Recommendations

In order to provide a clear focus for communicating and progressing its ambitions, the council should:

Review the aims and objectives included in the whole range of its corporate and service strategies, to produce a single, integrated statement of corporate aims and objectives.

In order to progress its aspirations for corporate cross cutting priorities (such as equalities and crime and disorder), the council should:

Ensure that these issues are given the corporate attention and central resources necessary to help the council meet its targets.

In order to make best use of consultation with users and stakeholders, and to ensure that consultees' views are both respected and seen to be respected, the council should:

Ensure that it consults all relevant stakeholders over strategies, policies, and priorities early enough to enable the results of consultation to influence outcomes, and make better use of established consultation mechanisms.

In order to use performance management more effectively to drive continuous improvement, the council should:

Develop further output and outcome measures, and report these regularly to committee for monitoring against targets;

Ensure that corporate and service reviews are clearly outcome focussed;

Use performance indicators more proactively both corporately and at service level to drive improvements in performance;

Ensure that targets for improvement are robust and stretching.

In order to improve evidence-based policy development and prioritisation, the council should:

Make more use of formal political scrutiny to explore alternatives to existing policies and strategies.