Approach to creating the plan
The Council’s corporate plan, Our Ambition, was agreed in December 2020. The plan was based on the priority areas Directors were planning to deliver over the medium-term, to contribute towards what were classed as four ‘pillars’ of sustainability – finance, workforce, environment and community.
The document was developed during the height of the COVID-19 response, so it was perhaps inevitable that it reflected the major events of the time, with the pandemic, and the potential impacts of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, important areas of policy focus at local and national levels. This is the third annual update report on Our Ambition and comes at the halfway point in delivering the plan.
Our Ambition is structured in three parts. The first section focuses on ten themes which were considered by elected Members and Directors to be the main areas for strategic policy focus. Each theme was assessed to identify ‘drivers for change’, the things we knew in 2020 would provide challenges and opportunities for Shetland and the Council over the medium to long-term. We were keen to signpost sources of evidence for these drivers, to further aid understanding of why they were considered to be priorities and what the implications of doing nothing might be.
Reflecting the positive nature of Our Ambition, each main section contains a set of actions, which Directors had outlined to Members they were planning to deliver to manage the changes and deliver the agreed objectives. The plan therefore reflected, and continues to reflect, existing and planned activity across Directorates.
The second section focuses on the political engagement the Council intended to carry out to help deliver the plan. The third section focuses on the organisational culture that is required to maximise the Council’s chances of delivering the plan. These actions focus on staff and are about approach and attitude.
This update report cannot hope to cover everything the Council has done under each of the themes in the plan. Rather, it provides some of the highlights and also, in places, identifies where performance has not been as expected, with an explanation of why. Most of this information will not be new as it is taken from our integrated performance management framework, so has featured in reports to Committee, either in quarterly Directorate performance updates, statutory reports like the Chief Social Work Officer’s annual report or national data sources such as the Local Government Benchmarking Framework (LGBF).