Consultation on our Council Plan 2024 to 2028

Background

In 2019, public, private and voluntary sector bodies that make up the County Durham Partnership jointly agreed a long-term Vision 2035. This vision is based on a strategic assessment of need using Durham Insight and was developed following consultation with the public.

The Council Plan is our high-level plan covering three years and is updated annually. The updated Council Plan continues to set out our ambitions to achieve this vision to make County Durham an even better place to live, work and visit. It outlines how we will achieve more and better jobs, people living long and independent lives within safe, vibrant communities, a county that is carbon neutral, and a council which is both efficient and effective.

The Plan

Our ambitions within the Plan continue to be structured around five themes:

• our economy
• our environment
• our people
• our communities
• our council

When updating the Plan we have streamlined the document and made it shorter and easier to read, which we believe makes it easier to understand our priorities. We've also intended it to be more visually appealing through a new attractive design.

Within each of the five themes, the Plan confirms our aspirations, the main activities we will undertake and how we will measure success. There are a number a service plans aligned to the Plan which describe the role that each of our services has in proactively delivering the vision. Performance is monitored regularly among services in addition to it being formally reported four times a year to our Cabinet and scrutiny committees.

The Plan continues to align itself to our Medium-Term Financial Plan which sets out how priorities will be resourced.

Equality and inclusion

The Equality Act 2010 places an equality duty on all public bodies which requires them to review and publish equality objectives every four years and provide regular equality progress updates. Although equality runs through everything we do, setting equality objectives helps us to better perform the public sector equality duty by focusing attention on priority equality issues affecting the county and our workforce. As part of the Plan, we propose to maintain our current equality objectives, which are:

• we will improve employment opportunities for disabled people
• we will build an inclusive and welcoming employee culture
• we will build inclusive communities

Our approach to wellbeing encompasses all of these objectives as we are committed to doing things with communities rather than to them and we want to make sure that everything we do is supported by evidence and informed by conversations with residents.

As part your feedback, we are keen to get your views on our renewed equality objectives.

View the draft Plan

Draft Council Plan 2024-28 (PDF, 4 MB)

Have your say

What happens next

Our Council Plan for 2024 to 2028 will be discussed at our Cabinet on 17 January 2024 with it scheduled for approval at the meeting of Council on 28 February 2024. We will report on the progress we make against priorities and measures in our Council Plan as part of our quarterly performance monitoring arrangements.