Corporate Plan 2022 to 2027: how this plan was developed

Owing to Covid-19 restrictions, in September 2021 we adapted our approach and held a series of online workshops to specifically discuss ideas for the Corporate Plan. We held a regional interactive discussion with North West and North East Wales Regional Cohesion teams and Co-Production Network Wales called Community Voices. This session sought to engage with people where language, culture, social or physical differences may create barriers to being effectively heard, and has formed part of the Conwy and Denbighshire Public Service Board’s Well-being Assessment that has informed this plan. Forty-three representatives from seldom heard groups took part in this discussion. We also contacted local groups and networks specialising in supporting people with sensory loss to ensure that their voices were included, as well as working with a local youth forum to gain their views. In addition to these sessions, we ran a survey to ask people’s views.

We reflected on all this feedback to develop our Corporate Plan for 2022 to 2027. It was approved by Council in March 2022 as a draft for wider consultation with communities and newly elected members. The draft plan was then amended in accordance with further community and elected member feedback, and finally approved by Council in October 2022. It was agreed that there would be reviews throughout the five-year term to reflect on changing focus and finances.

However, as the public sector’s financial environment has worsened, discussions were again held with senior managers and councillors during 2024 to rationalise our Corporate Plan, focussing on those ambitions that remain important to our communities. This has seen us move from nine citizen-focussed goals to five, creating better synergies between our desired outcomes, and strengthening some key underlying principles to the way we work as a council.

We still want to keep this conversation going and we want to hear your ideas as to how services can be improved. We’ll continue to use The County Conversation as a way that you can share ideas, and we will continue to invite community views on service developments. We welcome your comments or suggestions for improvements any time of the year, so please let us know.

We have rationalised the number of goals set within this plan to five, recognising that the nine that were set previously were very ambitious and spread our focus too thinly. However, this document is not a dramatic departure from the Well-being Objectives that we previously set in 2022, and should be viewed only as a refinement of what we have already said we would try to deliver. Crucially we have tried to strengthen the plan as a high-level strategic document, taking a step-back from overly operational detail. We have also taken particular care to review the wording of our commitments to make them more current, and being especially wary of potential future change owing to budgetary pressures. It is a difficult balance to achieve whilst still keeping an eye on what’s really important, but hopefully this document achieves that.

We have retained our long-term outcomes around the environment and housing. We have also kept our focus on economic prosperity and education; but recognising the strong synergies between these two important areas of work, we have brought them together within a single theme. Likewise, we have also retained our ambition for a healthy Conwy; but again, recognising clear synergies that exist, we have brought in the important work we do around promoting safety and safeguarding that previously stood apart in their own outcomes. Our resilience outcome has received the most significant rewrite, with a greater focus on the financial challenges that we are facing as an organisation. This outcome has also been elevated to emphasise its importance, recognising that if we don’t get it right, we will not be able to deliver the commitments made in the other four goals. Finally, we have decided that it is no longer appropriate to treat the Welsh Language and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as time-bound outcomes. Elevating these as fundamental principles that we work to, underpinned by their own strategies and reporting mechanisms, should help raise the profile of these two important agendas, no longer being dealt with in silos. We have also included the way that we work with our communities as a principle that should underpin all that we do.