LAA Roadshow: From Negotiation to Delivery

Over 150 people from local stake holding organisations such as local government, business, police, third sector, health, non-departmental public bodies, and academia, attended the event.

Phil Hope spoke about the way forward and said that the negotiations were only the beginning of the Local Area Agreement. The challenge now was to deliver the agreements so that the citizens of the East Midlands would reap the benefits of the new way of working. The Minister’s opening address was positively received.

James Blake, from Communities and Local Government, provided a national and regional analysis of Local Area Agreements. Attendees found the presentation helpful, and commented that it was interesting to hear the government’s view of lessons learnt.

A panel Q&A and discussion followed, at which the Minister and James Blake were joined by the Chief Executive from Derby City Council, Ray Cowlishaw, and Jan Sensier, Deputy Regional Director for Localities at GOEM. Overall people found the Q&A session useful; ‘some good questions led to good discussions’. It was felt that the panel did a good job to capture all the points, covering a good range and providing constructive answers. In particular it was noted that the Minister’s answers were very helpful, providing an ‘important focus on social exclusion’.

After a break for refreshments, representatives from the Nottinghamshire Local Strategic Partnership provided a presentation covering the development of the LAA in terms of overall strategy, management arrangements and links with future work on a single Sustainable Community Strategy for the County area. It highlighted how delivery is being driven in the partnership and exemplified where there have been successes as well as the lessons learned.

This was followed by two very well received presentations on how the LAA had helped young people. One was from Morris Samuels of Unity F.C., a Nottingham City based project that aims to bring together young people from different communities with a common love of football, and helps them develop with further education, training and employment opportunities; and Derby Dance (DeDa), which offers a class curriculum of over 40 classes a week and an extensive community development programme.

Lunch was followed by an extensive series of workshops on differing aspects of the Local Area Agreement. These included Community Empowerment, Reward, RIEP, Performance Management, Tackling Social Exclusion, and the Place Survey. The comments on the content of the workshops were largely positive, with most people finding these useful.

Overall the event was regarded as a success. In general the feedback was very positive, with delegates finding most of the morning sessions either ‘useful’ or ‘very useful’. The presentations on delivery appear to have been a success, with Unity and Deda in particular receiving a very favourable response.