Audit Wales tells Flintshire Council to move faster on transformation or risk annual savings treadmill
Wales’s public spending watchdog has warned that Flintshire County Council’s plan to overhaul how it operates is too slow and too short-term to tackle a budget gap of £29 million.
Audit Wales, in its annual summary of work at the council published this month, found the transformation programme lacks the pace and scale needed to sustainably manage the council’s financial pressures.
The watchdog warned that without change, the council risks being locked into year-on-year savings searches rather than addressing the underlying problem.
The council estimates a budget gap of £29 million for 2026-27, with a similar shortfall forecast for 2027-28.
Audit Wales said the council had responded to years of financial pressure by making significant savings, but those cuts leave it with fewer options to find further reductions from existing services.
Its current transformation approach, the watchdog found, is short-term, and the pace of implementation does not provide assurance the programme will allow the council to set balanced budgets sustainably.
If the council fails to implement its transformation strategy at sufficient pace and scale, Audit Wales warned, it risks continuing to rely on an annual process of identifying savings that hinders its ability to plan strategically.
The watchdog also found the council lacks a consistent corporate framework for managing all its partnerships, despite strengthening its strategic intent for partnership working.
Audit Wales made two formal recommendations on partnership oversight, covering the definition and governance of partnerships and the development of a framework to assess whether they are delivering value for money.
The transformation concerns were set out in a separate letter to the council’s chief executive rather than in a formal report.
The findings stand in contrast to a clean bill of health on the council’s finances.
Audit Wales gave Flintshire’s 2024-25 accounts an unqualified opinion — the best possible outcome — after the council submitted its draft accounts before the 30 June 2025 statutory deadline.
The audit was completed before the 31 October deadline.
There were no misstatements, no errors requiring correction and no weaknesses in financial controls.
That record puts Flintshire among a shrinking group of Welsh councils managing their accounts properly.
Auditor General for Wales Adrian Crompton has separately written to every council chief executive warning that the picture across Welsh local government is worsening, with fewer than six in ten local government bodies meeting last year’s accounts deadline, down from more than two-thirds the year before.
The annual summary will be presented to the council’s Governance and Audit Committee at a meeting in Ewloe on Wednesday.
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