Meeting documents

1 THE ISSUE

1.1 The report presents the Council's draft Corporate Plan framework document 2003 - 2007 for consideration by the Council Executive and for recommendation to full Council for adoption.

2 RECOMMENDATION

2.1 The Council Executive is asked to:

a) Receive and consider the draft Corporate Plan framework document 2003 - 2007 (as attached);

b) Recommend to full Council the draft Corporate Plan framework document 2003 - 2007 for adoption as a new Policy & Budget Framework item;

c) Authorise the Chief Executive, in consultation with the Executive Member (Resources) and the Executive Member (Economic Development), to make presentational improvements to the draft Corporate Plan framework document prior to submission to Council.

3 FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

3.1 The Corporate Plan is intended to subsume the Council's 4-year Financial Plan, to ensure that decision making on priorities and resource allocation is fully aligned.

4 BACKGROUND

4.1 At the moment the Council has a series of individual plans and strategies, but no umbrella plan. That umbrella role has traditionally been played by the Council Strategy and subsequently the Financial Plan, which has been the one place in which the Council's priorities have been thrashed out. Whilst this has worked quite well (the Council has been complimented by CPA and District Audit for our planning in this regard) it has inevitably meant that budget requirements have tended to dominate, without establishing the necessary linkages with service requirements. On occasion this has meant that service targets designed to achieve member priorities for the community have not been achieved because the necessary levels of resources have not been allocated.

4.3 The draft Plan framework document (attached) has been developed by the Council Executive via a working party made up of Executive (Cllrs Hanney, Darracott, Todd, Crossley and Haeberling) and non- Executive (Cllrs P Gay and Gerrish) Councillors. In formulating the draft document, the working party has reviewed the Council's existing Objectives and has updated them, as shown in Section 4 of the draft document.

4.4 The lead Executive Members (Cllrs Hanney and Darracott) presented the key points of the draft Plan to the Resources Overview & Scrutiny Panel (to which members of the Corporate Issues & Partnerships Panel were also invited) on 23^rd October. Any comments made by the Panel will be reported to the Council Executive at its meeting.

5. CONSULTATION

5.1 The lead Executive Councillors have discussed the preparation of the Corporate Plan with Trade Union representatives and a representative has been invited to attend the Corporate Plan Working Party as an observer. It is intended that Trade Union representatives will be fully consulted at key stages of the implementation process