A new sustainable community strategy and local area agreement

Our local area agreement (LAA) - the Salford Agreement - was completed in March 2008.

The LAA is intended to boost the city's public services and in turn help local people to achieve their ambitions. It has provided the focus for the partnership over the three years of the agreement (2008-11).

The new Sustainable Community Strategy for the city was signed off by Salford City Council in 2009 and replaced our current community plan

What is the Salford Agreement?

The local area agreement between Salford and central government sets challenging targets to be achieved between 2008 and 2011.

With the involvement of all strategic partners, we chose 23 priority issues for the city which are at the centre of our business. These include concerns like the level of worklessness and anti-social behaviour, and opportunities like mediacity:uk. Success on issues like these makes a major difference to people's lives.

Our partnership priorities

Our chosen priorities are:

Smoking	Obesity
Alcohol	Teenage pregnancy
Older people	Safeguarding vulnerable adults
Fear of crime	Anti-social behaviour
Higher education	Parenting
Providing affordable homes	Raising educational attainment
Reducing the number of looked after children	Community cohesion
Community engagement and empowerment	Child poverty
Worklessness	Basic skills
Developing mediacity:uk	Growing and developing business
Climate change	Environmental attractiveness
Ensure services and transport developments are coordinated

Measuring success

For each priority, we have agreed one or more indicators - these are how we will measure our improvement.

We have agreed 35 indicators from the government's national indicator set (a list of 198 indicators which reflect the improvements that the government sees as a priority nationally) for our LAA.

These 35 indicators and the targets that go with them in the LAA are described as designated and government will monitor our progress towards them. Because we negotiated these with Government Office and they come from the national indicator set, we know that Salford is contributing towards achieving national priorities.

The remaining 32 indicators in our agreement are described as supporting. Some are from the national indicator set while others have been devised locally. The supporting indicators are just as critical as the designated ones, but will only be monitored locally.

The agreement also contains 10 statutory early years and education indicators.

Targets for each indicator for the three year duration of the agreement were negotiated and local partners have signed up to achieving them.

Refresh 2010

We are required to carry out, with partners, a review and refresh of the Salford Agreement on an annual basis. The 2010 review and refresh was of limited scope concentrating on a small number of targets identified as likely to be particularlty affected by the recession. The refresh was completed in March 2010.

Named partners

The Salford Agreement names certain partners for each target - either as a lead partner or an organisation that will make a definite contribution to that target. These partners include:

Salford City Council	Salford Primary Care Trust
Greater Manchester Police	Central Salford Urban Regeneration Company
Jobcentre Plus	Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service
Northwest Development Agency	Salford's colleges
Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce	Salford Council for Voluntary Services
University of Salford	Greater Manchester West Mental Health Foundation Trust
MIDAS
Probation Service

Other partners may not be specifically named in the agreement, but, as this is the statement of our city's priorities for the next three years, will be asked to contribute where they can.

What about concerns and opportunities that aren't in the LAA?

It's important that we deliver on all of the city's objectives in the sustainable community strategy. The LAA priorities were chosen because they are issues where we need to make a significant improvement and where partnership working could make a real difference over the next three years.

Remaining objectives will continue to be addressed by the city's thematic partnerships and individual organisations.

Downloadable documents