Our Corporate Strategy sets out our priorities, within a core framework of addressing the Climate and Ecological emergencies and ensuring our residents have a bigger say.
Being our Best
Our ‘Being Our Best’ programme is driven by our values: being bold, empowered, supportive, and transparent. The programme is delivering a new operating model and a streamlined senior management structure.
As a council, we were a finalist in the ‘most improved council’ category in the LGC Awards, reflecting our level of ambitious change within the organisation.
Preparing for the future
We believe in facing challenges by thinking ahead. We have a strong track record of managing our finances well; we’ve successfully delivered efficiencies and adopted commercial approaches to generating income from our heritage assets.
The pandemic highlighted how reliant we are on visitor income. When combined with funding pressures on children’s and adults’ social care, and with the prospect of even greater funding challenges in the future, we know we need to increase our capacity to deliver better outcomes within available budgets.
Celebrating success
We’ve made considerable progress as a council, but we’re celebrating the success of Bath and North East Somerset as an area too.
We are proud of our World Heritage City, our market towns, our villages, and rural communities. We are home to significant academic, business, heritage, and natural assets. Our residents are highly qualified, and we have low levels of unemployment.
Economic strategy
Our economy faces challenges. Economic growth in the last ten years has been sluggish, and our lower-than-average wages cannot keep up with escalating costs of local housing. This is not a sustainable or inclusive model of growth.
Our new Economic Strategy sets out how we plan to address issues such as sluggish economic growth, lower-than-average wages, and escalating costs of local housing. We will need to collaborate to make the changes we need by working with local partners through our Future Ambition Board.
We also work closely with the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority to maximize investment in our area, whether that is for skills, infrastructure, housing, or transport.
Making change happen
We’re already playing our part through regeneration initiatives and by maximizing the delivery of new, affordable homes.
We’ve made great, innovative progress, but we need a new Executive Director of Resources to help us increase the pace of change.