Partners IN Salford

e-Bulletin, February 2008

A busy year awaits for Partners IN Salford!

It's been some time since we last sent a local strategic partnership e-Bulletin. Apologies for that, however you'll soon read that the partnership has been extremely busy getting our teeth into lots of new, interesting and innovative pieces of work.

This e-Bulletin will focus on all things local area agreement (LAA) related. The partnership has been working to deliver the targets in our first LAA, the Salford Agreement, whilst at the same time our thoughts have turned to producing our second LAA in line with new government guidance.

Please forward this to colleagues and members of your team and let us know if you have any comments or ideas for future editions.

To be added to our distribution list, e-mail us at the below address. To find out more about what LAAs are, visit www.partnersinsalford.org/local-area-agreement

Contact us

partnersinsalford@salford.gov.uk

0161 603 6800

Partners IN Salford, Salford Opportunities Centre, 2 Paddington Close, Salford, M6 5PL

Progress on the first Salford Agreement

Before Christmas we submitted a self assessment of the first six months of the Salford Agreement to Government Office for the North West. We are making progress towards most of our agreement targets at a Salford-wide level. Areas of especially good progress include excellent education results and more people from socially excluded groups volunteering.

Read our self assessment

All change for local area agreements

Government has now made some changes to local area agreements which mean all areas will need to have a new style agreement signed off by June 2008. Last year's Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act made it law for local areas to produce an LAA and to involve citizens in this. This is known as the 'duty to involve'. It also became law for certain organisations to help in putting together and delivering an LAA . This is called a 'duty to cooperate' and includes primary care trusts, fire and rescue services, Jobcentre Plus and the Learning and Skills Council.

A sustainable community strategy for Salford

The starting point for our new LAA will be a sustainable community strategy for Salford. You are probably aware that Salford already has a community plan, Making the Vision Real, which sets the vision for the city in 2016. However, Government now says that our long term aspirations should be set out in what it calls a sustainable community strategy (SCS), an over-arching plan for promoting and improving the well-being of the area. In 2007 we compared our current community plan to the government's requirements for an SCS and identified some elements that we currently don't have in our plan, including climate change. It was therefore decided that we should do some work to develop and broaden the scope of our current plan and this is now underway. The first stage, a broad description of our local circumstances and vision that the government calls a 'story of place' was submitted in draft to Government Office for the North West just before Christmas. Read the draft story of place here.

What will our second agreement look like?

Very different from the first. In Salford we are focussing on identifying those priorities which are critical to achieving the city’s vision, where we don’t yet have the level of performance we want and where additional partnership working is needed to achieve real improvements within the three year time frame of the agreement.

Once the priorities have been agreed, we will be able to select indicators which will help us measure progress. These indicators will be taken from the new list of 198 national indicators that the Government has produced. ALL these 198 indicators will be monitored but we only need to have targets for the indicators we select for our agreement. We can select up to 35 indicators from the list and there are also 16 separate education and early years measures that need to go in (so our agreement will comprise a maximum of 51 indicators). Government Office for the North West will be closely involved in negotiating which indicators to select since they need to be satisfied that Salford will be contributing to the national targets.

The partnership will then set targets for each indicator, again, in negotiation with Government Office for the North West which will show how much we intend to improve performance.

These targets will be the only targets that central government agree for improvements on local authorities' performance on outcomes they deliver on their own or in partnership.

We could also give our LAA a more local slant with the inclusion of locally agreed indicators not on the list of 198. Central government won't assess us on performance against these local measures but the duty to cooperate still applies.

A lead organisation or organisations will be given for each of the targets and arrangements for monitoring and management of performance will be checked to ensure they fit this new agenda.

So... the LAA is a combination of government's national priorities as articulated in the national indicators and our local priorities from the Salford sustainable community strategy.

What stage are we at in Salford?

In November the strategic partnership board met to hear more about new LAAs and to begin the process of developing our new one. The partnership confirmed that much of the work done for the current LAA is still relevant. Because our second agreement needs to be more tightly focused, partners also came up with some criteria for choosing what specific issues should be our priorities in the new agreement.

In December the Partnership’s executive reviewed the ideas generated by the board and gave a steer to the partnership’s management group to work these up further. The management group met twice in December and again in January to develop draft elements of the sustainable community strategy and draft priorities for the agreement.

Future timescales

The strategic partnership board will meet again on 6 February to review the proposals of the management group and identify any gaps or amendments needed. There will be an evening meeting on 19 February for those partners who were not able to consult their organisations before 6 February. At the end of February, a joint meeting of the partnership's executive and the council's Cabinet will confirm the priority issues for our agreement to give a clear steer for identifying which of the 198 indicators will make the most impact on these priorities.

Over the spring, negotiation will continue with Government officers to confirm indicators and targets with the Partnership’s executive of 26 March being a key part of the process. We are aiming for the city council to sign off the sustainable community strategy and LAA on 21 May and for it to be formally signed off by government in June.

Funding

From the next financial year (April), all local authorities will be given a new three- year grant - the Area Based Grant (ABG) which is a flexible, non ringfenced general grant. The ABG makes up 10% of the council's total funds.

This is an important shift by central government as part of their agenda to devolve responsibility to local government. It gives greater flexibility around funding as well as performance targets.

For Salford, approximately 35 specific grants will now be pooled within the ABG. This will include a new allocation of money called the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, which reflects the relatively high level of worklessness and low level of enterprise in the city. However the current Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF) will finish at the end of March.

These developments in funding arrangements will give us greater flexibility to direct money towards our agreed priorities for Salford but they represent a major change from previous funding regimes so working out how it will be managed is a complex task that will take some months. The process for allocating the ABG is being developed and updates on this will be made available as soon as possible.

Part of the background to new LAAs is the government's drive for more efficiency. Resources are tight and expectations are high. We need to really show that we are making the biggest possible impact with our money. The SPOTLIGHT pilots that have taken place in parts of the city will provide important lessons for doing this more effectively.

SPOTLIGHT

In 2007, the strategic partnership agreed to support a series of area-based pilot programmes to look at how we can provide public services that will give Salford's people the best possible prospects. Each programme, called a SPOTLIGHT, focuses on a particular theme, such as worklessness or young people not in education, employment or training.

The SPOTLIGHT brings together key stakeholders and emphasises the importance of 'getting under the skin' and understanding the root causes of the issue, its effects on people's lives and the way that organisations currently address the issue, through thorough research and engagement. All of this is completed within six weeks and results in proposals for improvement.

Three of the four initial pilots are now complete and the actions from them will be implemented over the next twelve months. The implementation will be supported by five teams of three city council officers who have been seconded to work on SPOTLIGHT full or part time. The members of these teams have all graduated from the council's Transform management development programme. The fifth team will look at solving any problems or challenges that have been common to all of the pilots.

The SPOTLIGHT methodology was adapted from a model used by the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU). Like the PMDU's model, at the end of each SPOTLIGHT the organising team presents their findings and recommendations to a high level panel including the leader and chief executive of the council.

The final presentations are available at www.partnersinsalford.org/taking-the-spotlights-forward, or more about the programme in general is here www.partnersinsalford.org/spotlight

SPOTLIGHT has and will continue to help us to learn how we can work together better and use our collective resources to greater effect to improve the services we offer residents in the city. What we learn will feed into the development of the LAA & sustainable community strategy as well as improvements in partnership working arrangements.

SPOTLIGHT findings so far

Findings from the SPOTLIGHT pilots to date have revealed that current services can appear confusing for both residents and the service providers themselves. Issues that have emerged include:

Already, SPOTLIGHT has led to changes in how we work:

We'll keep you up to date on the SPOTLIGHTS in future bulletins.

Our recent meetings

As usual, papers and minutes from the partnership can be found on our website at www.partnersinsalford.org/meetings-and-events-archive.

Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions please don't hesitate to let us know on 0161 603 6804 or partnersinsalford@salford.gov.uk.

Partners IN Salford, Salford Opportunities Centre, 2 Paddington Close, Pendleton, Salford M6 5PL   Telephone 0161-603 6800    partnersinsalford@salford.gov.uk