Agenda and minutes

There were no apologies for absence.

Members are reminded of their responsibility to declare any personal interest in respect of matters contained in this agenda. If the interest arises only as result of your membership of another public body or one to which you have been appointed by the Council then you only need to declare it if you intend to speak.

If the personal interest is a prejudicial interest, you must withdraw from the meeting. Normally you should leave the room before the business starts to be discussed. You do, however, have the same right to speak as a member of the public and may remain in the room to enable you to exercise that right and then leave immediately. In either case you must not seek to improperly influence a decision on the matter.

Councillor Dennis Edgerley declared that he was a Member of the Chorley Partnership Board.

The Assistant Chief Executive (Policy and Performance) will give a brief presentation on the background to Local Strategic Partnerships and the formation of Chorley Partnership.

The presentation will introduce the following documents.

The Assistant Chief Executive (Policy and Performance) gave a brief presentation to Members of the Group on the background of the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) and the formation of Chorley Partnership.

LSPs are not statutory bodies, however they do have an important role in bringing together the public, private, voluntary and community sectors to co-ordinate joint working and expertise in improving localities.

The Chorley Partnership is the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) for Chorley. The Partnership consists of a Board that meets four times a year and the Executive, which meets much more frequently. The Partnership’s role is to develop a vision for transforming the Borough and for tackling crosscutting issues through the production and delivery of the Sustainable Community Strategy.

• The Board acts as the centre of a communication network ensuring that the key issues for the Borough are raised and discussed. It also scrutinises performance management information on a regular basis on the progress made towards the targets set in the Sustainable Community Strategy and Chorleys’ contribution to the Local Area Agreement (LAA). The Board also holds the LSP Executive to account for delivery against the Community Strategy.

• The Executive is smaller and brings together the key decision makers/public sector partners in the borough, and is responsible for driving delivery and allocating resources to the LSP. The Executive gives steer to the sub-groups to develop action plans and partner-based projects to deliver improved local services.

There are five thematic groups that sit below the Executive, that are tasked with delivering projects to meet the Sustainable Community Strategy objectives. These are:

• Community Safety
• Economic Regeneration
• Chorley Local Children’s Trust
• Stronger and more involved Communities
• Neighbourhood Streetscene and Environment

There are also plans to develop another themed group around housing.

In the last two years a number of changes have been implemented to improve how the Partnership operates. These include:

• Restructuring of the Partnership and a new constitution
• Refreshed membership with elections to the Board and a new Chair
• New performance management framework in place
• Communications Plan for the LSP
• Council committed on-going revenue funding
• Increased role in Local Area Agreement negotiations

The Local Area Agreement is a countywide agreement between the Lancashire Partnership (Lancashire County Council’s LSP) and the Department of Communities and Local Government. There are 35 National Indicators that best reflect the priorities set out in ‘Ambitious Lancashire’, the Lancashire wide Sustainable Community Strategy.

Twelve District Local Strategic Partnerships deliver the Local Area Agreement on a local level and if they perform well will receive part of a circa £2million Performance Reward Grant at the end of the 3 year period (during 2011).

The Chorley Partnership identified and supported six projects for 2007/08 as follows:

• Reducing Teenage Pregnancy in Chorley
• Multi Agency Tasking and Co-Ordination (MATAC)
• Marketing Chorley
• First Steps
• Building a Chorley Community Network
• The Families First Project

An IDeA Peer Review was undertaken in October 2007 on the Chorley Partnership and this outlined areas where the LSP currently performs strongly and identified some areas for development.  ...  view the full minutes text for item 3.

Scoping document (enclosed)

The Members discussed several areas where issues had been raised or identified and these were fed into the scoping document.

The Group AGREED the following:

Objectives:

1. Ensure the wider engagement of the Council, Ward Councillors and local people in the work of the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP).

2. Look at maximising the Capacity of the Local Strategic Partnership by:

• maximising the funding contributions from partners
• aligning funding and projects with the objectives of the Sustainable Community Strategy
• considering the process used to select projects
• look at the delivery of projects and how they have added value

3. Investigating how the Local Strategic Partnership will tackle one of the  key issues for the Borough, the high rate of alcohol-harm related hospital admission rates.

Members of the public who have requested the opportunity to ask a question(s) on an item(s) on the agenda will be asked to put their question(s) to the Panel. Each member of the public will be allowed to ask one supplementary question within his/her allocated 3 minutes. 

There were no questions from members of the public.

• Tuesday 21 October 2008 at 6.30pm
• Tuesday 25 November 2008 at 6.30pm
• Tuesday 16 December 2008 at 6.30pm

It was AGREED that the dates of the future meetings of the Group would be as follows:

• Tuesday 21 October 2008 at 6.30pm
• Monday 24 November 2008 at 6.30pm
• Tuesday 16 December 2008 at 6.30pm