A new sustainable community strategy and local area agreement

Our new local area agreement (LAA) - the Salford Agreement - has now been completed and is awaiting ministerial sign off.

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.

Over the summer, we will continue to work on a new sustainable community strategy for the city to replace our current community plan

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 achieve for 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.

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.

Read the final Salford Agreement 2008-2011

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 community plan, which is being updated to become 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.

Download more information