Sandwell Audit Committee: Plenty of Assurance... But Where's the Evidence?
There are some council meetings where you can almost predict the script before anybody has even taken their seat.
A report is presented. Officers explain that improvements are underway. Members are “reassured”. Recommendations are “accepted”. A new board, strategy, action plan or working group has been established. Everyone nods solemnly, the report is noted and off we go to the next item.
But the Audit and Risk Assurance Committee really cannot operate like that.
If there is one committee at Sandwell Council whose job should be to keep asking “prove it”, this is it.
The Committee meets on Thursday, 3 September 2026 at 6.00pm in the Council Chamber at Sandwell Council House, Oldbury.
You can find the meeting details here:
Audit and Risk Assurance Committee – Thursday, 3 September 2026, 6.00pm
The full agenda and reports pack is here:
Agenda and reports – Audit and Risk Assurance Committee
And, importantly, residents can watch the meeting live here:
WATCH LIVE – Audit and Risk Assurance Committee – Civico
I have also emailed members of the Committee before the meeting, setting out a number of concerns and questions arising from both this agenda and, crucially, the draft minutes of their previous meeting.
Because those previous minutes deserve a lot more attention than simply somebody saying, “Are we all happy they're a correct record?” followed by a chorus of “Agreed”.
The July meeting was a big one
The previous meeting took place on 27 July 2026.
In roughly 90 minutes, the Committee dealt with Sandwell's Draft Statement of Accounts, Grant Thornton's External Audit Plan, the strategy for rebuilding external audit assurance, the Annual Internal Audit Report, the Strategic Risk Register and the Annual Governance Statement.
That is quite a bit of important governance squeezed between 6pm and 7.30pm.
Now, meeting length alone proves absolutely nothing. You could have a brilliant 90-minute meeting or three hours of waffle.
The question is what scrutiny actually took place and, just as importantly, whether the official minutes demonstrate it.
And that is where things become rather interesting.
Six Limited Assurance audits
Internal Audit completed 25 reviews during 2025/26.
Three received Substantial Assurance, 16 received Reasonable Assurance and six received Limited Assurance.
Those six were not some obscure collection of paperclip inventories and tea-fund procedures.
They concerned Payroll, Housing Electrical Safety Inspections, Procurement and Contract Compliance, SEND Placement Costs, Sandwell Children's Trust's Financial Outturn and Boscobel Tenant Management Organisation.
That's almost one quarter of the assurance-rated audits receiving Limited Assurance.
Internal Audit also made 171 recommendations.
And then comes a number I think members really ought to concentrate on:
Only 54% of previous audit recommendations had been fully implemented.
Now, apparently all the recommendations have been “accepted by management”.
Lovely.
But accepting an audit recommendation is the easy bit.
I can accept that I should lose two stone, exercise every day, tidy the garage and finish everything on my to-do list by Friday.
That doesn't mean any of it has actually happened.
The real Audit Committee question should be:
How many recommendations have actually been implemented, how many are overdue, how many are Fundamental or Significant, and how many have been independently retested by Internal Audit to prove the problem has genuinely been fixed?
That is assurance.
Everything before that is an action plan.
Procurement – here we go again
The July minutes themselves acknowledge that procurement and contract compliance has been a recurring audit concern for a number of years.
A Procurement Board has now been established and a new Procurement Strategy is promised.
Good.
But we've had enough boards, strategies, plans and “journeys” over the years to wallpaper Sandwell Council House.
The test is not whether a Procurement Board exists.
The test is whether the underlying weaknesses have stopped.
Is the contract register complete? Are declarations of interest properly recorded? Are exemptions properly documented? Are signed contracts actually being retained? Are large contract awards being reported correctly? Are the requirements of the Procurement Act properly embedded?
And, most importantly:
When will Internal Audit go back and test it again?
Because saying “we've fixed it” and an auditor independently confirming “yes, you have” are two completely different things.
Housing electrical safety
One of those six Limited Assurance reports concerns Housing Transformation – Electrical Safety Inspections.
This isn't a filing-system problem.
This is resident safety.
The wider evidence identified delays around remedial work, incomplete records and issues around the scheduling and completion of electrical inspections.
Yet you would struggle to appreciate the seriousness of that by reading the July minutes.
Again, that doesn't necessarily mean members didn't ask questions. It means the official record does not show us much evidence that they did.
For September, I would like to know the simple numbers.
What percentage of council homes are currently compliant?
How many inspections are overdue?
How many remedial works remain outstanding?
What's the oldest case?
And has Internal Audit gone back and checked whether the controls now work?
That would tell residents considerably more than “management actions are in place”.
SEND – another red flag
SEND Placement Costs also received Limited Assurance.
This is particularly concerning because SEND demand and expenditure are themselves major strategic pressures for Sandwell.
The audit concerns included the quality of decision records and the audit trail around placement decisions and financial commitments.
Again, this is where the Committee should join the dots.
If SEND is simultaneously a major strategic risk and the controls around SEND placement expenditure receive Limited Assurance, that should surely attract some serious questioning.
Yet the July minutes preserve remarkably little detailed discussion of it.
Sandwell Children's Trust
Then we have Sandwell Children's Trust.
Its Financial Outturn audit also received Limited Assurance.
This followed the discovery that three manual payment runs totalling around £2.732 million had not been recorded in the ledger, contributing to a major late deterioration in the Trust's financial position.
There have since been changes and improvements, including the appointment of a new Head of Finance, and those should absolutely be recognised.
But again:
Have the new controls been independently tested?
That is the recurring theme here.
Not “we've introduced a process”.
Not “we've appointed somebody”.
Not “a board is overseeing it”.
Does it now work?
And then there's Boscobel
The Boscobel Tenant Management Organisation audit was another Limited Assurance review.
At the July meeting, officers said the findings would be shared with Boscobel and Riverside. When members asked whether the findings had actually been communicated to tenants, officers couldn't confirm that and said they would make further enquiries.
Well, that was July.
It's September.
What did those enquiries establish?
This is exactly the sort of small but important commitment that can vanish between meetings unless somebody follows it up.
It is also why I believe this Committee needs a proper public action tracker.
Who agreed to do what? By when? Is it complete? Who has verified it?
Simple stuff.
The bank reconciliation – September has arrived
The July minutes also record that changes to financial systems had affected the Council's bank reconciliation process.
Members were told that reconciliations through 31 March 2026 would be completed and available to the external auditors in September.
Well, here we are.
September.
So there should be a very straightforward question on Thursday evening:
Are they complete?
Not “nearly”.
Not “progressing”.
Not “we remain confident”.
Complete.
Reviewed.
Signed off.
And supplied to Grant Thornton.
If they aren't, members need to know why and whether that has consequences for the external audit timetable.
Four PFI financial models
Members were also told that four PFI financial models were undergoing specialist review and that the potential financial consequences could not yet be quantified.
Again, July was July.
Nobody should be criticised simply because specialist work hadn't finished at that point.
But September provides the obvious checkpoint.
Have the reviews finished?
Have accounting adjustments been identified?
Are any material?
Has Grant Thornton seen them?
This is how audit scrutiny should work: question, undertaking, deadline, answer.
Not question, undertaking, disappearance into the great municipal filing cabinet in the sky.
No contingency plan
Perhaps one of the most significant admissions in the July minutes is that no formal contingency arrangements were in place should the November external-audit milestone be missed.
Grant Thornton's strategy depends heavily upon completing the 2025/26 audit work so that historic assurance can then be rebuilt.
The Council's annual report correctly records that the statutory backstop for 2025/26 is 31 January 2027.
Yet the July minutes incorrectly describe 30 November 2026 as the statutory backstop deadline.
It isn't.
November is an extremely important operational milestone in the assurance-recovery programme, but the statutory backstop is January.
That might look like pedantry.
It isn't.
This is the Audit and Risk Assurance Committee.
Dates, numbers and audit terminology really ought to mean what they say.
And that isn't the only drafting problem
There are several peculiarities across the September documents.
The agenda profile says the Committee consists of eight elected members and three independent members, before listing 11 councillors and two independent members.
The Counter Fraud report gives the value of prevented Right to Buy discounts as £699,700 in one place and £669,700 elsewhere.
There is also a financial-year heading which appears to refer to 2024/25 within the 2025/26 results.
Then there is the July minute structure itself. The figures about 25 Internal Audit reviews, six Limited Assurance reports, 171 recommendations and 54% implementation are placed under the minute dealing with Grant Thornton's Regaining Assurance Strategy, when they appear to belong to the following Annual Internal Audit Report item.
None of those things individually brings Sandwell crashing to the ground.
Mistakes happen.
But there is a certain irony when the paperwork of the Audit and Risk Assurance Committee needs its own quality assurance.
Strategic risks... and apparently AI
The Strategic Risk Register considered in July included serious issues involving Adult Social Care and Integrated Care Board changes, financial sustainability, budget management, SEND, housing, cyber security, business continuity and community cohesion.
So what detailed discussion survives in the official minutes?
Artificial Intelligence.
We are told Sandwell has an AI Governance Policy, that it gets reviewed and that training materials are available.
Fine.
AI is worth considering.
But if members also subjected the Council's major financial, housing, SEND and adult social care risks to robust challenge, why doesn't the public record show us?
That is not an accusation.
It is a perfectly reasonable question about the quality of the Committee's minutes.
“Effective and fit for purpose”
The Annual Governance Statement concluded that Sandwell's governance arrangements remained “effective and fit for purpose”.
At the same time, it identified six areas requiring continuing improvement, including financial sustainability, housing governance and regulatory compliance, governance of companies and partnerships, compliance with governance procedures and organisational capacity.
Again, maybe that overall conclusion is justified.
But the Audit Committee ought to test it.
How does “effective and fit for purpose” sit alongside six Limited Assurance audits, recurring procurement weaknesses and only 54% implementation of previous audit recommendations?
There may be a perfectly good answer.
Ask for it.
That's what assurance means.
Counter Fraud deserves credit
Not everything in this week's pack should be greeted with a raised eyebrow.
The Annual Counter Fraud Report contains some genuinely strong results.
During 2025/26 the team reports 281 completed investigations, 29 prosecutions, 42 council properties recovered, 41 housing applications cancelled before allocation and 10 Right to Buy purchases prevented.
The reported value of identified/prevented fraud and associated savings has increased significantly.
That work deserves recognition.
But good scrutiny doesn't stop because a report contains good news.
I still want the £699,700/£669,700 discrepancy corrected.
And where the report describes around £916,000 as actual or non-notional value, I'd like members to establish how much represents money actually recovered into the Council's accounts, how much is an established overpayment, and how much represents expenditure or discounts prevented.
They're all valuable outcomes.
They're just not the same thing.
8,140 National Fraud Initiative matches
The National Fraud Initiative generated 8,140 potential matches.
The report quite properly explains that a match is not itself evidence of fraud.
What would be useful is the other half of the story.
How many have been reviewed?
How many led to investigations?
How many resulted in fraud or error being established?
How many produced recoveries?
That would turn an activity figure into an outcome measure.
I've written to the Committee
Ahead of Thursday's meeting, I have sent Committee members a detailed email highlighting these issues and asking them to pursue the outstanding questions.
This isn't about trying to catch councillors or officers out.
I've said before that I want Sandwell Council to improve and I will give credit where it is due.
But being a critical friend does not mean sitting quietly while a report tells us everything is progressing nicely.
Sometimes friendship involves asking awkward questions.
And an Audit Committee without awkward questions is basically a very expensive book club.
One simple improvement
There is something the Committee could introduce almost immediately that would make a real difference.
Publish a standing Audit and Risk Assurance Action Tracker with every agenda.
For every significant audit recommendation or undertaking, show who owns it, the original deadline, current status, whether management says it is complete and — most importantly — whether Internal or External Audit has independently verified completion.
Then residents and Committee members could see the difference between:
PROMISED → DONE → VERIFIED.
At the moment, too much public-sector reporting stops somewhere around the first word.
Thursday should be about evidence
There is undoubtedly some positive progress within Sandwell's governance arrangements.
The Counter Fraud results are strong.
The Council got its draft accounts published on time.
Grant Thornton has a route towards restoring full audit assurance.
Internal Audit remains active and is openly identifying serious weaknesses rather than pretending they don't exist.
All of that matters.
But so do six Limited Assurance audits, 171 recommendations, recurring procurement problems, housing safety concerns, SEND controls, Children's Trust finances, unresolved audit-recovery issues and a previous recommendation implementation rate of only 54%.
The Committee's job isn't to panic about those things.
Nor is its job to wave them through because an action plan exists.
Its job is to establish whether the controls actually work.
So when the Committee meets at 6.00pm on Thursday 3 September, I hope members keep returning to one very simple question:
“Show us the evidence.”
Because that, surely, is what audit and assurance is supposed to be about.
Meeting information
Audit and Risk Assurance Committee
Thursday, 3 September 2026 – 6.00pm
Watch the meeting LIVE on Civico
#Sandwell #SandwellCouncil #Audit #Governance #Accountability #Transparency #LocalGovernment #CounterFraud #SEND #Housing #Procurement #SandwellInsight
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