Agenda item

Two Questions on Notice were considered in accordance with Council Procedure Rule 9.

Section 106 Funding

Councillor Sharon Harvey asked the Leader the following Question on Notice:

“How much section 106 money has been raised during this financial year, and what current and future projects will this fund?”

The Leader responded by explaining that Section 106 agreements were legal obligations entered into only where it was necessary to mitigate the impacts of a development proposal, to make it acceptable in planning terms. As a result of this criteria, so far during the 2022/23 financial year, no Section 106 agreements had been required to enable the granting of planning permission in the Borough. However, monies had been received during the financial year as a result of the trigger points being met for Section 106 agreements that had been attached to planning permissions granted in earlier financial years.

So far, in the 2022/23 financial year, a total of £115,403.63 had been received by the Council for Section 106 obligations.  Specifically, £19,994.47 had been received by the Council to be forwarded to Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust (WAHT) as funding towards acute and planned healthcare services.   A further £72,366.04 had been received towards mitigation for open space, play and sports facilities. This would fund projects at Glover Street, Bromsgrove Road, Batchley Pond, Rowan Crescent, Heronfield Close and Petton Close/Costers Lane.  In addition, £17,764.32 had been received for improvements to the public realm in Redditch town centre and would contribute to funding of The Canopies project.  A further £3,016.80 had been received to cover the cost of providing bins to new dwellings on Edward Street. 

There was a £2,262 monitoring fee that had been received to fund the cost of officers monitoring and reporting on Section 106 agreements. Since 2019, there had been a requirement to submit a monitoring report to Government in December each year known as the Infrastructure Funding Statement (IFS). The IFS for 2021-22 was in the process of being prepared to be reported in December and would be uploaded to the Council's website. The IFS for 2020-21 was already available to view on the Council's website.

Additional background information was also provided by the Leader in response to this Question on Notice.  This provided the following breakdown in detail for each development project:

·             19/00134/FUL land at Ipsley Street:

-        £6,438.06 for open space at Glover Street.

-        £20,563.16 for play at Glover Street.

-        £8,120.46 for sports at Redditch Cricket, Hockey and Rugby Club.

·             19/01630/FUL St Benedict's Social Club, Rowan Road:

-        £25,927.29 total index link for contributions for open spaces, sport, play and pitches.

-        £4,864.18 (plus index linking) for open spaces and sport at Batchley Pond.

-        £14,488.80 (plus index linking) for play at Rowan Crescent.

-        £3,451.57 (plus index linking) for pitches at Rowan Crescent.

·             20/01060/FUL Land adjacent to Clive Works, Edward Street:

-        Monitoring fee £2,262.

-        Town centre contribution £6,813.08.

-        Waste and recycling contribution - £3,016.80 – to fund the cost of providing bins to the new dwellings

·             20/00044/FUL Churchill Medical Centre, Tanhouse Lane:

-        £6,619.88 open spaces at Heronfield Close play area.

-        £4,697.19 pitches at Petton Close / Costers Lane.

-        £10,951.24 town centre public realm improvements to Market Place/Church Green.

-        Also £19,994.47 for Worcestershire NHS trust to be applied towards acute and planned healthcare.

Councillor Harvey subsequently asked the following supplementary question:

“A few months ago, it was reported that Section 106 money might be a useful funding stream to support bus services.  Would you consider putting this forward for bus services in the future?”

The Leader answered this question by commenting that Section 106 funding agreements were considered on a case-by-case basis in relation to planning applications.  Should a request be received from local bus operators for Section 106 funding in relation to a planning application, and should this request be considered relevant to the application, then this could potentially occur.

Section 24 Notice – Finance System

Councillor Joe Baker asked the Leader the following Question on Notice:

“Now that the controlling group has led us into another section 24 notice. Can the leader explain why measures were not in place to ensure if the new system failed that our accounts would still run smoothly with an implemented back up plan to enable the audit was done on time?”

The Leader responded by commenting that the Council’s previous financial system and cash receipting system were both at the end of their useful lives in 2018.  A tender process had been undertaken for the delivery of a replacement System and Tech1 were the successful bidder via a Crown Commercial Services (CCS) G Cloud mini competition process.

Any replacement of a Council’s financial system was a complicated process, so a programme team was established to ensure an implementation plan was timetabled and delivered.

It had not been possible to dual run an implementation of a financial system alongside an older system; there had to be full transfer on a set date to the new financial system.   For the transfer from the old to the new system to take place, a “go live” checklist needed to be completed to the appropriate standard.  This included months of testing of the configuration in various scenarios.  In the period just before the transfer date, a process was then followed to copy the data as at that date from the old system to the new system.  Members were asked to note that the majority of this process was run remotely as the Council was operating under Covid-19 restrictions for much of the implementation period, which was a new way of working for everyone.

Initially, the finance part of the system, not HR and Payroll, was due to go live in the Autumn of 2020 but the “go live” checklist was not approved as completed to the appropriate standard by the board and so the implementation was delayed until 8^th February 2021.  At this time, the programme team approved the checklist and agreed that it had been completed to the appropriate standard and the system went live.

After implementation on the 8^th February 2021, there was another important factor in the delivery of the financial system to a steady state.  For various reasons, all of the Corporate Finance Team left the organisation.  This meant that a new team needed to be recruited.  The Council were not successful with the process in the autumn of 2021 and only three new staff joined at that time.  However, following the campaign in the spring of 2022, another 10 staff were recruited.  This meant that by August 2022, the Council were back to a working establishment of Finance staff.  It should be noted that in this period there had been an acute issue in availability of finance staff both for Councils and for Auditors. It would have been impossible to deliver a full set of accounts without a finance team in place, whatever the Council’s finance system.  

The system was working in all aspects apart from cash receipting, and Members were advised that the Council was the only implementer to date of the Tech1 cash receipting solution (alongside Bromsgrove District Council). Significant work had been undertaken by both the Council and Tech1 to correct this over the previous four months and the final corrections went live over the weekend of the 5^th and 6^th November 2022.

Members were asked to note that 2020 and 2021 were years when the Council was subject to Covid-19 restrictions.  During this period, the Council delivered Covid-19 support to its stakeholders and completed all the associated assurance requirements for the Government for the additional support granted.

The Leader concluded by commenting that, once the Council made the decision to go live with a new system it had to move to using that system and there could be no parallel running.  The authority had undertaken new system implementation during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and, following the launch of the system, lost the Corporate Finance Team that would have taken the system through to steady state running. This would have been the team that undertook the corrections of defects/errors and delivered the financial statements.  Now that the team was up to capacity and the system could be fully supported, the Council had resolved the cash receipting issues and were moving to provide draft 2020/21 accounts by the end of November 2022.

Councillor Joe Baker subsequently asked the following supplementary question:

“Now that the Section 24 Notice is in place and given the Leader implemented an untested finance system, will he and the Portfolio Holder for Finance and Enabling apologise for the embarrassment this has caused to the Council?”

The Leader replied by commenting that nobody could have foreseen the combination of factors that contributed to the delays in submitting the Council’s 2020-21 accounts.  The Council had been open and transparent about the causes and a lot of work had been undertaken to address this.  There was also no option to run different finance systems in parallel meaning that the Council could not fall back on the earlier system.  In this context, the Leader advised that he did not feel that anybody needed to apologise.