Scottish Government relationships with public bodies: progress review

Annex C: Example of development work on DG Communities assurance arrangements

1. The issues highlighted and the recommendations in this section on assurance will mostly likely be familiar to DGs and their teams, and there will already be work underway in many areas to address them. Sharing good practice between DG areas will be really important, and the Public Bodies Unit can assist in that process if they have a nominated lead person to work with from each team. To start the process of sharing practice, some recent development work on DG assurance arrangements is included here as an example. This work has been carried out by Sarah O'Donnell on a secondment from her role as Director of Finance and Contractual Services at the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, and demonstrates the potential value of drawing on expertise from public bodies.

2. Sarah and the DG Communities team have developed an approach based on the 'Three lines of assurance' model that will already be familiar to DGs – and which is summarised for reference in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3: Three lines of assurance model

First Line Management consists of:

• Regular Team and 1-1 Meetings
• Risk Registers and Action Plans
• Progress on Objective, Action Plans
• Peer/Quality Review
• Self Assessments
• Annual Assurance Statements

Second Line Management consists of:

• Financial Management Reporting
• People Reporting
• Performance Reporting
• Programme and Project Assurance
• Digital Assurance
• Corporate Scrutiny and Challenge

Third Line Management consists of:

• Internal Audit/Gateway Review
• Staff Opinions
• Partners and other External Stakeholders
• General Public and Service Users
• External Advisory Board?
• Audit Scotland
• External Benchmarking and Accreditation

3. To apply this model in DG Communities, a draft assurance checklist has been developed covering five broad areas:

A. People resources

B. Financial resources

C. Policy & delivery

D. Strategic partnerships

E. Public/user involvement

This document provides a template for working through all of the key questions identified for each area, considering for each an assessment of current performance, the level of confidence in the assessment, sources of assurance and what could be done to increase the confidence if required. Section D on strategic partnerships covers relationships with public bodies. An extract from the current draft of the document for that area is shown in the table below.

4. The assurance checklist is one tool within a wider approach which recognizes that overall assurance requires:

• that success is well-defined, measured and reported;
• a culture of openness, trust and transparency;
• a process of assurance mapping and reporting; and
• a learning mindset.

Sarah and the DG Communities team are still developing the full approach and would be happy to share more information about the work that they are doing with others.