Members were led through the report of the External Auditor by Darren Wells, Grant Thornton, on the progress in delivering Grant Thornton’s responsibilities to the Council, in addition to a summary of emerging national issues and developments relevant to the Council.

The following points were highlighted for Members’ attention:

•     work on the 2022/23 audit had not yet started;

•     work on assessing the Council’s arrangements for Value for Money was in progress and would be reported to the December meeting;

•     work on the 2021/22 financial statements was complete except for gaining assurance from East Sussex Pension Fund on the testing of triennial valuation and the challenge on the valuations on land in Blackfriars;

•     low capacity in council finance teams and the failure to deal with historic accounting issues meant that the current September deadline for publication of audited local authority accounts in England had not been met;

•     a range of proposals and actions to address the backlog of local audits in England had been set out by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).  These included setting statutory deadlines and issuing qualifications and disclaimers of opinion in the short term;

•     in addition, DLUHC was considering whether legislative change was needed to set new statutory deadlines for local bodies to publish accounts to mirror the proposed changes to the Code of Audit Practice;

•     the Local Government Pension Scheme was in a stronger position than three years ago to meet future member benefits;

•     sustainability reporting (recording and disclosure of an organisation’s environmental impact caused by its activities) was in its infancy.  It had been widely adopted in the private sector, but take up in the public sector was slow; and

•     more than a third of all UK government spending on goods and services was spent by local government, therefore it was important that councils had effective arrangements for procurement and contract management. Grant Thornton had reviewed a number of reports, inspections and interventions issued by a number of firms and issued a report to highlight some common themes for Members and officers to consider.

Members were given the opportunity to ask questions and the following points were noted during the discussions:

•     delays to the East Sussex Pension Fund audit were due to staff shortages at East Sussex, but progress had been made;

•     the land at Blackfriars needed to be shown as investment for development purposes rather than as a valuation in the Council’s accounts;

•     commercial negotiations were underway regarding one of the sites in Mount View Street;

•     Grant Thornton advised that the auditing of the Council’s 2022/23 accounts should be completed fairly quickly; and

•     Rother District Council’s accounts audits appeared to be further forward than other local authorities.

RESOLVED: That the report be noted.

(When it first became apparent, Councillor J. Barnes declared a personal interest in this matter as a founding Member of the Rother DC Housing Company Ltd, and in accordance with the Members’ Code of Conduct remained in the room during the consideration thereof.)