Agenda item

The Committee were presented with a report that provided an update on Direct Payments following a review of the audit undertaken in the 2017/18 Financial Year. Officers informed the Committee that following a limited assurance opinion, a lot of work had been done in this area and good progress was being made and was on track to be removed from the Annual Governance Statement.

 Debbie Crohn, Head of Service, Care Management was in attendance at the meeting, along with Anthony Patterson, Professional Business Support, who looked to provide further updates where needed and endeavoured to answer any queries put forward by Members.

Questions were raised with regard to a number of issues, most of which largely centred on whether the debts identified and raised were recoverable or not. Members were assured that whilst there was a lot of identified debt, the Council was looking to recoup as much of this as possible, although some would be written off due to being irrecoverable. However, in the future they were looking at reducing the occurrence of debt in the first place.  This was already progressing through moving more people onto prepayment card accounts which would also allow the Council to claw back any money unused in the event of death. Additional staff were being used for a short period to work on recovering the outstanding debts more quickly than the existing resources allowed, reviewing packages where budgets were not being spent, and supporting people receiving Direct Payments until the Direct Payment Service was fully operational.

A further action was to create an identified Direct Payment Champion within each locality team. One Member raised a concern that this was in fact just devolving responsibility from one area to another. However, assurance was given that the Champions were experts in their fields, and were more widely supported by people within their teams to assist and ensure that the public had adequate guidance in this area. It was also noted that the Citizens Advice Bureau offered a lot of support to local people, and links in this area were being extended with a view to providing additional help. A lot of positive engagement was taking place, which complemented the work undertaken by Direct Payments Team and long term would be of benefit to all. Members applauded the work being done and looked forward to seeing the progress made in the future.

Queries were raised with regard to any timescales that the Team had in place for the recovery of debt, and were informed that additional actions were due to be put in place very soon. With regard to the ongoing implementation of the new DIPS system, it was considered that once fully operational would be much more efficient and following implementation could be relied on to work effectively.

From the Chair, Councillor R. Allan Jones thanked Officers for their update, but based on a number of issues still unresolved, asked for a further update at a future meeting.

            RESOLVED that

1)    An update report be provided to the Audit Committee in 6 months with regard to any further progress made; and

2)    The Audit Committee note the content of the report, and the actions taken, along with any outstanding actions still to be resolved.