Consultation on our Council Plan 2025-2029

Background

The Council Plan is our main corporate planning document and describes how we will deliver our key priorities over the next four years. It lines up to both our Medium Term Financial Plan which sets out how our priorities will be resourced, and the County Durham Plan which shows where we aim to develop housing, jobs, support the environment, as well as the transport, schools, and infrastructure to support it. The Council Plan is supported by a series of corporate strategies and service plans which detail the actions, major projects and improvements we are doing to deliver our priorities.

The Plan is reviewed every year, and is structured around the following five ambitions:

• our economy
• our environment
• our people
• our communities
• our council

Under each ambition, we have set out: 

• our priorities 
• our achievements 
• the issues to be addressed 
• what our contribution is in this area  
• what our future approach will be  
• what major projects we will be undertaking 
• our key performance indicators for the delivery of key services and to measure progress towards our ambitions.

We have also, in line with the Equality Act 2010, included equality objectives, which we review every three years.

Our progress towards achieving our ambitions is tracked through key performance indicators as well as data from Office for Local Government's Local Authority Data Explorer. This is used to develop our quarterly performance reports.

The Plan

In our current plan for 2024/25, we explain that we have an annual budget of around £1.3 billion which helps us provide more than 800 different services to more than 522,100 people in County Durham. Examples of services listed in our plan are:

• 16,400 adults supported by social care
• 148 allotment sites
• nearly 10,000 engagements with our archives
• two crematoria, 46 cemeteries and 96 churchyards
• 12 children's homes
• corporate parent to over 1,200 children
• 3 million visits annually to our leisure centres
• 5,000 people learning to swim in our pools
• 262 schools
• 15,500 children and young people receiving additional educational support
• 5,000 children supported by early help and social care services
• over 800,000 sq. feet business space managed
• 5,000 food businesses inspected
• 3,050 older people receiving residential or nursing care
• nine major events organised last year
• 3,845 km of highways and 487 road bridges
• supported living for 750 people and extra care establishments
• 57,000 Council Tax Reduction claimants
• over 200,000 library members
• nine parks and 12 Green Flag Awards
• over 83,000 streetlights maintained
• home care to 3,250 people, telecare for 2,100 and day care for 1,050
• 3,526 km of Public Rights of Way
• one million bins emptied each month
• 18,000 new benefit claims processed each year
• 15 family hubs
• over 500,000 calls answered by customer services each year
• more than 80,000 visits to our Customer Access Points
• 290 electronic vehicle charge points
• 45 hectares of woodland planted since 2020
• more than 2,500 births and 5,000 deaths registered each year

How you can help us

We want to hear from you about our plan and priorities for the next four years, and how we can keep you informed of our progress. We want to know from you:

• Are they the right priorities? Is there anything missing? Are there too many?
• What do you want to see from us so you can better understand how we are performing?
• How would you want us to share what people think about the quality of our services?   
• Is the plan easy to read and understand?

Have your say

What happens next

Your comments will help us to identify and understand local need, any gaps in our service delivery or any areas requiring improvement when we update our Council Plan. The Plan will be discussed at Cabinet in January 2025 ahead of approval at the Full Council meeting in February 2025.