County’s accounts open to public inspection

Elgan Hearn, Local democracy reporter

People are able to inspect a county borough’s draft accounts from the last year for the next couple of weeks.

At a meeting of Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council’s Governance and Audit committee on Monday, 9 March, councillors and independent lay members were given an update on the progress being made to complete work on the accounts for 2024/2025.

Senior finance business partner Tony Hagland said: “As committee knows there have been significant delays in the statement of accounts for a number of previous years and this has had a consequential impact on the production of the 2024/2025 statement.”

He said that the first draft should have been ready by May 31, 2025, and for Audit Wales to have audited the accounts by July 31, 2025.

The Welsh Government agreed to extend the deadline to producing the draft by June 30, 2025, and completion of the final audited accounts by October 31.

Mr Hagland said: “Unfortunately we didn’t meet any of those deadlines.

“The reasons were due to issues arising from previous years and audits and a number of complex accounting issues needed to be resolved and corrections to the previous year.”

He added that there had been a reliance on a small number of “specialist staff” which had created “pressure points, bottlenecks and delays” in the production of the accounts.

Mr Hagland continued: “We are now into a period of public inspection as required, it has been advertised and is taking place between March 2 and March 27.

“After which point the call of audit commences and the appointed auditor will be able to take any objections or comments from members of the public and that date has been set as March 30.”

Committee chairwoman and lay member Cheryl Hucker said: “It was anticipated that we would get this through in the autumn, it is disappointing that we haven’t achieved that, but I accept and understand why.

“Playing catch-up is hard and it’s been a relentless catch-up for the team in Blaenau Gwent.

“Hopefully we will be able to move forward, and we’ll see this back in its final version soon.”

This year’s issues have seen a £100 million accounting error for the Greater Gwent pension fund which is administered by Torfaen County Borough Council on behalf of Blaenau Gwent and several other public bodies in South East Wales.

In previous years Blaenau Gwent have been dealing with issues such as the £70 million Welsh Government loan for work to upgrade the railway line between Ebbw Vale and Newport, as well as the decommissioning of assets for Silent Valley Waste Services and the lack of accurate valuations for council assets.