Responsive local governance – Sunderland City Council

• Lead Member Sunderland City Council
• Categories Climate Change & Environment, Strategy

Sunderland City Council’s Community Leadership Programme has challenged people, processes and structures to improve their contribution to helping Sunderland City Council to become the best Community Leader that it can be. Each must work within the Council’s core values of ‘Decent, Proud and Together’ to help the council to

• Understand its communities, customers and their needs better than ever before
• Set priorities which will meet the highest priority needs of local people and local communities most effectively
• Develop responses to priorities which will maximise chances of achieving desired outcomes irrespective of who delivers these
• Evaluate success and impact more effectively than ever before

In 2012 the Council rationalised its Executive and Committee arrangements and aligned these to support its priorities for development as a Community Leadership Council. Changes featured  extensive devolution to Areas on the one hand and an increased focus on strategic aspects of community leadership on the other. It therefore

• Consolidated the role of Area Committees as local hubs of community leadership and service redesign
• Introduced Area Boards for ‘Place’ and ‘People’ as the focus of ‘de-siloing’ council services and decentralised governance.
• Actively encouraged Area Boards to recommend bottom-up changes to current service standards and approaches
• Established a clearer relationship between Cabinet, Area Committees and Area Boards to aid the introduction and embedding  of these arrangements.

New arrangements have been complemented by refreshed  Area-based budgets with a budgetary value of over £1.5m. These are designed to enable local Councillors, working with partners and their local communities to identify the right local priorities and to act upon these speedily with minimum bureaucracy and delay. Budgets include a Ward Community Chest of £10,000 per Ward per year which often also acts as seed funder of local community activity. Budgets are increasingly being targeted at activity which

• Strengthens engagement between the Council and  communities to improve the quality of intelligence available to the Council to target and shape its priorities and responses
• Supports demand management by promoting local self-help in key areas such as Adult Social Care
• Encourages community capacity development in areas which the Council has identified plans for transformation which could generate additional local economic opportunities

Read Sunderland’s case study on promoting internal co-production here.

Read Sunderland’s case study on bringing services closer to the communities they serve here.