Improvement Plan 2023-2024

Published on 29 September 2023

Updated: 26 April 2024

Contents

• Introduction
• Our strategic planning framework
• Identifying our improvement objectives
• Our improvement objectives 2023– 2024
• Improvement Objective 1: Our services and facilities
• Improvement Objective 2: Our communities
• Improvement Objective 3: Our economy
• Improvement Objective 4: Our environment
• Improvement Objective 5: Our city
• Continuous improvement and monitoring arrangements   

Introduction

Under the Local Government Act (NI) 2014, we have a statutory duty to agree improvement objectives and produce an annual improvement plan. This is referred to as our “Duty to Improve”. 

The improvement plan does not include everything we intend to do over the year, but instead focuses on a small number of key improvement objectives agreed in consultation with local people. 

Our residents have told us that they want us to provide excellent, value for money services. They’ve also told us that they want us to provide leadership for the city, so that everyone in Belfast can enjoy a good quality of life. Therefore, our improvement objectives include a mix of social, economic and environmental improvements, coupled with service improvements, to provide a broad but balanced approach to improvement. 

We do a lot of our work in partnership with other organisations across the city. However, as the improvement planning process deals solely with council performance, each year we review our improvement objectives to ensure they focus on what we can do better to improve our services or improve quality of life in Belfast.

This year, we undertook a substantial re-assessment of our improvement objectives and streamlined many of our previous improvement actions, redirecting our improvement efforts and resources to where it matters most. We did this so that our improvement objectives continue to make the best impact possible and are meaningful for local people.  

Our 2023-2024 improvement plan comes at a time of increasing pressures on budgets and resources, both for council and for our residents.  The past few years have been very difficult. COVID19 brought unprecedented challenges for our health, for our society and for our economy. Now, the cost-of-living crisis has brought a new set of challenges. Improving what we do and how we do things is particularly important, especially if we want to maintain service levels and build a sustainable future for our ratepayers and communities.  

During the pandemic, Belfast demonstrated that it was a caring and resilient city with a strong community spirit. We want this year’s improvement plan to reflect those same characteristics and values. 

Our strategic planning framework

The Belfast Agenda

The Belfast Agenda is the city’s community plan. It was first published in 2017, following extensive engagement with residents and partners. It sets out a long-term vision for Belfast and shared outcomes for the city, supported by shorter-term action plans to help achieve those aims.

Managed by the Belfast Community Planning Partnership (BCPP), it guides what council and other public agencies in the city will do, in collaboration with businesses and communities, to make Belfast better.

Last year, the BCPP began to review and update the Belfast Agenda. “Continuing the conversation” with residents, the BCCP has now agreed 15 priorities for the period 2023-2027:

• Health inequalities
• Community and neighbourhood regeneration
• Educational inequalities
• Jobs and skills
• Sustainable and inclusive economic growth  
• Housing-led regeneration 
• Connectivity, active and sustainable travel 
• Future city centre and wider city regeneration and investment  
• Re-naturing the city and improving the food system
• Creating a sustainable circular economy 
• Innovating to net zero

Cross-cutting priorities

1. Inclusive growth and anti-poverty 
2. Good relations and shared future  
3. Older people  
4. Younger people  

Action plans aligned to each of these priorities have been developed and will be updated on an annual basis. 

Council strategic planning and performance framework

Our Corporate Plan is the main strategic plan for our organisation. It sets out how we will support the Belfast Agenda and deliver our own organisational priorities, services and programmes. We also have several supporting strategic plans to help manage and direct specific activity. For example, our Local Development Plan which is the spatial planning framework for the city and our medium-term financial plan which sets out the financial strategy for the council. In November 2020, we also produced a COVID recovery plan which still informs strategic planning today. These strategic plans, including the Improvement Plan, are supported by annual departmental and committee plans to ensure activity for the year ahead is managed. Monitoring of our performance against these plans takes place at regular intervals at a service and departmental level. We also bring updated reports to our corporate management team and committee.

Identifying our improvement objectives

Strategic context

The Belfast Agenda sets the overall improvement priorities for the city. Our corporate plan sets the strategic priorities for council. Therefore, it’s important that our improvement plan reflects these strategic planning frameworks. Our first improvement objectives were fully aligned to the Belfast Agenda. However, unlike the council improvement plan, responsibility for the Belfast Agenda is shared across partners. The collaborative nature of this work often made it difficult to isolate and report council performance. Following feedback from the Northern Ireland (NI) Auditor, we have stripped away the collaborative actions to focus solely on council activity and the performance improvement areas that we can control and improve. However, we still use the Belfast Agenda as a guide. The priorities in the Belfast Agenda are agreed in collaboration with our residents, so we know that it is a good starting point for determining what we should focus on.

Statutory guidance and outcomes

When developing our improvement objectives, we also follow guidance issued by the Department for Communities (DfC) and recommendations provided by the NI auditor. Therefore, we must ensure that our improvement objectives deliver improvements in relation to:  

1. Strategic effectiveness: This relates to longer term outcomes – are we making a difference?
2. Service quality and availability: This is about what we do – are we delivering good services and programmes that meet our residents' needs?
3. Fairness: This is about equality – are we being inclusive and ensuring that no one is left behind?
4. Efficiency: This is about good financial management – are we running our services well and providing value for money?
5. Sustainability: This is about the environment – are we doing things that will protect our environment for the generations that follow?
6. Innovation: This is about trying new things – are we continually learning and improving what we do?    

​The guidance also states that our improvement objectives should be:

• Legitimate - making a demonstrable contribution to the aspects of improvement as listed in the Local Government Act.
• Clear - setting out the visible improvement that citizens can expect.
• Robust - with defined terms of success (quantitative or qualitative).
• Deliverable - with established links to individual service programmes and budgets.
• Demonstrable - capable of being supported by objective evidence.

In addition to this statutory guidance, we also apply an outcomes-based approach to our improvement objectives.  This means focusing on the impact, or end-results, of our improvement activities rather than the service or process. From a performance perspective, we need to measure what we do and how well we do it. However, we believe it’s more important to measure “is anyone better off?”. Improving people’s outcomes can be challenging, but it is the only way we can demonstrate to our residents that what we are doing is making a difference. Under each of our improvement objectives, we therefore explain the rationale for each improvement objective:

• Why it’s important
• What we want to achieve
• What we will do, and
• How we will measure what we’ve done and the impact we’ve achieved.  

Annual review

Every year we review and update our improvement objectives to ensure we continue to deliver the improvements people want. We do an initial assessment that looks at the previous year’s improvement objectives in terms of the progress we’ve made, the current strategic context and the statutory guidance. This forms part of our annual corporate planning process. We then share our draft objectives and proposed actions with the public. Only when our residents have had an opportunity to have their say, do we finalise the improvement plan. 

Our annual review process for 2023-2024 is set out in the table: 

Consultation and engagement

Between October and November 2022, we facilitated several local area engagements and two online engagement sessions to enable residents, communities and other partners to shape the refreshed Belfast Agenda. This gave us valuable insight into what was important to our residents and what they would like to see happen. Often participants used the opportunity to feedback issues relating directly to council. Across the ten workshops, we heard from over 170 people and 110 different organisations.  

In February, we developed draft improvement objectives with indicative actions. We put this out to public consultation so our residents and other interested stakeholders could have a say in agreeing our improvement activity. In the consultation we asked our residents:

• Are we focusing on the right things?
• Is anything missing?
• What are your ideas about what we need to do to achieve these improvements?

The public consultation ran for over eight weeks between 20 February and 19 April. Managed through our online consultation platform, it provided residents with an opportunity to learn more about the proposed improvement objectives and included a link to an online survey. We used a range of communication channels, including Facebook and Twitter, to promote and direct people to the consultation and sent out notifications to our Your Say Belfast (YSB) mailing list. The survey asked residents whether they agreed or disagreed with the proposed improvement objectives, to provide comments or to suggest other areas they felt should be included as improvement objectives. 

Thirty six individuals and three organisations responded to the survey. As the vast majority of respondents agreed with our proposed improvement objectives, we did not feel it necessary to make significant changes. Indeed, many emphasised the importance of the city centre and of focusing on core council services; others emphasised the importance of environment-related improvements. Some suggested that we needed to use clearer language, actions and targets. We hope that we have addressed this in our final, more detailed improvement plan.

Developing our improvement actions

During the consultation period, we began to develop more detailed improvement actions, indicators and targets for measuring progress. We review and update these to reflect the comments and suggestions received from residents and then create our formal improvement plan. Elected Members approve the improvement plan, which is then monitored on a quarterly basis. The remainder of this plan sets out our detailed improvement objectives and improvement actions.

Our improvement objectives 2023-2024

Improvement Objective 1: Our services 

What we want to achieve

Maintain and where appropriate improve residents' satisfaction with the council and the services and facilities that we provide.

Why this is an improvement objective

Our residents have consistently told us that they want our improvement plan to focus on improving the services we deliver and the facilities we provide. The provision of high quality, customer-focused and efficient services is extremely important to residents and a key aspect of the improvement duty. For this reason, ‘Improving our services and facilities’ will always be the starting point for our improvement plan.   

Improving and maintaining high levels of customer care is on ongoing improvement aim for us. To help ensure that we continually meet customer expectations and can adapt to changing circumstances, we’ve put in place an internal change programme designed to improve customer care. We include aspects of this programme with our annual improvement plan. This year we are focusing on improving how residents access council online and making interactions with council easier and more seamless.   

In addition to our customer care programme, we also have an ongoing continuous improvement programme and a capital (a building and assets) programme that we update annually. The continuous improvement programme tends to focus on operational issues and internal changes to our processes, systems and service design. These changes help us ensure that our services continually evolve, are efficient and fit for purpose. For our public facing improvement plan, we identify the key actions that will help us improve our services and facilities, such as through our Leisure transformation Programme. In previous years we have focused our efforts on specific issues or services, such as improving our safeguarding policy or helping our environmental services to adapt to the new COVID-era operating environment. This year, after listening to our residents, we have focused on cleanliness issues and our ongoing leisure transformation.   

What we will do

• Improve our customer care practices by continuing to implement our customer focus programme.
• Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of key services, focusing this year on our services that help make the city clean and green.
• Upgrade and improve our leisure facilities by continuing to implement our Leisure Transformation Programme.

How we will measure our performance and impact

Activities to support this improvement objective

Statutory assessment - how this achieves our improvement duty 

Whilst this objective aligns most closely to service quality and availability, it also contributes to all the other statutory improvement requirements in some shape or form. Fit for purpose services can only be achieved through efficiency and innovation, and in keeping with our wider corporate goals, must also support fairness and sustainability.

Improvement Objective 2: Our communities

What we want to achieve

Improve our local areas and enhance how we engage and support residents so everyone can enjoy good quality of life.

Why this is an improvement objective

Our residents have emphasised that our improvement plan must support local people and improve local neighbourhoods. In 2021-2022, we aligned our improvement plan to our COVID19 recovery plan and created a new improvement objective that focused on “our communities”. This theme was particularly well received by our residents so our elected members agreed to keep this as a priority moving forward. 

Improving health and wellbeing has consistently been one of the highest-ranking priorities for our citizens. However, whilst we believe that our improvement plan must contribute to improved health and wellbeing, we also feel that health improvement requires a partnership approach and therefore is best addressed through the Belfast Agenda. We will continue to work with our Belfast Agenda partners to help address health inequalities, whilst using our improvement plan to identify specific things that we can do to improve health and wellbeing. 

This year, one of the biggest challenges facing our citizens is the cost-of-living crisis. In recognition of this, our improvement plan now includes actions deigned to help support our residents, especially those most vulnerable, through the cost-of-living crisis

In response to ongoing citizen engagement, we are continuing to focus on physically improving our neighbourhoods and on enhancing our parks and playgrounds. Feedback from the Belfast Agenda and the results from our regular resident survey also show that we need to become better at engaging our communities and local people. Central to this is widening participation and building capacity. 

What we will do

• Improve the physical condition of local neighbourhoods.
• Improve our parks and playgrounds and encourage people to be physically active.
• Support our residents, especially those most vulnerable, through the cost-of-living crisis.
• Enhance and improve how we engage and involve our residents.

How we will measure our performance and impact

Activities to support this improvement objective

Statutory assessment - how this achieves our improvement duty

This objective helps us to deliver strategic effectiveness, fairness, and innovation. Improving local quality of life and creating inclusive growth are key strategic objectives for the council. Our proposed activities support that goal as we look for new, fairer and better ways to support our vulnerable residents, regenerate our neighbourhoods or strengthen community capacity. The actions also contribute to sustainability by protecting and enhancing our green spaces and to service quality and availability as we strive to make our engagement accessible and fit for purpose.

Improvement Objective 3: Our economy

What we want to achieve

Help small businesses, including social enterprises and co-operatives, to develop and grow, and by doing so, help create opportunities for local jobs and employment. 

Why this is an improvement objective

Creating better jobs and supporting local businesses and entrepreneurs have been key priorities for our residents since the first “Belfast Conversation” in 2015, the engagement process used to develop the Belfast Agenda. Therefore, our improvement plans have always included actions designed to support local prosperity and employment. Last year, we also included activity aimed at supporting social enterprises and co-operatives. This helps support our vision of inclusive growth, where all people share in the success of the city.

A strong and heathy business sector is vital to for the success and wellbeing of our city and for those who live here. This is turn supports employment, which allows us to deliver our vision of inclusive growth. Although other Government departments, particularly the Department for Communities (DfC) and the Department for the Economy (DfE), have statutory responsibility for the economy, employability and skills development, we have an important role to play. We run several initiatives to support small businesses and develop entrepreneurs and provide a range of employability and skills programmes to help people to access skills ad jobs. We will therefore continue to work in partnership in an integrated and strategic way to ensure that, as a city, local people can access decent, secure jobs that pay well and provide opportunity for progression and development.

What we will do

• Deliver support through our local business start-up programmes.
• Deliver the ‘Go For It’ programme for start-up support for 2023-2024. 
• Help mobilise and deliver the new enterprise support service.

How we will measure our performance and impact

Activities to support this improvement objective

Statutory assessment - how this achieves our improvement duty

Our key motivation behind this improvement objective is improving strategic effectiveness and fairness. However, it also supports other improvement criteria. We will continue to review and develop what we do in this area to ensure everyone can benefit from the economic development work we do. That means ensuring that our programmes and initiatives are innovative and fit for purpose and can contribute to economic sustainability for local businesses and residents.

Improvement objective 4: Our environment

What we want to achieve

Help tackle climate change, protect our environment and improve the sustainability of Belfast.

Why this is an improvement objective

In October 2019, the council declared a climate emergency in Belfast. In response, we created a new climate and sustainability improvement objective for 2020-2021. Whilst a small minority of our residents disagreed with this step, explaining that they did not believe in climate change, the majority of our residents were extremely supportive. Given the significant challenges facing our environment and the behavioural changes that will be needed to truly make Belfast an environmentally-friendly and sustainable city, we feel it is necessary to keep the environment as an improvement focus for the foreseeable future. 

Our focus this year is on ensuring, that as a council, we have appropriate strategies, policies, and initiatives in place that will enable us to support climate action and protect our natural resources. Climate change is a global concern. However, all of us can take steps to help avert this. Key to this is developing a strategic climate plan for council. This will include taking steps to reduce our emission and “green” our fleet of vehicles, managing our waste, enhancing our natural environment and encouraging biodiversity.

Through the Belfast Agenda, we will also continue to use our civic leadership to develop joined-up approaches to tackling climate change in Belfast.

What we will do

• Help tackle climate change by developing and implementing a BCC Climate Plan.
• Continue to protect our environment by developing a BCC tree strategy, a local biodiversity action plan and by continuing to roll out the One Million Trees programme.
• Increase the level of recycling across the city and reduce our reliance on landfill.

How we will measure our performance and impact

  Waste figures are provisional for 2022-2023. Validated figures will not be available until November 2023.

Activities to support this improvement objective

Statutory assessment - how this achieves our improvement duty

This objective aligns most closely to sustainability. However, it also contributes to all criteria. We need innovation and courage to transition quickly, but we also need to do this fairly, so that we leave no one behind. Similarly, managing our waste requires us to balance efficiency with service quality and availability, whilst championing our environment and securing sustainability.

Improvement objective 5: Our city

What we want to achieve

Revitalise our city and help it to innovate in an inclusive and sustainable way.

Why this is an improvement objective

Adapted from our 2020 Recovery Plan, we now use this theme as way to identify and prioritise improvement activity that will benefit the city collectively in the longer term. Residents have told us that they want the city centre to be vibrant, safe and welcoming. They recognise that a prosperous and enticing city centre brings social and economic benefits for Belfast and the wider regional economy. Activity to support the city centre will be supplemented by improvements to public spaces and greenways, as well as the continuation of our ambitious city innovation programme to ensure Belfast can harness digital innovation to better address complex urban challenges and support our citizens and communities.These strategic, city development projects contribute to our other improvement priorities such as helping to grow our economy, enhancing our environment or supporting our communities.

What we will do

• Encourage digital innovation across the city by continuing to deliver the Smart District programme.
• Revitalise and support our city centre by continuing to implement the Vacant to Vibrant City Centre Scheme.
• Improve public spaces and greenways across the city.

How we will measure our performance and impact

Activities to support this improvement objective

Statutory assessment - how this achieves our improvement duty

This objective aligns most closely to strategic effectiveness, sustainability and innovation. However, as with many of our improvement actions, we expect the outcome of these actions to impact across other areas as we encourage people to share our city and enjoy healthier greenways and public spaces.

Continuous improvement and monitoring arrangements 

General Duty to Improve

The improvement objectives outlined in this plan do not represent everything we will do in the year ahead. As on organisation, we are committed to continually improving, both in terms of the services we provide and the leadership we show for the city. Through the delivery of our corporate plan and through our facilitation and leadership of the Belfast Agenda, we will continually strive to ensure that Belfast is a city that supports the needs and ambitions of local people.  

To ensure that we continuously improve and meet the needs of our city and residents, we have established these governance arrangements to manage the delivery of all of our plans, including our improvement objectives. These arrangements include:

• Formal monitoring of plans and activity through our standing committees
• An aligned planning process – where activity is ‘planned’ in at the relevant level (committee, departmental, service, area)
• Consideration of the full costs (including where necessary ongoing costs) is included in our estimates process
• Delivery of contributing projects through a clear programme management framework
• Appropriate risk management in relation to main programmes of work
• Appropriate monitoring, reporting and performance management arrangements in place
• Monthly monitoring and reporting (strategic planning and performance information) at a corporate management team level 

Improvement objectives - reporting framework

Each reporting year, we publish an annual self-assessment report, setting out how we have performed against our improvement plan for the previous year, and during the year, we bring quarterly progress reports to the Audit Committee. In addition to these formal reporting mechanisms, our Corporate Management Team monitors progress against our improvement plan as part of the management team’s wider performance management responsibilities.

Arrangements for achievement of statutory performance indicators

The Local Government (Northern Ireland) Act 2014 requires councils to collect and publish information including statutory performance indicators set by the Department for Communities. This relates to activity in respect of economic development, waste management and planning applications.

Statutory performance indicators are:

• Waste management
• Economy
• Planning

Waste figures for 2022-2023 are provisional; validated figures will not be available until November 2023.  

Planning

The Department for Infrastructure (DfI) sets the targets for councils and issues performance updates. The figures for 2022-2023 are currently provisional (will be verified by DfI over the summer). Due to difficulties extracting data from the new planning portal, the enforcement data is only available for the first six months from April to October.

Planning application performance for 2022-2023 was severely impacted by the implementation of the new planning portal (the replacement regional planning IT system used by 11 of the 12 planning authorities in Northern Ireland). The new planning portal was launched in December 2022, but was subject to a number of technical issues, which meant that it was not sufficiently operational until March 2023. This significantly adversely impacted decision times.

Performance on major applications dropped from 31 weeks in 2021-2022 to 57.6 weeks in 2022-2023. This was largely due to delays in issuing decisions post-Planning Committee, principally around the Section 76 planning agreement process. Whilst there are various reasons for such delays, Planning and Legal Services have put in place a number of critical actions to improve performance in this area.

Local applications performance was also impacted by a number of significant staff vacancies, particularly in managerial roles, which adversely affected the throughput of work.

The statutory consultee process continued to limit overall performance. Whilst there have been improvements by consultees in some areas, response times from the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, Department for Infrastructure (Roads and Rivers agencies) continues to fall short of what is required.

In August 2022, the Planning Service began experimenting with a new way of processing planning applications following innovative lean system principles. It has experimented with over 100 applications to date, with very positive results in terms of improved performance and customer delivery. The Planning Service will continue to grow the experimentation in 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 and it will eventually become the new way of working, rolled out to all areas of the development management process.

Statutory indicators for enforcement is unavailable for 2022-2023 due to difficulties extracting data from the new planning portal. However, for the first six months from April to October 2022, performance was 86.5 per cent, being well inside the statutory target of 70 per cent of enforcement cases brought to a conclusion within 39 weeks.

Contact our Performance team

Performance Team
City Hall
Belfast
BT1 5GS

Email: performance@belfastcity.gov.uk