Corporate Plan 2024

Public consultation has taken place on our plans to build our Corporate Plan 2024 around the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs.

The consultation ran from 11 December 2023 to 4 March 2024 and has now closed.

We have left the consultation details on this page for the public’s information, but you can no longer comment.

The results will be published on this page in due course.

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What is a Corporate Plan?

At least once during an administration, roughly every four years, the council sets out its medium-term vision for the future including its aims, ambitions and a set of objectives.

Once agreed, the Corporate Plan is used by council officers to make recommendations to councillors and is used by councillors to make decisions and prioritise limited resources.

It has to work in harmony with the council’s Local Plan, the council’s official planning blueprint which allocates land for new homes, jobs, new schools and community uses as well as imposing rules designed to dictate the quality and density of developments, boost biodiversity, protect valued open spaces over the long term and to ensure any new development minimises its contribution to climate change while also mitigating against its effects.

It also has to complement the council’s Medium Term Financial Strategy which looks at the council’s finances.

The Corporate Plan and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

We would like your views on our proposal to build the council’s next Corporate Plan around the UN’s SDGs.

This would involve making the SDGs relevant to the challenges facing the district and fulfil councillors’ ambition to ‘think globally and act locally’.

It is hoped that by using the SDGs, the council’s Corporate Plan will put the district’s communities, in all their forms, at its heart so it almost becomes a community plan.

The SDGs will also allow the council to produce an action plan so that everyone can measure the council’s progress and hold it accountable.

While the council cannot take direct action with a number of the SDGs, it does recognise it has a powerful role in being able to work with others at all levels of the community and more widely to bring about change.

Where there is disagreement, the council also recognises it has a powerful voice in lobbying others and acting as a champion for the district and those that live, work and study here.

This consultation is designed to help us understand which of the SDGs you think are the most important or most relevant to the district.

There will be work the council is doing that will already contribute to the council’s progress towards the SDGs and there will also be work we need to get underway or accelerate.

Corporate Plan themes

This document is designed to help you have your say as part of the council’s consultation on its Corporate Plan.

It will point to the data that is out there which explains the district’s position in relation to each of our proposed themes.

It will give a flavour of what the council is already doing on each theme and what it could do in the future.

You can also read the Equality Impact Assessment.

What happens next?

All the feedback we receive will be reported to councillors before the final Corporate Plan is adopted.

Published: 11 December 2023