Locality Improvement Plans
Community planning is the process by which councils and other public bodies work with local people, businesses and voluntary groups to plan and deliver better services to improve the lives of people who live in their community. It is about reducing the outcome gap for those who experience the greatest inequality, taking a preventative approach.
The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 requires the Edinburgh Partnership to develop and deliver a local outcome improvement plan for the city and individual locality improvement plans for each locality
Local outcome improvement plan
The Local Outcome Improvement Plan 2018-28 has three priority themes:
- enough money to live on
- access to work, learning and training opportunities
- a good place to live.
This is a ten year plan with outcomes that can only be tackled through partnership working.
Locality improvement plans
To inform the first version of the plans, launched in 2017, we listened to a wide range of people, taking the conversations to where people were in the locality and recognised the importance of engaging with people who would not normally take part. We also utilised locality profile information.
In early 2020 each of the four locality improvement plans were reviewed, looking at what has been achieved to date and what our communities have told us so far during the delivery of each plan. They were then streamlined, focussing on fewer priorities and only on those that will truly tackle poverty and inequality, that have been identified as thorny issues in our communities and can only be achieved through partnership working.
During the revision, the world was faced with a global pandemic. COVID-19 has negatively impacted all communities in different ways. The priorities in the plans have now been considered along with what we know so far about how this pandemic has affected our communities. We have taken data from partners, showing where focus is needed for the city’s recovery and aligned our priorities to the findings of the Poverty Commission so that we can achieve better outcomes for citizens across our localities.