Section 2
The Council’s Medium Term Corporate Strategy

The County Council in November 2001 approved a Medium Term Corporate Strategy to guide its work for the period up to 2005, the life of the present Council. The Strategy set out nine corporate objectives and, within those, the key priorities the Council intended to focus on. A commitment was made to review progress on the priorities identified in the Strategy, and the need to focus on a smaller number of priorities was acknowledged in the Council’s self assessment for the Comprehensive Performance Assessment.

The Council has now reviewed its priorities taking into account progress to date and also the effects of three significant recent developments, the Community Strategy, the Corporate Performance Assessment and the Public Service Agreement. These are all referred to in more detail elsewhere in this Plan. A copy of the updated Medium Term Corporate Strategy is available on the Council’s website or in printed form from the Public Relations Unit (see Introduction).

The Council has decided that its major service priorities can be grouped under the following six Corporate Objectives:

The later Sections of this Plan relate to each of these Objectives and also set out in the Section on "Making the Priorities Work" how we will improve our corporate working practices in order to support the delivery of these improvements.

Within each Objective the Council has identified a small number of priority issues it wishes to address. These priorities form the main element of our plans for future improvements to services that are described in later Sections. We have identified how our progress in achieving each of them can be measured and will monitor and report regularly on this in future. We believe that this refinement of the Corporate Objectives and the priorities identified within each of them will help to focus our efforts more effectively on the things that matter to the people of Leicestershire.

It should be emphasised that, whilst the focus of our improvement plans may be on these priority issues, the maintenance and development of all services we provide is important. We aim to demonstrate continuous improvement in all service areas.