Plymouth’s Local Area Agreement 2008

Plymouth, along with every other Unitary and Upper Tier Local Authority, is required to submit a new Local Area Agreement (LAA) to Central Government under the new Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007. The final draft of the LAA was submitted on 30 May 2008. It is expected that the LAA will be agreed by Government in June 2008.

Our new LAA sets out the key priorities and targets for Plymouth over the next three years to deliver the short to medium term priorities of the Sustainable Community Strategy.

Under the new arrangements for Local Area Agreements, Plymouth City Council and its partners have selected 35 indicators drawn from the new National Indicator Set (NIS), together with 15 locally defined indicators.

The new LAA builds on the development work undertaken to complete Plymouth’s first LAA last year and many of the arrangements already in place will be continued and further developed as appropriate.

The LAA table

Available in the documents table below is the final draft of Plymouth’s LAA which contains 35 so-called 'designated' targets and 15 local targets. The LAA itself consists of a table setting out the choice of indicator, the baseline position (where known) and the annual targets to 2011 (where possible). It should be noted that there are a high number of new indicators within the National Indicator Set which means that a baseline position is not yet available for these indicators. Where baselines are not yet available, the table sets out when these may be expected. A number of indicators identified in the table have been deferred at a national level until their definition and/or baselines have been further refined.

The 35 targets against indicators chosen from the NIS are designated targets and must be formally agreed with Central Government. Local non-designated targets do not have to be reported or agreed with Government, although they must be submitted as part of the final LAA. The 35 designated targets are intended to be the only performance targets agreed between Central and Local Government. Performance against these designated targets will form part of Plymouth’s assessment under the new Comprehensive Area Assessment in 2009.

Existing stretch targets

Alongside the new LAA, Plymouth has an existing commitment to the 12 stretch targets agreed as part of our Local Area Agreement 2007 to 2010 and these will continue to be closely performance-managed under existing arrangements to ensure the full draw-down of Performance Reward Grant. Government is also still committed to these targets which sit outside of the new LAA.

How did we choose the LAA indicators?

The 23 priorities set out in the first column of the LAA have been drawn from the Sustainable Community Strategy although the wording has been refined to aid clarity following consultation with the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) Forum, LSP Board, Executive and theme groups

To ensure that priorities also take account of any more recent work, the choice of indicators has also been influenced by the recent reviews of a number of key strategic documents:

• The review of the Children and Young People’s Plan
• The Community Safety Partnership’s Strategic Assessment
• The new Health, Social Care and Well-being Strategy
• The Corporate Plan 2008 to 2011

The choice of indicators has been developed with key members of the four LSP theme groups and the Children’s Trust and the choice of priorities been challenged in some detail at a well-attended LSP Forum event in December 2007.

A cross-partnership task and finish group was established by the Executive Group of the LSP to develop and rationalise the wording of the priorities and narrow the choice of NIS indicators to the 'up to' 35 required for the LAA.

Governance and accountability

The governance and accountability diagram in the documents table below sets out the governance arrangements for the new LAA. These do not differ significantly from those arrangements already in place under the existing LAA. At a practical level, there will be more comprehensive performance reporting of the LAA to the Council, whereby all LAA targets will be reported rather than the stretch targets as at present. It is expected that this will take place twice a year at six-monthly intervals.

Equalities and diversity

Equalities and diversity is being addressed through the LAA in two main ways. The first activity builds on work already in place for the LAA agreed in 2007. Each of the targets set out in the LAA will be supported by a delivery plan and these plans will be the subject of equalities impact assessments. This work has been supported by the Council’s Social Inclusion Team and ensures that at the most appropriate level, the impact of the activities being planned to deliver the improvements required are being assessed for positive and negative impacts on different service users.

Alongside the development of the LAA, we are working with colleagues in the Social Inclusion Unit to build our knowledge of the changing communities within Plymouth through a joint piece of work with the University. The results of this piece of work, entitled the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Data Cataloguing Study, will improve our knowledge of who holds data on different BME people in the city and how best we can use this data to inform future decisions over priorities and issues. This will be available on the website shortly.

What next

Detailed delivery plans will be completed for each of the LAA indicators and will be published on the website as soon as they are available.

The LAA will be refreshed annually although we are still awaiting further guidance on how this is to be carried out. We are also awaiting guidance on the arrangements for performance reward grant and in the meantime, the frequently asked questions in the documents table below should provide an overview of how the new arrangements will work.

Documents

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	Plymouth's Local Area Agreement 2008 to 2011 - Plymouth's Draft Local Area Agreement 2008 to 2011. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 78.3KB
	Reward element templates - Plymouth's 12 stretch targets. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 158.2KB
	LAA reward frequently asked questions - frequently asked questions on how the new arrangements will work. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 56.6KB
	Governance and accountability diagram - sets out the governance arrangements for the new LAA. File format Adobe Acrobat (pdf) - 18.4KB

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