Good progress delivering Council Strategy

Good progress has been made delivering the Council Strategy, according to the first performance report since the strategy was launched earlier this year.

The Council Strategy sets outs five priority areas and three or four specific goals for each one. An accompanying delivery plan sets out how these will be achieved and by when, during the strategy period from 2023 to 2027.

Across the five priority areas, four are achieving or exceeding targets (green) and one is amber.

• Services we are proud of - green
• Tackling the climate and ecological emergency - green
• Thriving communities with a strong local voice - green
• A fairer West Berkshire with opportunities or all - green
• A prosperous and resilient West Berkshire - amber

Speaking about the first progress report Councillor Martin Colston, Executive Member for Strategy Development said:

"A good start has been made towards delivering the Council Strategy with some early achievements clear to see, but much more still to do over the four year lifetime of the Strategy. It's backed up by a delivery plan which sets out how we will deliver the strategy and by when so that residents can judge us on our progress. While we are pleased with our initial progress, a small number of measures are not where we want them to be at this point in the strategy and we will be focusing on these in the coming months.

"We want to be transparent about the measures we are working to and our performance against these - so residents can see for themselves how we are doing. Our online dashboard is updated quarterly with the latest data which will help residents to hold us to account for our delivery of the Council Strategy."

Among the particular areas of achievement noted in the report are:

• Good performance for children's social care measures
• The timeliness of decisions for planning applications
• Progress made enabling digital access to services
• Young people leaving care being successfully supported into employment
• Installation of vehicle charging points into car parks
• Focused on increasing transparency and accountability by appointing an opposition Councillor appointed to the chair of the Scrutiny Commission and by offering the chairing of the Town Centre Masterplan steering group to Town Councils
• Created a Sustainability Hub for residents and businesses,
• Opened the refurbished Newbury Lido

One priority, a prosperous and resilient West Berkshire, was rated amber because, while the majority of measures were on target, three were below target.

There are also several measures which need to improve including delivering on-street EV charging points, the time taken to decide on new housing benefits claims and the number of households actively fostering children and young people.

You can visit our online performance portal to see quarterly updates showing our progress delivering on each of the priority measures.

You can read the 2023/24 Performance Report Quarter Two online. It was discussed at the Executive meeting on Thursday 14 December - which is available to watch back our YouTube channel.