Community services

Tim Field

Community services is led by Deputy Director, Tim Field.

Salford is divided into eight neighbourhoods, each of which has a community committee. This provides the local strategic partnership with a consistent and well-established means of engaging with our communities. Each community committee produces an annual community action plan which lays out the priorities for the neighbourhood under the headings of the seven pledges of the city. Neighbourhood teams, consisting of many service deliverers such as the police, health, environment, then deliver the community action plans under the leadership of a Neighbourhood Manager.

This division manages this process. Significant amounts of money are devolved to community committees so that the community, with the support of elected members, can decide upon the allocation of some resources to their agreed priorities. Community services manages this process, with the main aim of enhancing service delivery for residents of and visitors to the city.

In December 2008 an event called Salford Neighbourhoods Summit was held. A large group of partners, including community members came together to re-commit to neighbourhood working in Salford and to look at how our current ways of working can be improved. The Summit led to a piece of work called our Strategic Direction of Neighbourhoods Review which involved a great deal of listening and learning, thinking and planning which took place across 2009.

The review took a top-to-bottom look at how partners work together to deliver neighbourhood services, at how the important decisions get made and at how partner agencies can work even more effectively together and with more local people. The review resulted in a report to cabinet which made ten recommendations. The report was supported by councillors on the Cabinet of Salford City Council and work is now underway to gain the active support of all partners and communities, and to work together to turn the ideas into a successfully delivered action plan. The action plan will be known as our “Building Better Neighbourhoods Programme” and will take a positive, partnership approach under the slogan of “Everyone Can.”

Nonetheless, there have been successes, with models of excellent engagement in parts of the city, for example, in Winton, from which others can learn. The compact with local people provides an excellent example for how the council and its partners, working in neighbourhoods, can support local people to improve the quality of life in neighbourhoods.

The experiment of co-location of key services in Ordsall to address safe, clean and green priorities has received positive comments but will need to be reviewed as part of our overall response to improving integrated service delivery in neighbourhoods. It is clear that environmental concerns remain a priority for local communities, as evidenced by the council's Big Listening surveys, and there is a commitment to how best use environmental resources in the most responsive way to local communities concerns.

Similarly, the devolution of decision-making regarding £100K of highway repairs and maintenance to community committees and the pilots in participatory budgeting has been welcomed in community committees and has placed Salford at the forefront of testing out models of community engagement and involvement. Further work now needs to be done to evaluate the impact of this work and to test out whether such approaches could be applied to other areas of activity at a neighbourhood level.

The integrated work with the PCT through health improvement teams in each neighbourhood and challenging health inequalities, is a model that can be built upon to tackle the most significant health challenges, particularly heart disease and cancer. The forthcoming Healthy Weight Strategy has been developed through a wide-ranging partnership between the council, PCT and other key partners and will have a strong focus on neighbourhood working to achieve its desired outcomes.

The health and wellbeing manager has now joined community services. The role entails reducing health inequalities within the city council and among our communities. The current focus is on completion and implementation of the Healthy Weight Strategy, working closely with the deputy director of public health at the PCT.