Garry Fitton, Chief Financial Officer

Garry Fitton, Chief Financial Officer

I’m a Chartered Accountant with over 15 years’ experience in the sector and have the responsibility for the areas of Finance, Procurement, Estates and Motor Fleet for Achieve together.

I enjoy working collaboratively and am proud that my experiences have enabled me to establish clear and easy to understand reporting processes. This further improves the support we provide our homes to deliver sustainable quality care. A great aspect of my role is engaging with and involving my team as much as possible in the ongoing training and embedding of process to ensure that these strong controls are passed on consistently throughout our organisation.

As our funding comes from public bodies, I am also very committed to ensuring that our operational teams and homes are involved regularly in the budget process. This ensures that we work within the financial constraints of our contracts whilst delivering the sustainable high-quality support for those entrusted to our care. I am very proud of the way in which we have recruited a finance team who are approachable and understand the difficult roles performed by each of our fellow team members.

Transparency is everything in finance and we endeavour to be open and honest in everything that we do.  We have a robust internal audit process backed up by an external audit from our auditors KPMG. We also work closely with the Market Oversight team within CQC.

Data and the visibility of key management information is helping us manage the business and will help us to drive the business forwards making evidence-based decisions. What is supporting that is the development of a safe, secure IT network and systems that can help us keep people safe, offer insight that will lead to impactful decision making and keep everyone better connected across our organisation.

As Achieve together continues to grow, my role and expertise in mergers and acquisitions enables me to work closely with our Investors and Banks to give them the confidence to invest in us for the future. We believe that investment in the building and maintenance of our homes and services is paramount. Alongside the investment in people, training, equipment and systems, this is what provides safe, secure environments for the people we support now and in the future, meeting and exceeding best practice.

As a part of this we aim to deliver our estates and maintenance services through an in-house team whenever possible. This is important to us, as it means that our Estates Operatives get to know the people we support, and they understand and respect that they are working in their homes. We are also able to benchmark, deliver and improve the high-quality workmanship that we expect. When we do need to use external suppliers, our procurement team are on hand to ensure that we receive the highest quality services for the best possible price.