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‘Clear strategy, huge ambition and strong leadership’ in guiding city through challenges ahead

Published: Tuesday, 19th July 2022

‘Clear strategy, huge ambition and strong leadership’ in guiding city through challenges ahead

A group of leaders from local authorities across the country have praised Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s ‘clear strategy, huge ambition and strong leadership’ in helping the city recover from the pandemic and foster sustainable, economic growth.

In a focused four-day ‘corporate peer challenge’ a team of seven local government experts also praised the city’s growing national profile and influence and success in securing external funding, including the highest allocation of levelling up grants for any single city in the country last year.

The review was led by the Local Government Association and involved more than 40 meetings and feedback from more than 150 people including council staff, councillors, and external stakeholders from other public sector organisations, businesses and the media.

The review took place in May and has today been published in full in a 24-page document on the council’s website: www.stoke.gov.uk/peerreview.

Council leader Abi Brown said: “We’re really pleased to get this level of thorough feedback of the way we operate as a council from experts who are our peers from other parts of the country. The review has provided us with detailed, critical scrutiny. It is good practice and good sense to let other authorities challenge what we are doing, because it gives us an important set of insights from our peers that can help us to continue to improve.”

The review was conducted by a council leader and chief officers from authorities across the breadth of the country, from Islington to Hull. The report praised ‘positive signs’ of the city’s economic growth, singled out the support of partners ‘aligned to the council’s ambitions’ for the city and residents, and recognised a ‘step change’ in the council’s increasing influence at a national level.

The report also highlighted the socio-economic challenges the city faces in relation to rising inflation and the increasing cost of living, especially at a time when healthy life expectancy for men and women is below the England average, gross weekly pay is below the UK average and with a lower number of residents going to university than the England average.

The reviewers made a series of recommendations for the council to pursue including:

  • Maintaining a focus on children’s services improvement as the absolute priority, and ensuring an unrelenting drive on this from across the council
  • Strengthening engagement with residents, partners and staff particularly in relation to the authority’s ‘Levelling Up’ ambitions to secure partnerships and investment into the city.
  • Working to ensure that these ambitions impact positively and to the greatest possible extent on the clear challenges that the city faces.
  • Reviewing the authority’s capital programme and financial strategy over the next five years, particularly in light of rising inflation and options around savings and income generation.

The recommendations in full can be found in the published report on the council’s website.

Councillor Brown said: “This was a positive review, with positive challenge. We’re pleased that the findings will help us to redouble our focus on critical services and areas of the council business. We have already identified work in a number of key areas that the review has also highlighted, so it is a good endorsement of our judgment, particularly in response to the financial challenge. We know that the current national situation, with rising inflation, is incredibly hard for residents and businesses. We are impacted in the same way, and so we are looking at how we can be extra vigilant on how we spend public money to mitigate against this.

“Earlier this month we launched our #StrongerTogether campaign to put at residents’ fingertips all the information they need to check if they are eligible for council tax discounts, benefits, sign-posting to support services, and information for businesses about rate relief and checking eligibility for grants. Just search www.stoke.gov.uk/strongertogether for more.”