argues the July decision came too late for families to make alternative arrangements. That is an allegation made in the formal call-in notice and deserves a proper answer rather than political throat-clearing.

And here's a new one: 1 July or 1 August?

This is where a little forensic reading becomes useful.

Sandwell's July Cabinet report authorised the Section 151 Officer to submit the Council's 2026/27 Crisis and Resilience Fund expenditure plan to DWP by 1 August 2026.

However, the Government's published CRF guidance says unitary and county authorities were required to send their initial delivery plan to DWP by 1 July 2026, with Section 151/CFO sign-off.

Now, before anybody reaches for the pitchforks, this does not prove Sandwell missed a Government deadline.

Perhaps Sandwell submitted an initial plan by 1 July and the August document was something different.

Perhaps DWP agreed another timetable.

Perhaps there was correspondence we haven't seen.

There may be a perfectly boring explanation.

Excellent.

Let's have the perfectly boring explanation.

Produce the plan, its submission date, the Section 151 sign-off and DWP acknowledgement.

Mystery solved.

That's what scrutiny is supposed to do.

£300,000 becomes £469,000

Here's another one for lovers of municipal arithmetic.

The January budget papers anticipated about £300,000 a year in CRF administration income/cost provision, based on approximately 5% of the Fund.

By July, the proposed administration budget was £469,000.

Separately, another £494,000 was allocated to additional Welfare Rights staffing and software.

There may again be an entirely legitimate explanation.

But £300,000 becoming £469,000 is the sort of thing a board with the word Budget in its name might reasonably ask about.

What changed?

What exactly is contained within the £469,000?

How many staff?

What software?

What publicity?

What evaluation?

What is one-off and what becomes an ongoing cost?

And what precisely does the separate £494,000 buy?

These are not gotcha questions.

They're called accounting.

The £2 million pilot pot

The Council also intends spending £2 million on resilience pilots — potentially covering food security, healthy living, financial resilience, skills and employment.

Again, perfectly worthy objectives.

But Cabinet delegated considerable authority to senior officers, in consultation with the Cabinet Member, to determine the pilots and make in-year adjustments. It also delegated development of the 2027/28 and 2028/29 expenditure plans.

So who gets the money?

Who chooses?

What are the criteria?

Are they grants or contracts?

How is performance measured?

What happens when a pilot fails?

Will councillors and the public see the outcomes?

Because “pilot project” is one of those lovely public-sector phrases that can mean anything between excellent innovative intervention and £200,000 disappeared into a PowerPoint presentation and everybody agreed lessons had been learned.

We shall see.

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And now... the cupboard

This is where the political change in May becomes important.

Reform UK won 41 of Sandwell's 72 seats at the May election and took control of the authority. Councillor Ray Nock was subsequently appointed Council Leader from 26 May.

That means we need to be fair about what follows.

Most of the problems I'm about to discuss were not created by the Reform administration.

They existed under the previous Labour administration.

Some go back years.

Some involve national pressures as well as local management.

Some are officer and system issues rather than things created personally by councillors.

So I am not going to perform the lazy trick of sticking “REFORM FAILURE” on every spreadsheet dated before they took office.

But nor should changing the political leadership cause the Council's institutional memory to develop sudden-onset amnesia.

The paperwork doesn't reset itself after an election.

The residents waiting for repairs don't vanish.

SEND cases don't disappear.

Unspent Disabled Facilities Grants don't magically install bathrooms at midnight on polling day.

Legacy responsibility and current responsibility are different things.

Labour can properly be challenged about what happened on its watch.

Reform can properly be challenged about what it does with what it inherited.

That is the handover test.

Housing: C3 remains the large elephant in the Council flat

Sandwell received a C3 consumer judgement from the Regulator of Social Housing in October 2024.

The regulator said there were serious failings and significant improvement was required, particularly around the Safety and Quality Standard.

That is unquestionably a Labour-era legacy issue.

The Council subsequently began substantial recovery work — stock condition surveys, reducing repairs backlogs, improving safety compliance and introducing new systems — and that progress should be acknowledged. The Council itself has reported significant corrective action.

But as of this review, the October 2024 C3 remains the latest Sandwell regulatory judgement listed by the regulator.

So the question for Reform isn't:

“Why did you get a C3?”

They didn't.

The question is:

“What are you doing to get Sandwell out of C3, what remains outstanding and when should tenants expect the regulator to be satisfied?”

March scrutiny was told that around £51 million sat in HRA reserves, but crucially some of that represented deferred work including stock condition surveys, repair backlogs and a replacement housing management system.

In other words, £51m in reserves isn't necessarily a giant municipal piggy bank waiting for somebody to smash it open.

Some of it has work attached.

The real issue is delivery.

Disabled Facilities Grants: the underspend that refused to go away

March scrutiny was told that around £6.6 million of Disabled Facilities Grant funding was underspent.

This is money intended for adaptations including stairlifts, accessible bathrooms and other work helping disabled people remain independent at home.

At Quarter 3, £6.639m was forecast to slip into 2026/27.

By final outturn, it wasn't £6.639m.

It was £6.678m of an £11.639m budget slipping forward.

Yes, the papers point out that other councils have difficulties spending DFG allocations.

Fair enough.

But a national problem can still be a Sandwell problem.

And calling something “slippage” does not make the human consequences disappear.

Behind the word could be somebody unable to use their bath.

Somebody struggling upstairs.

A carer lifting somebody because an adaptation isn't finished.

An older resident unable to return home safely.

So the new administration should inherit not merely the £6.678m balance but the question:

How many people are waiting, and for how long?

That's the metric I want.

Not just money carried forward.

People carried forward.

SEND: clearing a backlog isn't the same as fixing the system

There was genuine progress before May.

The historic EHCP assessment backlog — previously reported at 523 cases — had been reduced to zero.

Good.

Credit where due.

But earlier scrutiny had also been told the EHCP 20-week completion rate had fallen to 15.65% against a 50.3% target, while average statutory assessment time had reached 57.82 weeks against a 20-week target.

The July performance report still identified EHCP timeliness and statutory assessment duration as persistent red indicators.

So “the backlog has been cleared” is true.

It is also not the whole story.

If you clear the historic queue and then people continue waiting far too long, congratulations — you have cleared yesterday's backlog while manufacturing tomorrow's.

SEND demand is also forecast to continue growing. The Council's own Sufficiency Strategy says that, based on historic demand and conversion rates, Sandwell could have more than 10,000 children with EHCPs by 2031, although it correctly cautions that ongoing reform work could change that projection.

Again: legacy pressure.

Current responsibility for the response.

The money that keeps slipping into tomorrow

Sandwell's final 2025/26 General Fund capital programme was £89.308m.

Actual expenditure was £63.304m.

That's 71% delivered, with £25.810m slipping into later years.

The HRA capital programme was £92.552m.

Actual expenditure: £62.330m.

That's 67%, leaving another £30.222m slipping forward.

Now, capital programmes always reprofile.

Planning changes.

Contractors slip.

Projects move.

Weather happens.

Things genuinely change.

But once tens of millions repeatedly move from “this year” to “next year”, scrutiny needs to ask whether we are looking at isolated project delays or a wider delivery capacity problem.

A budget isn't an achievement because somebody successfully typed it into Excel.

Eventually something has to get built, repaired, adapted or installed.

Sandwell Children's Trust: £19.792 million doesn't become history just because the calendar changed

Sandwell Children's Trust accumulated a historic deficit of approximately £19.792m by the end of 2024/25.

A three-year contract was agreed covering 2025/26–2027/28, totalling £309.072m, with arrangements intended to stabilise the Trust and recover the deficit.

The 2025/26 outturn included a £6.597m draw from reserves for additional Trust contract payments connected to that cumulative deficit.

Again, Reform didn't create it.

But the contract continues under Reform.

So scrutiny should keep watching it.

Otherwise “we have agreed a three-year contract” risks becoming local-government shorthand for “please don't ask us again until 2028”.

No.

Ask every quarter.

FOIs and Subject Access Requests: transparency apparently still takes time

This one should concern anybody who has ever tried to extract information from a public authority without first obtaining a degree in patience.

Back in Quarter 2, Sandwell was already below its 90% target for responding to Subject Access Requests and Freedom of Information requests on time.

The Council said additional diagnostics, resources and digital solutions were being explored.

By Quarter 4, SAR performance had fallen to 36%, with annual performance of 50%.

FOI performance was 70%, against the 90% target.

The Quarter 4 breakdown recorded Finance & Transformation at 0% for 14 SARs, Children & Education at 33%, Adult Social Care & Health at 31%, and Place at 45%.

The report does say work is progressing on a new system after discussions with Hackney.

Fine.

But this is Budget & Corporate Scrutiny, and information governance is specifically within its remit.

So it needs to return.

Not as another paragraph saying “work continues”.

With numbers.

Complaints and the customer journey

Quarter 4 Stage 1 complaints averaged 11.33 working days against a 10-day target, with Children and Education at 19.21 days. The report says many Children's complaints relate to SEND delays.

The Council was also receiving an enormous number of avoidable calls.

Nearly half — 48.48% of calls about repairs — were residents chasing repairs that had already been reported.

That is a fascinating customer-service statistic.

You can have a very polite person answer the telephone and still have a broken customer journey because the resident is ringing for the third time asking why nobody has fixed the leak.

Previous scrutiny also raised anonymous responses from officers, misleading MySandwell statuses and response times for councillor enquiries.

March's tracking report showed some recommendations had been hanging around since 2023 and 2024 under various descriptions of ongoing work.

New political control is an excellent opportunity to ask an old-fashioned question:

Did we actually finish any of this?

Procurement: another one that must not quietly wander off

March's Budget & Corporate Scrutiny Board considered proposals for a new Ethical and Commercial Procurement Strategy, refreshed procurement rules and improved contract management.

Members were told the final Strategy, Procedure Rules and Contract Management Framework would return to scrutiny.

That matters.

Because Sandwell is simultaneously letting and managing very substantial contracts, including housing maintenance and regulatory work.

The July Cabinet papers themselves stress the importance of compliant procurement, performance management, social value and effective contract reviews.

Good.

So bring the promised framework back.

Scrutiny has an unfortunate habit, not unique to Sandwell, of enthusiastically requesting an update and then apparently assuming the update has ascended to heaven if nobody puts it on another agenda.

Let's not do that.

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This isn't an argument that nothing has improved

For the avoidance of doubt — because nuance is terribly unfashionable on social media — Sandwell has made genuine progress.

The Council exited Government intervention.

Children's Services achieved a Good Ofsted judgement after years of difficulty.

The LGA Corporate Peer Challenge found Sandwell significantly more stable and credible than it had been in the dark old days, while still identifying important further work around housing, transformation and organisational capacity.

The General Fund position has also been substantially more stable than in some other councils.

None of that should be airbrushed out merely because criticism gets more clicks.

But improvement does not mean scrutiny becomes redundant.

Quite the opposite.

If the Council really is improving, good scrutiny helps make sure it stays improved.

Labour's legacy. Reform's test.

And this is the key point.

Housing C3?

Inherited.

The DFG backlog?

Inherited.

SEND pressures?

Inherited.

The Children's Trust historic deficit?

Inherited.

FOI and SAR weakness?

Inherited.

Capital slippage?

Predominantly inherited.

Procurement reform begun but not completed?

Transitional.

These cannot fairly be rewritten as things Reform created after taking office in May.

But from the moment the new administration knows about them, a second clock starts ticking.

The question slowly changes from:

“Who caused this?”

to:

“Who is fixing this?”

And eventually, if nothing happens:

“Why did you leave it?”

That is where scrutiny should sit.

Not rewriting history to blame the new lot for everything.

And not allowing the new lot to blame history forever.

Thursday is a useful first test

The Crisis and Resilience Fund is different from most of those legacy matters.

This was a July 2026 decision of the current Reform Cabinet.

So Thursday's meeting provides an early test of how Sandwell's new political arrangements deal with challenge.

Will scrutiny simply hear explanations and wave the decision through?

Will it turn into party-political theatre over free school meal vouchers?

Or will members do what scrutiny should actually do — interrogate the evidence, separate fact from assertion, demand the paperwork and improve the decision where improvement is required?

I don't currently see evidence that the entire Crisis and Resilience Fund proposal should simply be thrown in the bin.

The principle of moving people from repeated crisis towards longer-term financial resilience is sensible.

But there are unresolved questions about the timing, the impact on families, equality analysis, accessibility, the apparent 1 July/1 August delivery-plan discrepancy, the 14-day public processing message versus the Government's 48-hour urgent-payment ambition, administration costs, the £2m pilots and the extent of delegated authority.

Those questions deserve answers.

And when Thursday's call-in is finished, the Board should turn around and look at the rather large pile of unfinished business sitting behind it.

Because elections change councillors.

They do not delete corporate memory.

And in Sandwell — of all places — we really should have learned by now that “we thought somebody was dealing with it” is not a governance system.

I'll be watching what happens on 20 August.

And, as ever, I'll update this when the answers arrive.

Assuming, of course, they arrive within the target response time.

Don't hold your breath.

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