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A forward-looking and resilient Council

We're always looking to make services more efficient and sustainable and better meet people’s needs, and will carry on looking at ways to develop our services and change the way we work in the future.

Illustration of a winter street scene.

As a large County Council we have a range of central services that work across the whole of the Council to provide and support our day-to-day services for residents.

This includes our customer service centre, legal and governance teams, finance, human resources, procurement, communications, IT and business support.

These services are the 'engine room' of the Council and help us provide and deliver our customer-facing services, ensuring we have the resources we need to work efficiently and adapt for the future.     

Colleagues in our central teams also make sure that we work in a lawful and transparent way, reducing any risks, and making the best use of resources to protect services while delivering value for money for local people.

Our staff stepped up during the pandemic and worked hard to adapt services and protect the most vulnerable. We want to continue to support them by giving them the skills and knowledge they need and providing a positive, inclusive culture. We'll also continue to develop new and innovative ways of working, including some which came out of the pandemic, like hybrid home/office working, and using 'virtual visits' to connect social care staff and residents. We're always looking to make services more efficient and sustainable and better meet people’s needs, and will carry on looking at ways to develop our services and change the way we work in the future.

We’ll keep developing our technologies to reach those in isolated communities, and make it easier for people to communicate with us and access our services. We’ll create effective, easy-to-use systems and processes to ensure we get it right for residents first time, every time. And, we’ll keep listening and using residents’ feedback and other data to make services better, working closely with partners to get the best for people.

Finally, we’re working hard to secure more powers and resources for Nottinghamshire. We know this would help us improve our services, support local businesses, create jobs and attract much needed investment for infrastructure and the economy. We are doing this by collaborating with other councils in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, and our many partners, all of whom share in our ambition. We’re talking with Government about our proposals, and how they link to our broader ten-year vision, and the national levelling up agenda.

Over the next four years, we’ll focus on:

  • Delivering our Council-wide Improving Residents Access Programme, to give people better access to information and services, develop technology that helps people access our services more easily, and empowering vulnerable people to be as independent as possible.
  • Maintaining the financial sustainability of the authority through our Medium Term Financial Strategy, allocating resources appropriately to achieve the ambitions in this Plan and working with partners and the Government to maximise the resources available.
  • Developing our Council-wide approach to service transformation. This will help us to identify and develop new ways of delivering services that create the best possible long-term outcomes for people. It will find better ways of managing costs and demand.
  • Managing the transition from our current Committee system to a Cabinet system of governance that will help speed up and improve our decision making.
  • Continuing to develop our hybrid-working model to enable staff to deliver services in new ways, whilst reducing our carbon footprint from staff travel and reducing our property costs.
  • Continuing to invest in supporting and developing our workforce, so that our staff are resilient, adaptable, and equipped to face the challenges of changing services and workplaces.
  • Ensuring that the way we work with our partners, residents and with each other across the Council reflects the values we set out in this Plan.
  • Joining up our commissioning activity across Council services to achieve financial benefits and improve services for people.

Success means:

  • People can access Council services more easily
  • Resident satisfaction with the Council improves
  • The Council has a balanced budget and valued services are protected
  • The Cabinet system of governance is successfully adopted
  • The County Council retains and recruits a highly talented workforce.

In 2022-23, to achieve this, we will deliver the following actions:

  • Work to bring forward regional devolution proposals with our regional council partners that will secure major investment, jobs and increased prosperity for Nottinghamshire and the East Midlands, in response to the Government’s Levelling Up White Paper.
  • Develop a Digital Strategy that embeds use of data and new technologies into all elements of the Council’s business. This will improve the experience of our residents when they interact with the Council, create efficiencies in our processes and ways of working so that we use our resources where they add greatest value to our residents and communities and help us to understand the needs in our communities to target resources effectively.
  • Implement changes to the Council’s governance arrangements, so that Councillors can make timely and informed decisions about changes that affect the people of Nottinghamshire.
  • Engage with our workforce around the Council’s culture and ways of working – "The Nottinghamshire Way." This will involve developing and rolling out a refreshed approach to employee engagement so that colleagues understand how they fit into the ‘bigger picture,’ feel listened to and involved in the decisions and changes that impact them. This will be supported by a new corporate leadership development programme.
  • Strengthen the processes we use to choose how to provide services for residents by developing our approach to 'strategic commissioning.' This will ensure that our funding is used effectively to meet identified needs and that services demonstrate good value for money.
  • Review our Hybrid working model to ensure it is flexible and meets the needs of our changing workforce and reflects new developments in technology.

To find out more about what we’ve got planned for the current year, you can read our full Annual Delivery Plan 2022/23 [PDF].

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