Salford Agreement

The Local Area Agreement (LAA) was submitted, approved and signed by the Secretary of State, in 2008.

Below are links to the refreshed LAA 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 2010 (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 local area agreement between Salford and central government sets challenging targets to be achieved between April 2008 and March 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.

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

The launch was very positive and lots of questions and answers were raised.

LAA delivery model

Extensive work has been undertaken by partners to create the LAA delivery model.

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.

Salford Agreement Performance Information

Performance reports are presented to the Salford Strategic Partnership Executive quarterly.

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	NHS Salford
Greater Manchester Police	Central Salford Urban Regeneration Company
Jobcentre Plus	Skills Funding Agency
Northwest Development Agency	Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service
Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce	Salford City College
University of Salford	Salford Council for Voluntary Services
MIDAS	Greater Manchester West Mental Health Foundation Trust
Probation Trust

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 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 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 anticipated that a delivery mechanism will be in place during 2010.