Friday 5 February 2010

This week has been dominated for me by our preparations for the 2010-11 budget and our Use of Resources assessment which will take place in March.

The budget will be considered by Cabinet next week and then debated and approved by Council later in the month. The Finance teams have been pulling this together for several months with the support of all of the departments. It's been a slick process this year and the overall result is, I think excellent. More details of the content and highlights in future blogs as the budget is reviewed by members and approved.

Our Use of Resources assessment, conducted by our external auditors - KPMG is an important piece of work. We were assessed as a 2 score last year (out of 4), on a harder assessment regime introduced for the first time. I'm seeking to secure a 3 score this year, and to achieve this about twenty of us are preparing case studies and key lines of enquiry (sometimes called KLOEs) to demonstrate the progress that we've made in the last year.

One key part of this work is our updated anti fraud and corruption policy. This will be shared with the whole organisation on The Wire today and highlights for all staff our policies and procedures around fraud and corruption. I encourage you all to read this short document to familiarise yourselves with the contents and changes.

Yesterday, The Service Directors and I spent some time together working on the Business Plan for Resources for the next four years. This work, to be published in early April sets out how we will deliver the objectives in the Corporate Plan and importantly summarises the likely changes which we will all be involved in over the coming years. More of this too in future blogs.

Thanks for reading, have a good weekend and talk again next week