The Local Area Agreement (LAA) is an agreement between the government and the Island and forms a part of the government’s vision for improving the way local priorities are addressed.
It is intended to encourage and re-enforce partnership working through a set of key promises and targets driven by the Sustainable Community Strategy that offer improvements to the lives of Island residents.
The LAA (April 2008) is intended to run for a period of three years after which it will be reviewed and modified to take account of any shifting change in local need.
Eco Island forms the foundation to the Sustainable Community Strategy and has been developed across four Eco Island themes. From these themes, a set of 15 key Eco island priorities have been established, seen as significant to achieving the outcome each theme describes.
The LAA supports Eco Island by setting a series of targets agreed with the government as being the most important measure of how well the Island is doing in reaching its Eco Island ambitions. We can have up to a maximum of 35* measures as agreed with Central government, supported by a number of additional locally agreed indicators. All of these indicators are underpinned by programmes of action agreed among the Island Strategic Partnership, leading to a range of initiatives and activities each of which is performance managed with progress reported to the partnership and the government.
These Indicators give a strong focus to the partnership's ambitions, they will drive improvement and delivery of the sustainable community strategy – Eco Island.
* A further 16 statutory indicators are set by Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).
For each of the 35 indicators, actions are taken that are planned to deliver the outcome for the indicator. This includes a process for target setting that seeks to establish the trend for improvement that is needed.
Performance is reported on at each quarter end to the ISP, assisting it to monitor performance achieved and the associated use of funding and resource.
While the majority of the indicators may be the responsibility of departments across the Local Authority, others may involve participation either in part, or wholly, by one of a number of the partner organisations involved in Eco Island.
With the introduction of the current LAA, a number of the specific grants the Local Authority receives, previously 'ring fenced to things the government say we have to spend the money on) will become non-ring fenced. In most cases these will have gone to form a part of a new ‘Area Based Grant’ (ABG). This means it will now be possible to use the total non-ring fenced funding within the ABG to support the delivery of local, regional and national priorities, including achievement of LAA targets.
An update is available on the ISP website by clicking here .
The promises and targets that have been agreed by the ISP and the Government can be found by clicking here.
As the LAA progresses, performance reports will be posted on this webpage
