Finance

Finance

When I was elected to chair the Community and Children’s Services committee, I became much more involved with budgeting, procurement and operations of a portion of the Corporation. It soon became apparent that all of this needed significant improvement. I have been focussed on accomplishing reforms in all of these areas and have worked to be on the committees necessary to effect reform. This is why I serve on the following committees:

•  Finance Committee (Deputy Chairman) – responsible for budgets

• Investment Committee – responsible for generating returns to fund operations

• Policy and Resources Committee – the Corporations primary policy committee

•  Resource Allocation Sub (Policy and Resources) Committee – responsible for resource allocation decisions within budgets set by the Finance Committee

• Capital Buildings Board – responsible for the largest capital projects. Now, this is concerned with delivering the Salisbury Square Court and Police project

•  Audit and Risk Management Committee – responsible for risk management, including internal audit, as well as audits of the financials

• Digital Services Committee – responsible for digital operations and security, including all data compliance. The largest current project is a new Enterprise Resource Planning system

• Projects and Procurement Sub-Committee (Chair) – responsible for reforming all procurement and projects practices of the Corporation

• Efficiency and Performance (Finance) Working Party – performs deep dives on parts of the organisation having budget problems

Principal Accomplishments

• • Providing £50 million for urgent fire safety work on our Housing Estates

  • Budgeting for a 5 year renewal program at the Barbican Arts Centre

  • Budgeting for a substantial increase in homeless support and social care

  • Budgeting for attention to the long neglected operational property maintenance backlog

  • Budgeting for increased street cleaning

  • Investment in a solar farm to secure renewable energy 

My current focus is on

• Reforming our project procedures to dramatically improve efficiency and radically altering our procurement procedures. Those procurements funded with local authority funds must comply fully with the new Procurement Act in the most efficient way possible. The majority of our procurements are not funded with local authority funds and should be free to use more efficient commercial procedures.

• Improving budgeting to reflect actual choices based on our priorities rather than just inflation adjusting last year’s budget.

• Improving returns on investments. Like our budgeting, the allocation of investments has not had a serious review for some years. We have reviewed property allocations and changes are being made. The review of equity and other financial investments has just begun.

• Delivery of the ERP programme. I sit on the member working group that is attempting to ensure that we modify our ways of working to properly use the program we have selected, rather than trying to modify the new system to meet our current ways of working.