Delivering our plan
Governance
The Senior Leadership Team (SLT) of the council will oversee the delivery of this Corporate Plan. The SLT will work with the council's Commissioners given the interdependencies between the Corporate Plan and the Improvement and Recovery Plan (IRP).
The Chief Executive, Statutory Officers and Executive Directors 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.
Our commitment is to deliver this plan and report on this plan in an open and honest manner, in support of our IRP improvement outcomes.
Finance and funding
The resource pressures the council faces, the requirements to deliver in full our extensive and varied savings programme, along with our renewed commitment to securing value for money requires challenging decisions and difficult choices to be made. We continue to work under a Direction from government to reconfigure the council's services commensurate with the available financial resource.
This new Corporate Plan, in setting out how we will implement a new operating model, needs to do this in a context of savings, and a strict debt reduction plan. Inevitably this means ceasing some activity, divesting from many investments, selling capital assets, commissioning more effectively and working differently.
Our financial pressures may mean that the pace of delivering some of our priorities needs to flex and change. In recognition of this and the mobilisation of the new operating model, work continues to develop detailed business cases over future financial years. These business cases will be laser-like in their focus on the outcomes to be achieved, the options to deliver these and the financial and whole council resource requirement.
Through the business planning process and the rigour we bring to this, we will discharge our leadership responsibilities, improve the quality of our decision making and deliver a plan that is evidenced and informed.
In future iterations of our Corporate Plan, we will consider resources set against each of our strategic priorities and use a wide range of business intelligence developed throughout 2024-25 as part of the next phase of the Performance Management and Assurance Framework (PMAF) development, so that our policies and strategies inform resourcing and other decisions.
Implementing the new operating model, continuing the internal change programme, embedding and coordinating the PMAF disciplines and restructuring will enable us to have robust data, information and analysis to do this well.
Measuring impact and reporting
To openly demonstrate progress towards delivering our outcomes, as part of our new Performance Management and Assurance Framework (PMAF) we will evaluate success in a number of different ways, crucially by the impact for our residents, communities and businesses.
To measure impact we will track a suite of objectives and metrics. These will set out what we want to achieve (outcome) and where we want to get to (objective) and how we will know that we have delivered this (milestones and key 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.
We already have much to build on. In addition to the outcomes we set as part of our IRP, extensive partnership work went into developing the approved Health and Wellbeing and the Brighter Futures: Developing Well in Thurrock strategies. We have a considerable body of evidence supporting our emerging Local Plan and a priority for 2024/25 is to build a strong evidence based to support our Place Strategy.
A crucial objective of the PMAF for the first year of this Corporate Plan is to consolidate the evidence we have into a single source of information on the benefits and outcomes we are seeking for Thurrock. When this is complete, we will evaluate gaps in our knowledge and information and take steps to address these gaps. The specificity we bring to defining our economic and social benefits and outcomes will enable us to strengthen our partnerships, improve our engagement and communication and provide a solid foundation for improving our corporate capability, decision making and direction.
Following defining our outcomes we will have clarity of the council's role and contribution, communicating our core indicators and the data sources that we will use to track our progress and improvement. We will set planned service and delivery outputs, targets, milestones and be clear about our current baseline and the gap to target.
We will evolve this approach, drawing upon other indicators of success including regional, sectoral and national benchmarks to provide the insight we need to sharpen our focus and prioritise our resource and effort. This approach will enable us to better identify risks and be more enquiring and curious to explore the factors that could be affecting achievement.
Reporting
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.
Alongside our metrics we will detail how, when and who is accountable and responsible for reporting progress. In committing to deliver improvements in the transparency of performance information, progress and performance against the outcome measures will be shared internally, with our governance boards, elected members and publicly with residents and partners.
Our progress and performance information will be essential for developing future business cases and commissioning approaches.
Corporate Plan pages
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