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The Councils Improvement Agenda

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Awareness of the Borough's past is important in setting the framework for its future. Regaining lost prosperity and re-establishing Barnsley as a sustainable and expanding economic centre within a region full of similar towns and challenges is no mean undertaking, and one the Council cannot achieve alone. Close and positive work with bodies such as the Police, Health Authority, and the business and voluntary sectors, is key to achieving success in retaining the best of the Borough's cultural heritage whilst gearing up for, and actively supporting, regeneration.

The Council has an important part to play in delivering this agenda, and takes its role as a community leader very seriously. It has therefore made significant efforts to transform the way it operates, its accessibility and the way in which it seeks to mobilise the efforts of other local partners to continuously improve the quality of life for local residents.

A Vision for the Borough

With the past in mind and the ambitions for the future clear, the Local Strategic Partnership, "One Barnsley" (which comprises all the key local agencies and is chaired by the Leader of the Council) has developed an over-arching vision for the Borough. This states that by 2010, all partners want Barnsley to be a place of:

Opportunity - where access to good employment and other opportunities is matched by a culture of enterprise and success.
Prosperity - where individuals and families are able to enjoy a good standard of living.
Community - where people support and help each other.
Compassion - where everyone is valued and accepted.
Security - where people are safe and secure and live in a clean, healthy and comfortable environment.
Good Health - where people are healthy, active and able to enjoy life to the full.
Confidence - where children and adults have the skills, resources and aspirations to aim high, become active citizens, provide for themselves and make their impact on the world.

The Council has adopted this Vision as its own and uses it to set the context for all its priority improvement and service delivery activity.

The Vision for the Borough sits across the Council's Mission Statement which covers the Council's role in providing community leadership and also affirms the overall ambitions and focus for its service delivery activity. The Council's Mission Statement is:

"To improve the social, economic and environmental well-being of Barnsley by working with, and on behalf of, all those who live, work and invest in the Borough."

Together with the Vision, this formal Mission Statement sets out the Council's regeneration agenda for the next 5 years and beyond. It is a promise to local residents that the Council intends fully to honour, working in partnership with colleagues in "One Barnsley".

An important part of how this can be achieved is to ensure that service delivery across all the partner agencies is targeted at tackling the Borough's issues and challenges in a joined-up and comprehensive way. The Community Plan is the main way in which this is achieved.

The Barnsley Community Plan

The Community Plan is a statutory document which covers a 5 year period but is reviewed every year. It provides a framework for local service delivery across the whole Borough and is complemented by 9 Area Community Plans, developed following local consultation (Think Local!) through community development and Area Forum activity. This collection of documents is used to inform "One Barnsley" and the Council's decision-making processes and helps to prioritise issues at the local level. The Community Plan sets out a long-term vision for the Borough, and also the specific actions against which all the partner bodies' progress can be judged, and which help translate the Vision into reality.

Each review of the Plan has centred on consultation involving local elected Members, partner organisations and most importantly, the people of the Borough. This takes places through open invitations to Forum events, where performance is reviewed, priorities re-evaluated and forward plans set. In January 2004, "Community Summits" were piloted across the Borough and attracted attendance from more than 1000 members of the public. Community Summits represent a new way of working using local knowledge and resources to attract more people to discuss service provision and local area needs. Recognising the importance of local people's views and promoting active citizenship is at the heart of the community planning process.

Community Plan Strategic Goals

The first Community Plan identified 4 key Strategic Goals which captured the fundamental nature of the Borough's challenges. The Strategic Goals for 2004/05 were refined and are now stated in a way that captures the regeneration and sustainability agendas:

Economic Well-being
Social Well-being
Lifelong Learning
Environmental Well-being

In addition, the 'Citizenship' agenda has been developed, and continues to pull together cross-cutting priorities and focus efforts for the Goal Group work programmes. The cross-cutting priorities linked to the Goals were confirmed in the 2004/05 Community Plan as:

Remaking Learning: Education and Skills: Increasing attainment of 13-19 year olds
Working Age Education and Skills: Supporting communities to engage and work
Lifestyles: Promoting participation in healthy lifestyles
Remaking Barnsley: Achieving a new and sustainable economic future
Community Safety: Tackling anti-social behaviour and drugs

These priorities are also fully embedded in the Council's Corporate Plan through the Priority Improvement Framework (PIF). All the partners, including the Council and its own services, have committed to working towards these Strategic Goals and cross-cutting priorities in an integrated way in the full knowledge that regeneration is a complex, long-term process.

The National Agendas

The Strategic Goals of the Community Plan form a key element of the priority-setting framework for the Council, alongside other central government priorities and broader social and technological drivers, including feedback from key external national and local stakeholders.

The agreed "Shared Priorities" between central and local government, as set out in Circular 03/2003, Annex A, are:

Sustainable Communities:

Promoting the economic vitality of localities
Transforming the local environment

Transport:

Meeting local transport needs more effectively

Safer and Stronger Communities:

Reducing crime and anti-social behaviour, community cohesion, reduced drug abuse

Healthier Communities:

Quality of life for older people
Promoting healthier communities, narrowing health inequalities and encouraging healthy lifestyles

Children and Young People

Raising standards in schools
Improving quality of life

Within this complex and challenging set of agendas there is a clear need to set priorities, to ensure achievement and delivery of a manageable set of corporate programmes, initiatives and projects.

Local Priority Setting

The local improvement agenda is influenced by a number of things, in addition to central government advice and the Community Plan. Other factors include consultation responses from local residents, and feedback from external and internal assessments. One of the key pieces of assessment work which provided significant challenge and context to the local improvement agenda was the CPA Corporate Assessment. A number of elements contributed to the assessment, including the Council's past performance in Best Value Review inspections; progress in achieving targets in the Local Public Service Agreement; the effectiveness of corporate management systems; and, the Council's past record of delivering improvements for local people.

All the improvement agendas influencing the Council's work programme are brought together in the Priority Improvement Framework (PIF). The PIF was first developed in 2003 as part of work undertaken to support the Corporate Plan element of the 2003/04 BVPP. In essence, it is the agreed framework for guiding improvement activity in Council services for 2004/05 and beyond. As part of the Council's on-going commitment to service improvement, the PIF is reviewed and reproduced annually in the BVPP.