Slough council must address gap in its senior leadership team for stability, meeting hears

Slough council is ‘wasting time’ on transformation if it does not swiftly address instability in its adult services workforce, a councillor has said.

The council is generating a plan for managing risks but is missing an important one – the stability of its senior leadership team, the councillor thinks.

At an audit and corporate governance committee meeting on Wednesday (March 11), an internal audit plan for 2026/27 was presented to councillors.

This breaks down how a local authority looks to manage risk and governance over its services.

Temporary accommodation, children’s services and adult social care have been putting pressure on the cash-strapped council – and audits look into these.

An audit of James Elliman Homes, a council-owned housing company which has been posing a risk to the local authority, is considered a ‘high priority’.

The audit plan is subject to the council hiring an internal auditor during the year. This has been accounted for in the 2026/27 budget.

Councillor Frank O’Kelly (Lib Dem, Cippenham Village) said: “[An internal audit] is an expensive thing to have.

“However, it’s a much more expensive thing not to have. Any risked resource in internal audit has to be flagged as soon as possible.”

But the councillor said there is an important risk missing in the plan – namely the stability of the senior leadership team.

The council currently has an interim head of internal audit and interim head of transformation finance, the meeting heard.

The council ‘just lost’ a head of adult services – and this is ‘potentially leading to a failure of governance’, Cllr O’Kelly said.

“Unless we sort ourselves out at the top, we’re wasting our time with the transformation,” he said.

“There is something that we can do better. We can support people better, we can train people better, we can offer a better environment – whatever that might be.

“But if I worked here as a corporate entity, I would be very concerned that my best people are moving on somewhere else.

“We have a very temporary stability at the moment. If your best people are moving on all the time, you’re never going to have a foundation.”

He added that he will be writing to the council’s CEO about this, because the cost of not addressing it is ‘too high’.

The latest risk report showed nine ‘high’ corporate risks, including failure to provide safe temporary accommodation and failure to meet adult social care demand within the budget.

Cllr O’Kelly asked whether the lessons from these corporate risk reports are actually being embedded into the council’s departments.

William Green, Slough’s risk management consultant, said: “[The work] is not fully embedded, but we are getting there.”

Councillor Mohammed Nazir (Lib Dem, Manor Park and Stoke) asked for reassurance that the audit plan will be delivered, as internal audits are ‘an important function’.

Ian Kirby, Slough’s head of internal audit, reassured councillors that the plan is ‘proportionate and deliverable’.

He told the meeting: “The plan is not fixed, we can change it as risks emerge. We have some flexibility to do that.”