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Welcome to the council’s Corporate Plan. This Plan sets out what it is that we want to achieve for the benefit of local residents and communities over the next five years, to deliver the Denbighshire We Want.
We are committed to delivering our activity in a sustainable way for the long-term benefit of our communities and their future generations. This Plan meets our obligations under the Well-being of Future Generations Act and the Equality Act. It also captures our key performance functions for the purposes of The Local Government and Elections (Wales) Act 2021.
The Plan is underpinned by our desire to work as ‘One Council’, where our diverse services are working together towards shared goals more effectively. We will provide a focus on preventative actions that protect people from harm and address the challenges that our communities face, such as the accepted Climate Emergency, ensuring sustainable economic growth, promoting well-being, and quality of life. We want to work with our residents, businesses, partners, and stakeholders to help shape the services we provide and the way in which we provide them.
Our ambitions here go beyond the term of this five-year plan. We can’t achieve all that we want alone, so where we can we will work collaboratively with our communities and partners. We aim to integrate our ambitions with national and regional objectives to bring greater and lasting benefits for the county in the longer term.
We hope you support our ambitions. If you have any questions, or want to learn more about our Corporate Plan, please feel free to contact us or visit our website.
Jason McLellan
Leader
Graham H Boase
Chief Executive
During the summer of 2021, residents in the county were asked about their long-term aspirations for their communities. We did this through our ‘County Conversation’ approach, a series of workshop discussions held with residents across the six areas of Denbighshire (Rhyl, Prestatyn, Elwy, Denbigh, Ruthin and the Dee Valley), and an online survey (with hard copies available in all libraries and One Stop Shops). We also met with each of our secondary school councils. All the feedback that we received informed a larger Assessment of Local Well-being (external website), produced with our partners on the Public Services Board (external website). This has helped us to understand the current state of Well-being in our county and to identify necessary interventions to benefit future generations.
Having drafted a long-list of pledges for our Corporate Plan, we initiated a second phase of our County Conversation between January and March 2022, inviting feedback on the themes identified from the initial engagement and the Well-being Assessment. Feedback was also sought from colleagues from other organisations, including Health, North Wales Fire and Rescue, Natural Resources Wales and the third sector. During the spring further workshops were held for Denbighshire County Council staff on an individual theme basis to start to plan the actions that we would deliver.
Following the election of the Council in May and further planning sessions with the new Cabinet and the Senior Leadership Team, a final phase of public engagement and meetings with political groups was held at the end of the Summer, 2022, to ‘sense-check’ our final pledges prior to their adoption by the Council in October.
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As described above, the Conwy and Denbighshire Well-being Assessment (external website), which examines data and the views of local people through the lens of the Well-being Goals for Wales, has supported the setting of our well-being objectives for Denbighshire. Our objectives, therefore, directly contribute to the achievement of the national goals. This gives us confidence that we are focusing our resources on delivering the right outcomes that will be of the greatest benefit to our communities.
The following are the council’s nine Well-being and Equality Objectives that will help to deliver sustained performance improvement across the council’s work.
- A Denbighshire of quality housing that meets people's needs
- A prosperous Denbighshire
- A healthier and happier, caring Denbighshire
- A learning and growing Denbighshire
- A better connected Denbighshire
- A greener Denbighshire
- A fairer, safe and more equal Denbighshire
- A Denbighshire of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language
- A well-run, high performing council
Sustainable development, and applying the five ways of working to improve the economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being of Wales, has been central to the work that we have done to identify our objectives and develop the actions that we will take forward in support of each theme in this plan.
⁃ Long-term: Having analysed past, current and predicted future data trends, and also discussed long-term aspirations with our residents, we are confident that this plan will deliver long-term benefits for our communities.
⁃ Prevention: Looking at future trends, including risks and opportunities, has also enabled us to identify preventative steps that we can take now to prevent problems from getting worse in the future.
⁃ Involvement: Developing our Plan through Involvement has been a key driving principle. In addition to an online consultation, we have invested significant time to holding discussions with focus groups across the county, including all secondary schools, and with staff. We endeavoured to make these focus groups representative (reflecting age, gender, social status, occupations, hard to reach groups, etc.).
⁃ Collaboration: Delivery of the objectives cannot be isolated to one service alone and will therefore require collaboration (within and outside of the council). We will form a collaborative working group for each of our nine objectives (nominating one senior officer as a lead for each themed area). These working groups will consist of key stakeholders, who are most likely to be professionals but will also consist of service-user representation.
⁃ Integration: We have aligned our Plan with national programmes of work, such as the Programme for Government, as well as the work of our partners regionally and locally. As we take our activities forward we will continue to evaluate the impact of our work on the goals of our partners and other organisations, and always look for opportunities where we can integrate and deliver greater benefits.
Although public bodies aren’t required to undertake response analysis, we will undertake this exercise as it will lead to better delivery. This will take the form of:
- Consideration of what’s already being done in support of each objective.
- Consideration of good practice.
- Consideration of ‘gaps’ in service provision to be addressed.
- Consideration of overlaps with other organisational objectives, and opportunities to integrate.
- Consideration of opportunities to innovate (through new technologies or otherwise).
- Prioritisation of options for action according to a cost and benefit analysis.
Steps will be reviewed by our senior management, Cabinet, and Scrutiny. Our evaluation will assess the extent to which identified actions are being delivered; whether they are delivering their predicted benefits; and what (if any) corrective steps are required. These governance arrangements will be delivered with existing resources.
Details of our actions as they are developed, including timescales and progress, will be available on our Corporate Plan and performance web pages.
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This Corporate Plan is ambitious and will need a large amount of financial resources to succeed in full. However, it should be noted that most of the activities identified have already started, and will therefore have resources identified in order to help them be achieved. Examples of large commitments include the investment in our highways, flooding schemes, school buildings, and our Climate and Ecological Change Strategy.
Since the last Corporate Plan a robust budget process has been established, which along with a new approach to managing our capital spend will ensure that services can put forward requests for further funding as part of the annual budget process. This will help prevent funds being allocated before need, and help with prioritisation across the council.
It should also be noted, however, that the council is entering a very uncertain financial environment due to inflationary and demand pressures far exceeding the projected level of funding. This may impact the availability of funding. The proposed strategy will allow the council to identify resources as and when the need arises and within available funding restrictions.
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Our Corporate Plan captures a wide breadth of activities from across the council’s many varied services; however, it does not detail everything that we do. Many other statutory obligations and important activities, which may or may not contribute to our objectives, take place within the council, and are captured and monitored through the business plans of our individual service areas. These service business plans are the backbone of the council’s performance management arrangements. They are reviewed annually ahead of each financial year, and are signed off by the Head of Service and Lead Cabinet Member(s), with input from Scrutiny Link Members.
Performance against these plans are monitored on a quarterly basis by services. The council also carries out what it calls 'Service Performance Challenges' once a year, which is when senior managers, councillors, and our regulators (Audit Wales, Estyn, Care Inspectorate Wales), perform a deep-dive into the achievements and pressures faced by our services.
It is our intention that, following the commencement of this Plan, information about the performance of our services against our service plans will be published on our website. For more information about these plans and our broader Performance Management Framework, please visit our performance web page.
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For more information, or to let us know what you think about anything in this plan, contact us:
Rydym yn croesawu galwadau ffôn yn Gymraeg / We welcome telephone calls in Welsh.
By post:
Strategic Planning and Performance Team,
Denbighshire County Council,
PO Box 62,
Ruthin,
LL15 9AZ
We welcome correspondence in Welsh. There will be no delay in responding to correspondence received in Welsh.
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