Salford Agreement

The LAA has now been finally submitted and formely approved and signed by the Secreatry of State, and thus negotiations have been finalised.

Below are links to the final PDF and Word version of Salford's Final LAA refresh document submitted to GONW and adopted by the Secretary of State together with the confirmation letter from Government Office North West.

Final Salford Agreement Refresh (PDF)

Confirmation letter from Government Office North West

The LAA will boost the city's public services and in turn help local people to achieve their ambitions. It will provide the focus for the partnership over the next three years.

What is the Salford Agreement?

The new local area agreement between Salford and central government sets challenging targets to be achieved between now and 2011. This second LAA is significantly different to the first Salford Agreement.

With the involvement of all strategic partners, we have chosen 23 priority issues for the city which will be 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 will make a major difference to people's lives.

The improvement that we have committed to achieving these 23 priority issues will involve a huge change in the way we work. We know that doing what we have always done will not be sufficient.

Salford Agreement Performance Information

LAA launch event

The LAA was launched on the 12 September 2008 at the Digital World Centre and the event speakers were:

Councillor John Merry - Leader of Salford City Council and Chair of Partners IN Salford,
Barbara Spicer - Chief Executive, Salford City Council
Kevin Brady - Assistant Chief Executive, Salford City Council
Julie Higgins - Director of Public Health and Deputy Chief Executive, Salford Primary Care Trust

Please use the link at the bottom of the page to view the questions and answers raised from the event

LAA delivery model

Extensive work has been undertaken by partners to create the LAA delivery model (please see the two attachements below).

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 16 statutory early years and education indicators.

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

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	Learning and Skills Council
Northwest Development Agency	Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service
Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce	Salford's colleges
University of Salford	Salford Council for Voluntary Services
MIDAS	Greater Manchester West Mental Health Foundation Trust
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.

Plans for delivering the LAA will be drawn up and these will give more details of how different partners can contribute.

In some cases the targets will be broken down further, so we might, for example set a target for reducing smoking in a certain part of the city or amongst target groups of people. Elected members, community committees and neighbourhood structures and communities of identity will have an important role to play in making these aims happen.

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 current 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.

Joint Strategic Commissioning

The delivery of the priorities within the LAA will be the responsibility of us all. Some will be delivered by single organisations whereas others will require collaborative working to ensure we maximise our achievement and at the same time do this in the most efficient way possible. For example, the objective of reducing teenage pregnancy rates is not the responsibility of a single partner but involves many of us in preventative exercises such as education, improving access to contraception, reducing teenage drinking of alcohol and others. It is best to join up our activities to make sure the best approach is delivered. To do this we have created a Joint Strategic Commissioning Framework.

The Framework is based on a continuous cycle with four phases: analysing, planning, doing and reviewing, each as important as the other. Through this process it is expected that the partnership will achieve:

High quality integrated services, with shared outcomes that meet the needs of all who are intended to benefit from them
Better value for money
Greater capacity to deliver more integrated services.

How we will implement the Framework is currently being developed and it is hoped that a delivery mechanism will be in place by Christmas 2009.

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