Focus on Priorities

Sustained focus of resources on our Council Plan Priorities outcomes

"The main focus will be through engagement with service users and staff removing or changing activities that play only a small part in delivering priorities and sustaining the focus of expenditure on activity that support the Council Plan outcomes. We want to engage with users, based on the successful and unique models for anti-poverty and local outcome improvement plans; engaging communities of interest and the most vulnerable in prioritising and directing activity".

Transformation Event News

We continue to face huge challenges and with more funding cuts a reality over the next three years, forecasts of our funding show that we can expect around c£49 million less to spend on services and resources. This is nearly 15% of our current budgets over that period. This is on top of nearly £106 million in savings we have had to make since 2010.

Reducing budgets will result in a Council that is very different from now. It is not a case of small changes across the Council - we need to Transform.

We have held a series of Transformation Events which have been designed to bring together a mix of citizens, customers, staff, councillors and partners to review current services and identify potential different ways to deliver them.  There will be 9 main events.

Priority areas on which the Council spends a lot of its budget have been identified as the focus of each event:

• Workforce
• Council travel  
• Recycling and litter  
• Education core delivery and curriculum  
• Partnership approach to earlier intervention  
• Income generation, fees, charges  
• Schools
• Capital strategy  
• Public transport and travel 

The events focused on bringing transformational ideas that can be implemented, at pace, to bridge the funding gap.  We found out a lot about what we do and what mattered the most to different groups.

The ideas generated will be used by Members to influence the budget setting process for 2020/21. You can read about the event, the questions considered at the event and the ideas generated in the Newspaper Outputs below:

• Event 1 Our Workforce [PDF - 1MB]
• Event 2 Council Travel [PDF - 785KB]  
• Event 3 Recycling and Litter [PDF - 676KB]
• Event 4 Education Core Delivery and Curriculum [PDF - 696KB]  
• Event 5 Partnership Approach to Earlier Intervention [PDF - 665KB]
• Event 6 Income Generation, Fees and Charges [PDF - 725KB]
• Event 7 School Models [PDF - 654KB]
• Event 8 Public Transport and Travel [PDF - 685KB]
• Event 9 Future Capital Strategy [PDF - 695KB]
• Event 10 Our Workforce (2) [PDF - 1MB]