Podcast transcript

This is Anne McCubbin talking with John Baillie, Chair of the Accounts Commission, about the Best Value audit report and findings on Aberdeenshire Council.

John, how’s the council doing overall?

The council has turned in a sound performance. But it now needs to lift its eyes a bit to the horizon and think more strategically in the medium to long-term.

So, you say ‘a sound performance’. What’s it doing particularly well?

It has provided a good quality of service in key areas such as education, housing and social work. And it is committed to working with, and is working well with, other organisations in the area.

It has sound financial control. It has an effective decentralisation policy and procedure and also has good decision making processes.

And what does it need to improve?

The council has been very much performance-focused and it now needs to look a bit further ahead to the medium to longer term and think more strategically.

But also, more specifically, there are areas for improvement in performance, particularly in areas such as continuous improvement and looking at services and the extent to which these should be tested for competitiveness against the market and other benchmarks. 

Also the asset management processes do need to be addressed more carefully and fully. And risk management needs to be more embedded in most of the decisions the council needs to take. Finally, having mentioned the strategic issue, there is a particular issue there for long term financial planning. 

I think local people will be particularly interested to know how you think this report and findings compare to those for Aberdeen City Council…

That’s a question that I think a number of people, and especially local people, would want to know the answer to. However this comparison is not something we do between councils anywhere in Scotland. 

Councils are different in nature right across Scotland and this is for a variety of reasons - geographical dispersion, deprivation and many other things. So we do not compare one council with another.

Another topic hitting the headlines locally is the Trump Inquiry. Do your report and findings comment at all on the issues raised there?
 
Since the original Trump application was turned down the council has changed its procedures so any application which has a regional or national dimension is now considered by all councillors, as a whole rather than, as was the case, simply the area committee.

That is really the only directly related issue in the report concerning Trump.

More generally, the council has among the highest number of planning applications of any council in Scotland. But it is taking longer to process these than it and we would like. Among the reasons the council give us for this delay is the difficulty in recruiting and then in retaining qualified planning staff. This is something that they are addressing currently, but it nonetheless remains a problem at the moment.

Finally, what are the next steps for the audit work at Aberdeenshire council?

The council is committed to the Best Value process and so we would expect them to adopt our findings and the improvement agenda included in the Controller of Audit’s report. And then to proceed with implementation of both.

We will continue to monitor progress with implementation, as we do for all councils, via the local auditor who will report to us on a regular basis.

John, thanks very much.