BNDfC Partnership Board agreed the New Deal programme should move away from prescribed themes to a set of priorities that reflected the future challenges and opportunities facing the programme in Burngreave. These included a change of priorities resulting from what has been achieved so far and the changing context locally, regionally and nationally eg imminent delivery of the Transformational projects, Full Service Districts, Mixed Communities.
There was recognition that community resources were stretched by the number of meetings held in the area. The meetings often duplicated areas of discussion, people in attendance and, due to their narrow focus, limit the opportunity to consider the wider impact of decisions.
The regularity of meetings also takes up a considerable amount of staff resources in preparing papers that would be better spent managing project performance, developing the Focus and Strategy Groups and engaging residents and Board members through more effective and interesting means than at present.
The existing Theme structure was never implemented consistently across all of the theme areas and has resulted in different practices in different themes which make it difficult for residents, staff and Board members to participate effectively in more than one theme area. As a result of these issues the Board agreed to the re-organisation of the programme to four priority areas from seven Theme areas. The new priority areas being:
Community Strength
Children and Young People
Housing, Environment and Crime
Skills and Employment
The Board also decided for the meetings to be held bi-monthly and to revise the Project Approval Process to reflect the changing emphasis to shaping delivery from project approval. Initially, we are looking for an expression of interest from those who feel they may have something to contribute to the priority areas of the programme.