Corporate Plan

Governance

The Senior Leadership Team (SLT) of the council will oversee the operational delivery of this plan. SLT will work with commissioners to ensure focus is maintained and committed to improvement, to financial sustainability and to ensuring we have the leadership vision and capacity in place to move forward.

The cascade of onward accountability for delivering the plan to each service and individual will take place through Service Planning and workforce performance objective setting. The embedding of this ‘golden thread’ will ensure all of our workforce are aligned to a shared set of priorities.

The Chief Executive and SLT will be accountable to Cabinet and the Overview and Scrutiny and Standards and Audit committees for delivery, performance and risks associated with delivering the priorities agreed as part of the refreshed corporate performance management and assurance framework.

This Plan now incorporates the elements of improvement in line with our Directions from the Secretary of State. Greater alignment of our activity allows for SLT, elected Members and Commissioners to have a complete overview of how the council is delivering services alongside improvement. This reporting will continue to be scrutinised by our improvement boards as part of ongoing reporting to Commissioners.

The Modernisation and MTFS (Medium Term Financial Strategy) Board is the officer-led governance body responsible for oversight of the council’s savings and modernisation programme. Many of the aspects of this plan will deliver service transformation and savings, therefore the Board will scrutinise the delivery of the related projects which seek to achieve the priorities and outcomes set out in this plan.

Our operating model

Elected Members, SLT and our Commissioners are clear that to deliver the priorities set out in this plan, the council needs to implement a new operating model. This is centred on five areas of focus:

• frontline services
• customer experience
• locality model
• strategic commissioning
• corporate services.

Our Transformation Roadmap sets out the activities we will need to undertake to ensure we operate differently and deliver the savings required by our MTFS and strict debt reduction plan. These areas of focus will guide us as we prioritise the activity that has the most impact for residents as we become an enabling council.

Our equality objectives

We are committed to creating a fair, accessible and inclusive borough where everyone has a voice and an equal opportunity to succeed and thrive, and where community-led ambitions are supported and actively encouraged. In support of this commitment, our four equality objectives are:

• access to services
• building cohesion and integration
• improving resilience
• developing our workforce

These align with our corporate priorities. All service plans include sections for highlighting activities being undertaken in relation to these objectives. We will review our equality objectives in light of feedback gained through a variety of engagement initiatives and activities including the Communities in Action project in Chadwell St Mary in 2024/25, the residents survey and the new Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise (VCFSE) Charter.

Measuring performance

To openly demonstrate progress towards delivering our outcomes, as part of our Performance Management and Assurance Framework (PMAF) we will evaluate success in a number of different ways.

To measure our impact, we have set out what we want to achieve (outcome) and how we will know that we have delivered this (milestones and metrics).

As a performance management tool, milestones and metrics support the transparency we will bring to our processes and our decision making, support alignment across the council and enable us to build improvement into all we do. This informed understanding of the impact we are making will empower our leaders, managers and teams to innovate whilst owning and being accountable for their personal performance and results. The PMAF enables a “golden thread” from the corporate priorities down through other key strategies and service plans and ultimately into individual performance objectives.

Defining and reporting on our milestones and metrics through our PMAF will support our value of operating with integrity, namely that we will do what we say we will do. We state how, when and who is accountable and responsible for progress. In committing to deliver improvements in the transparency of performance information, progress and performance will be shared internally with our governance boards and elected members and publicly with residents and partners.