Salford's Story of Place
December 2007
Strategic Overview Realising the vision
Salford‟s community plan, Making the Vision Real 2006-2016, was published in December 2005 and sets out a shared vision adopted by Salford Strategic Partnership. Making the Vision Real states that: 'In 2016, Salford will be a beautiful and welcoming city, driven by energetic and engaged communities of highly skilled, healthy and motivated citizens, who have built a diverse and prosperous culture and economy which encourages and recognises the contribution of everyone, for everyone'. In developing the community plan, the partnership looked at a range of social scenarios that predicted how Salford may look in the future, should current demographic trends continue. The current community plan was based on the findings of this process and outlines the longer term aspirations for the city up until 2016. In developing the community plan, the Partnership recognised that achieving this vision requires a focussed, partnership led approach on the following themes:
A healthy city A safe city A learning and creative city A city where children and young people are valued An inclusive city An economically prosperous city A city that‟s good to live in
A strong and prosperous Salford
Since the publication of Strong and Prosperous Communities, in October 2006 and the release of the place shaping guidance in March 2007, which highlighted a new duty for all areas to produce a sustainable community strategy, the Partnership has started re-shaping Salford‟s community plan to ensure it has a stronger focus on communities, places and economic prosperity. To further develop the concept of the LAA being the delivery plan of the Sustainable Community Strategy, recent government guidelines (“Negotiating the new LAAs” stated that: “A strong and ambitious Sustainable Community Strategy, based on extensive engagement locally, agreed by the council or councils and the Local Strategic Partnership, is fundamental to the success of LAAs. The SCS sets out where the area has come from, where it is at, and where it wants to be with social, economic and environmental goals incorporated in a joined up way to contribute to sustainable
development. It will set out ambition over a much longer timescale than the three year LAA.” At the heart of the strategy will be the creation of sustainable communities and places, which will recognise the need to raise economic and social aspirations in the city, foster community engagement and unite people with places. The Partnership understands that for Salford communities to be prosperous and sustainable, a clear strategic focus and a range of underpinning interventions is required to ensure:
the city attracts newcomers and incentivises the local population to achieve their full potential Salford has a thriving economy that generates wealth and long-term investment without effecting the natural social capital.
It is agreed that a sustainable Salford will rely heavily on local people that are equipped with the necessary skills, education and training that meet employer expectations and inward investor work force requirements. This is reflected in the Salford Agreement through a dedicated objective of improving economic prosperity in the city, together with a range of priority groups, including people on welfare benefits, adults with low skills and low income families, who are also a key focus of the delivery plans.
The Salford 5
The Salford Agreement was developed around five overarching objectives. The objectives were developed by the partnership, in consultation with local people to reflect both short and long term aspirations for the city as reflected in the community plan. The objectives are unique to Salford and provide the overarching strategic focus for delivering transformational social change in the city. This creation of five overarching objectives also provides the backbone to the performance management framework for the agreement, which are underpinned by 30 outcomes and 87 performance indicators.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Improve economic prosperity through educational attainment, skills, employment, and enterprise Improve health outcomes and reduce inequalities Improve community safety Improve community engagement Improve environmental sustainability
Narrowing the deprivation gap
The Partnership recognises that there are a number of priority groups and areas in the city which are experiencing serious inequalities, with the wealth gap widening – Salford has been cited as the most polarised city in the country. The below groups were thus considered a priority for the delivery agreement, in order to stabilise and reverse this trend. Children and young people, particularly those at risk, looked after children and those living in poverty, as defined by low family income levels
Adults with low or no skills and those out of work and claiming benefits Families and individuals living in the most deprived areas of the city
The process for identifying local indicators was based on an evidence based approach which recognises the added value of partnership working, opportunity and improved quality of life for local people. This approach has provided the necessary challenge to the culture of individuals and organisations in the way front line services are delivered, and in moving towards services which are personalised and tailored to individual neighbourhoods, that are most in need. In this way, the Agreement has provided the catalyst for undertaking transformational change across the city, but particularly in areas of the city where there is severe deprivation. The partnership agreed that to make headway on narrowing the deprivation gap in Salford a radical step change in the way services are provided was widely recognised. As such, a whole systems (partnership led) approach to delivering on key issues in the agreement was adopted, which will see localities targeted on a range of issues such as worklessness and health, environment and community safety.
Connecting People to opportunities theme
The concept of balancing “people” and “places” is featured as a cross cutting theme in the Salford Agreement and will be a key component of the revised Community Strategy. Salford has already made significant progress in developing a strategic driver of „Connecting People to Opportunities‟ over the last six months, which aims to connect local people to the economic growth of the regional centre and job opportunities expected to evolve in Salford, through media city uk and other inward investment opportunities. To do this, an ambitious programme of upskilling the adult population is required, together with work at primary and secondary aged children to ensure Salford people are the benefactors of wealth creation and the large scale regeneration of the city. „Connecting People to Opportunities‟ is acknowledged as being a key driver in the development of our strategy to transform the city and the primary challenge facing the Salford Partnership over the next five to twenty years. There is now a very clear political and partnership steer that the Agreement must provide a vehicle and focal point for driving forward transformational change in public service delivery across the city to ensure that we demonstrably tackle deep rooted inequality, deprivation and disadvantage amongst our communities. The connecting people agenda aims to ensure that local people are connected to economic opportunities in the city, so that the job offer created by developments like mediacity uk are accessible to local people and that local people in turn are sufficiently skilled to compete for such jobs. Another key driver for change in the city, will be the use of a strategic commissioning approach which is fundamental to generating greater public value from the Salford Agreement. The partnership have recently focused attention in exploring a strategic joint commissioning methodology through our locality pilots, the evaluation of such work is regularly monitored and expected to be built upon further during 2008/9/
Developing a strategic focus
To deliver our vision of connecting people with opportunities, the partnership first needed to understand the drivers behind the unusually wide gap in life opportunities between the most deprived people and places in the city, and the other areas of the city which have little or no deprivation. In developing the Salford Agreement, considerable investment was made in looking at the economic and social profile of Salford‟s communities, which was based on Labour Market Analysis carried out by the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion. This collation of this evidence based highlighted the scale of the challenges we face in Salford to narrow the child poverty, poverty of aspiration, skills and employability gaps across the City. As a result of this work, the partnership is now able to understand the scale of the connecting people challenge by comparing the City averages for key indicators against the most disadvantaged wards and super output areas within the city and comparing the City averages on key indicators with the North West and England averages. Narrowing the gap in economic prosperity is considered a key priority for the partnership and this is reflected through plans to develop a basket of Neighbourhood level performance indicators which will reflect the locality piloting work taking place in priority wards in the city. SPOTlighting is the model currently being trialled to drive the delivery of the LAA in a local context. It will take a whole systems approach, and will focus on Shared Priority Outcome Targets (SPOT) which are seen as major drivers of deprivation/change and which clearly need an integrated „whole system‟ approach. The model will enable a cross section of the partnership to focus attention on these key issues, bringing every possible influence to bear. It will enable an understanding of how our approach may need to change over the short, medium and longer terms and will identify opportunities and barriers to the delivery of the Agreement. In developing the Salford Agreement, the IMD 2004 was used to assess the level of deprivation in the city and to identify key wards requiring more specialist intervention across a range of deprivation domains. The IMD methodology was used to calculate ward based rankings, across the thematic domains of: income, employment, health, education, housing, crime and the living environment in order to prioritise wards in the city requiring immediate and specialist interventions. This evidence, together with consultation with local people and front line service providers provided a robust evidence base for establishing a performance management framework that embraces neighbourhood renewal and the need to narrow the gap between the worst performing wards in the city and the rest. The release of the IMD 2006 in November will again provide the evidence base in reviewing priorities for the new generation Salford Agreement.