Introduction
Aligned to our city’s refreshed community plan (the Belfast Agenda 2024-2028), Belfast City Council Corporate Plan 2025-2028 and the annual Corporate Delivery Plan 2026-2027, our Performance Improvement Plan 2026-2027 sets out the council’s key priorities for improvement over the next 12-month period to ensure that we fulfil our duty to improve.
Duty to improve
Under the Local Government Act (NI) 2014, we have a statutory duty to:
- agree improvement objectives
- publish an annual Improvement Plan
- ensure appropriate arrangements are in place to achieve them.
Defining improvement
In accordance with the act and accompanying guidance, for us ‘improvement’ is about enhancing the sustainable quality of life and environment for ratepayers and communities rather than limited to gains in service output or efficiencies.
Our Performance Improvement Plan has also been developed against the backdrop of the council’s new, emerging Planning and Performance Management Framework to embed a consistent, streamlined approach to planning and performance management throughout the organisation. It will also help to build an effective culture of performance management to ensure all members, staff and stakeholders work to achieve the best possible outcomes and value for money for the residents and communities in Belfast. The framework will also be a crucial tool to support informed decision-making, more effective use of resources and drive improvement across the organisation.
Our medium and longer-term arrangements to ensure continuous improvement are outlined in Figure 1. This plan sets out our performance improvement objectives for 2026-2027 which are compliant with the requirement for them to be:
- legitimate - making a demonstrable contribution to at least one (or, probably, more than one) of the aspects of improvement listed in the Local Government Act.
- clear - setting out the visible improvement that citizens can expect.
- robust - with defined terms of success (whether quantitative or qualitative).
- deliverable - with established links to individual service programmes and budgets.
- demonstrable - capable of being supported by objective (but not necessarily measured or quantitative) evidence.
