by Trevor Bevins, Local Democracy Reporting Service.
Dorset Council is continuing to tighten up its management controls – after a serious breach over contracts in 2024, which led to the dismissal of 11 interim officers.
The South West Audit Partnership (SWAP) last year identified systemic failures in the council’s Building Health and Safety Compliance programme between 2022 and 2024 where an initial budget of £4m ballooned to around £13million without proper Cabinet approval or a documented business case.
Since then the authority has been tightening up on all areas – although a meeting heard this week there were still some concerns.
Colehill & Wimborne Minster East councillor Andy Todd told an audit and governance meeting this week (Monday evening) that he believed the council could be at risk of substantial fines from the Information Commissioner’s Office for having not yet dealt with 36,000 personal records held on paper.
He called for faster action to clear the backlog and asked for the risk rating of the issue to be increased to indicate the risk.
Cllr Todd said he was concerned that a council report seemed to suggest it might be two years before it was resolved, yet it had already been seven years since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into being.
He told the committee that if the council had breached the regulations it could be open to a fine of 4% of its turnover, which might run into millions of pounds.
“Given the teeth that the Information Commissioner has maybe we should revisit this quicker than the two years suggested,” he said.
But officers said the issue was not being ignored and would not have to wait for two years to be concluded.
Sally White, the assistant director of SWAP told councillors her team would revisit the subject on a regular basis and would be chasing to ensure the necessary actions were being taken.
The meeting heard that other audit and governance issues across the council were now largely up to date although more training is about to be introduced on the authority’s whistleblowing policies – where staff are encouraged to disclose wrongdoing, or negligence, without fear of personal repercussions.
The committee also backed a call for a report into how artificial intelligence technology might present a risk to the council by manipulation of the images and/or audio on its streaming of meetings and whether council documents, published online, might be at risk of being altered.
