Compliance reviews

As part of our commitment to ensuring we are delivering our responsibilities, we built upon and continued to develop a series of internal reviews which look at our compliance with the Board’s General Rules, the Framework Agreement and the Act.

The reviews are intended to highlight any gaps in terms of our delivery and where we can make improvements.

The details and outcomes of these reviews are provided to the Audit Committee, which discusses and raises queries about each of the reviews that have been undertaken.

To date these reviews have confirmed that we are delivering our responsibilities. Notwithstanding this, we have highlighted several action points and areas where would could improve further and we will take these forward in 2017.

Transparency 

Both the Board and Staff have continued to work on improving our transparency. Examples of how we are continuing to achieve this include:

  • Conducting the majority of Board business in open session, publishing the Board’s agenda, papers and minutes via our website;
  • Producing timely, up-to-date information, either annually or biannually, about our key activities and trends, and measuring these against our performance indicators;
  • Publishing our annual business plan and reporting on the delivery and achievement of the objectives within the plan at the mid-year and the year-end points;
  • Reviewing and updating our Publication Scheme;
  • Complying with Government expectations, including the publication of all ARB payments over £500, publishing Board members’ and Registrar’s expenses; and
  • Publishing Board members’ biographies and a Register of Interests.

In 2015 we conducted a review of ARB’s commitment to transparency, one of the outcomes of this was to update the organisation’s Publication Scheme in 2016. This exercise was undertaken, as planned, to ensure that the Scheme continues to comply with the advice and guidance from the Information Commissioners Office.

Governance Statement

The Financial Statements section of this report, which has been signed off by our auditors, contains a governance statement from Karen Holmes, our Accounting Officer, and can be found here.