Our Key Priorities

The Council has a number of plans and strategies that will be focused on reducing child poverty and inequalities in the city.

These include:

• Local Child Poverty Action Plan including our wider fairness work
• Children and Families and Chief Executive’s Service Plans
• Equalities Mainstreaming Reports
• Not Just a Roof housing options and homeless strategy and Rapid Rehousing Transition Plan

Fairness, Equality and Child Poverty

The Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 was introduced to reinforce the drive for Scotland to be the best place in the world to grow up, and to live up to the Fairer Scotland vision in which eradicating child poverty is central.

Every Council and local health board in Scotland is required to publish annual Local Child Poverty Action Plan Reports setting out action being taken at local level to tackle child poverty. This action also needs to counter the effects of the Cost of Living Crisis.

The city is setting itself the ambitious goal of reducing child poverty by half by 2030 and matching the Scottish Government’s overall national target of reducing child poverty to less than 10% of children living in relative poverty by 2030.

We are in the privileged position to benefit from the work done by the final Dundee Fairness Commission, which made many powerful recommendations and which will influence the next full revision of our Fairness and Child Poverty Action Plan.

Overseeing the development and implementation of our Fairness and Child Poverty planning will be the Dundee Fairness Leadership Panel. This body brings community representatives with lived experience of poverty together with council leaders and our partners. It is sure to shape our future reports and will be driving the work into the future. It is vital that people experiencing poverty at the sharp end can have their voices heard as city agencies work to improve life for them.

The latest action plan submitted to Committee highlighted work that is ongoing across the city including the Local Fairness Initiatives, Cost of the School Day project, the Dundee Community Food Network, the Discover Work service, support across our communities by our local teams and a wide range of advice services to maximise people’s incomes.

The drive for inclusive growth in the next section will also include our commitment that the Council will contribute to ensure that Dundee is a living wage city. The city has passed the milestone of 100 organisations accredited as a living wage employer. The Council has ensured its pay scales mean no one is earning less than the living wage.

Combining the Council’s responsibility to children and young people and priority of reducing poverty will target the percentage of 16-19 year olds across the city to ensure they all get into employment, training or education. Our aim is to see all young people’s lives take off in a positive way, with a strong focus on care experienced young people and those from Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation 1 (20% most deprived) areas.

Our Equality Outcome Plan 2021 - 2025 follows the Equality and Human Rights Commission (Scotland), as well as information and evidence available at a local and national level across the functions of the Dundee City Council.

The new outcomes and actions were developed to reflect the lived experience of people in Dundee from protected groups, the impact of COVID-19 and the evolving national policy landscape. Across these outcomes are 86 agreed actions that will promote inclusivity across all communities in Dundee.

The equality outcomes agreed are:

1. Ensure that the equality and human rights of residents and employees from protected groups are safeguarded and promoted
2. Increase opportunities for protected groups to secure Fair Work
3. Implement community justice services that increase access and protection for people from protected groups
4. Close the gap in educational attainment experienced by young people from protected groups
5. Improve access and transportation to places in Dundee
6. Improve health outcomes by promoting access and equality of service for people with protected characteristics
7. Reduce the additional social inequalities experienced by people in poverty and in protected groups

A Caring City

Care services were severely strained during the COVID-19 pandemic and came though it down to resilience of its staff and support from all the community-based organisations and volunteers.

Care services were severely strained during the COVID-19 pandemic and came though it down to resilience of its staff and support from all the community-based organisations and volunteers.

Workforce planning and building community-based organisations will continue to be vital to build the new service which faces challenges in recruitment and retention following Brexit at the same time as unprecedented demand for community care showing in rising levels of unmet need. Better community care will depend as much on the strength of community support networks as it will on the services.

The awareness of drug deaths highlighted in Dundee in recent years has brought to the fore the support for people who are experiencing problems with drug or alcohol use. The Drugs Commission established in Dundee to provide recommendations will include co-designing the services people need and be taken forward by the Dundee Alcohol and Drugs partnership. In the last three years we have seen a reduction in drug deaths from 72 in 2019/20 to 52 in 2021/22.

The Dundee Integration Joint Board (IJB) is responsible for the planning and commissioning of adult health and social care services. The Strategic and Commissioning Plan 2022-23 (an extension of the previous three-year plan for 2019-2022) sets out in full the priorities and associated actions for the delivery, improvement and transformation of health and social care services and supports. Through the Dundee Health and Social Care Partnership, the Council, alongside NHS Tayside and providers in the third and independent sectors, are responsible for implementing these priorities and actions.

The IJB has agreed four strategic priorities: health inequalities; early intervention and prevention; localities and engaging with communities; and, models of support / pathways of care. Some of the key actions contained within the plan include:

• A range of actions to improve responses to mental health and wellbeing and the needs of people who use drugs and alcohol.
• Changes to the way people access health and social care services, including making information about services more accessible for people who might need them.
• Enhancing health promotion activity, in partnership with NHS Tayside Public Health, and services that promote the co-ordination of care such as social prescribing and lead professional models.
• Reviewing, following the pandemic, arrangements for engagement and communication with the public and for the IJB to contribute to community planning arrangements.
• Transformation of approaches to providing non-acute care, managing unscheduled care (including discharge without delay), primary care improvement, personalisation of services and delivery of public protection arrangements.
• Continued focus on responding to the needs of unpaid carers through implementation of A Caring Dundee 2 (Dundee’s strategic plan for carers).
• Work with Dundee City Council and NHS Tayside to further develop the workforce, digital and property resources required to support the improvement and transformation of adult health and social care services.

The IJB monitors performance in adult health and social care functions in-line with national requirements, including a focus on the 23 National Health and Wellbeing Indicators. Annual, quarterly and issue specific performance reports and analysis are published at: www.dundeehscp.com

The IJB is currently developing a replacement strategic and commissioning plan for 2023/24 onwards, which will be supported by a performance framework.

 

The Council has a number of plans and strategies that will be focused on delivering inclusive economic growth including community wealth building.

These include:

• Tay Cities Regional Economic Strategy & Action Plan
• Tay Cities Regional Deal Document
• Tay Cities Skills Investment Plan
• Tay Cities Region Tourism Strategy
• Dundee City Events Strategy
• Dundee Local Development Plan
• City Centre Strategic Investment Plan
• 2001 – 2031 Waterfront Masterplan
• Community Wealth Building Strategy

A strong city economy creates enough jobs to sustain its population’s income and local service needs and wants. A sustainable economy can do this for the long term by design by continually renewing itself and preventing depletion of its natural, social and financial resources. Dundee is familiar with smart technology that can sense changes in the environment and intelligently adapt itself.

Dundee is well positioned for the future with two globally renowned universities and St Andrews just across the bay, along with Dundee and Angus College plus Innovation Hubs at Michelin, and Forth Ports position in renewable technologies and thousands of jobs in digital technology and life sciences. The £300m Tay Cities Deal will bolster the infrastructure needed to sustain this growth but ensure it is inclusive growth that provides jobs for local people.

The city received a massive boost from the arrival of V&A Dundee and can now look forward to the development of the Eden Project.

The Waterfront continues to make exciting progress, with more award nominations for the superb Waterfront Place and all bar one of our new commercial units now fully let. The original promise of a major jobs boost is well underway, with over 1,000 of the original 3,000 jobs target for the waterfront now met and more jobs planned. This includes employers that the Council has supported including NHS24 and Social Security Scotland.

Inclusive

Over the last five years Dundee has been closing the gap on the median earnings from being 13% behind in 2015/16 to just 6% behind in 2021, compared to Scotland as a whole. The claimant count for people applying for benefit while looking for work by June 2022 is below the pre COVID-19 level and the percentage of the Dundee population in work is at its highest level rising from 61% in 2013 to 71% in 2022.

There are approximately 11,000 working age people who are either unemployed or economically inactive and not actively seeking work. Not all of them are supported by existing employability measures, and the priority for the Council in the next few years is to assist this wider cohort. This is consistent with the new employability strategy which focused on supporting these harder to reach groups to achieve positive destinations.

Community Wealth Building

Community Wealth Building is a people-centred approach to local economic development, which redirects wealth back into the local economy, and places control and benefits into the hands of local people. It is a central theme of the Scottish Government’s programme for government and national performance framework, aligning with the Council’s priorities to create new jobs, good jobs and green jobs.

Entry level employment opportunities from within anchor institutions including Dundee City Council, Dundee’s Health and Social Care Partnership, Leisure and Culture Dundee, and Tayside Contracts can be supported by new and emerging programmes of employability support to align with the objective to employ more of Dundee population, especially those left behind by the current labour market.

The Council will aim to change its approach to service design and procurement so it supports community wealth building principles. The development of local community and social enterprises that can participate in local shorter supply chains for the Council and meet the community’s own needs will be encouraged. Opportunities will also be considered to redesign the use of local land and buildings the Council owns and workforce planning to develop local labour markets.

Services across Dundee City Council and our partners will work together to deliver on this key priority.

 

The Council has a number of plans and strategies that will be focussed on tackling climate change and reaching net zero by 2045.

These include:

• Dundee Climate Action Plan
• Regional Transport Strategy
• Waste and Recycling Strategy Action Plan 2020-25
• Dundee Biodiversity Action Plan 2020-30
• Local Food Growing Strategy

Climate Change Action Plan

Dundee has already declared a climate emergency recognising the serious environmental, social and economic challenges posed by climate change and has set a target of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 or sooner.

In response, a city-wide Climate Action Plan was prepared that set out a first set of ambitious actions under the themes of Energy, Transport, Waste and Resilience to support Dundee in a just transition to a net-zero and climate resilient future by 2045 at the latest. The Council has invested around £60 million over the last three years to tackle climate change and additional projects will bring the total to almost £115m by 2026.

The way councils operate and deliver services means they have an important role to play in climate change, everything from thinking about emissions from our fleet and buildings to the way we deal with our waste and green spaces has an impact. Carbon emissions from Dundee City Council’s operations have been cut by almost 50% in 10 years.

By leading the way through bold and ambitious initiatives such as the low emission zone, we are setting a benchmark that we hope others will follow, and by working together with the private sector across the city we can all adopt more sustainable practices.

The Council will support the Dundee Climate Leadership Group to help achieve net-zero. It will also continue to support the development of the Sustainable Dundee partnership of public, private and community organisations working together to deliver the Plan and its future iterations, scaling up collaboration across the city.

The Waste and Recycling Strategy sets out our long-term plans to maximise recycling and minimise general waste. It is a vital operation the Council delivers, and it is targeting increasing the percentage of waste recycled and working with communities to reduce the amount of waste being generated.

Community Choices

As part of commitment to community participation and empowerment the Council will be the first local authority in Scotland using a community choices model to identify and have citizens decide on local climate change.

The Dundee Climate Fund is an important part of the Council’s policy response to mobilising community action on climate change, where there is none, enabling existing communities to have a greater impact, and facilitating capacity building within the network of local stakeholders.

This new fund will run for four years and is designed to raise awareness of climate change while supporting communities to identify and vote on local projects aimed at delivering on the following themes:

• Energy: reducing consumption, promoting energy efficiency, use of renewables
• Transport: encouraging active travel, decarbonising transpor
• Waste: reducing waste, recycling, reusing resources
• Resilience: improving greenspaces, biodiversity, local food growing
• Community Engagement: increasing public awareness, engaging communities and young people in climate change.

As part of our city-wide drive to tackle these crucial issues, we need to engage with the city’s citizens and get them to support us through action.

This fund is an innovative way to enthuse groups and inspire them to put projects in place. Ours has to be a city-wide effort as there are so many challenges that need to be met. This fund can be a catalyst for community-based actions which will lead to a better, greener future. Services across Dundee City Council and our partners will work together to deliver on climate change action as a key priority.

 

The Council has a number of plans and strategies that will be focused on building resilient and empowered communities.

These include:

• Strategic Housing Investment Plan 2023-28
• Local Housing Strategy 2019-24
• Rapid Rehousing Transition Plan
• Tenant Participation Strategy
• Community Learning & Development Plan 2019-24
• Dundee Community Safety Outcome Improvement Plan
• Dundee Cycle Strategy 2019
• Local Community Plans 2022-27

Working with local communities to support the growth of 20-minute Neighbourhoods

The City Centre and district centres need to change as online shopping and new hybrid working patterns change how people commute to work and shop. This will leave space and parts of the city requiring imaginative redesigns to meet people’s needs. The Council will provide leadership and a City Centre Strategic Investment Plan backed by leading design thinking to bring new life into the centre of the city and provide a model for other district centres across the city.

This aligns with the principles of “20-minute neighbourhoods” which aim to enable people to meet all or most of their day-to-day needs within a short distance of their home and without the need for unsustainable methods of travel. For most people that will mean without the need for a car as walking, wheeling, cycling and short public transport trips will be designed to be the most obvious choice.

Our Local Development Plan will focus on the delivery of infrastructure and facilities where they are required to create a network of complete, compact and connected places. Communities will find it easier to make change happen by the creation of Local Place Plans. These will represent shared understandings of place and local priorities to achieve more sustainable neighbourhoods and better outcomes for local people.

Building homes to meet community needs

Dundee City Council and its partners remain ambitious in our plans to increase the supply of total new housing including affordable housing across the city. The Local Development Plan includes a target of building 480 new homes across all tenures annually. These plans link closely to housing need, including those with particular needs, and are designed to ensure that affordable new build housing meets the highest possible standards in terms of energy efficiency while reducing the impact of residential accommodation on the climate. New build social rented accommodation requires to adhere to ‘Net Zero’ guidance in terms of improved energy efficiency and the decarbonisation of residential accommodation through the use of alternatives to fossil fuel for heating.

New build plans include both mainstream housing and housing suitable for those with particular needs and it is acknowledged that the latter are more expensive to deliver as they often provide bespoke accommodation to meet the needs of the individual or family. In demographic and economic terms, the delivery of more homes will also support efforts to grow the city’s population and to support the local construction industry

Local Community Plans 2022-27

Dundee has well established processes for locality planning to facilitate work between community planning partners and communities. There is a Local Community Planning Partnership (LCPP) in each of the eight wards of the city. These LCPPs are one of our key mechanisms for empowering communities as local people sit alongside service providers as equal partners taking collective action. People who know their own communities best, people who have lived experience of using services and local workers who have built up relationships in those communities, work together to ensure the community voice is heard and that local people are at the heart of actions taken to reduce inequalities in their neighbourhoods. They have a nominated senior officer (Locality Leader) and also include local elected members and partners, from across the public and voluntary sectors.

Each Local Community Planning Partnership produces and works to a Local Community Plan which is also reviewed every five years. These contain partnership actions to meet the needs and aspirations articulated by local people, are co-produced with the community and reflect the priorities for each ward at a community level, providing a local focus to city-wide issues. The key focus of the new local plans for 2022-2027 is reducing inequalities, which clearly links to the City Plan priorities.

Community participation

COSLA and the Scottish Government developed a framework agreement setting down that at least 1% of local government budgets will be subject to participatory budgeting by the end of 2021. The framework defines Community Choices as the term used in Scotland for Participatory Budgeting (PB) and sets PB as the enabler for active participation of citizens in local decision making. The process typically involved communities voting on the preferred spend from range of choices developed in the community.

The Council has used a range of ways to support local community engagement through local community planning, Community Regeneration Fund and the annual budget prioritisation survey to directly influence where resources are targeted. The new Community Climate Choices Fund will be a further development. Over the course of this plan the Council aims to design a systematic way for communities to be directly consulted on budgeting decisions that effect their community.

Services across Dundee City Council and our partners will work together to deliver on this key priority.

Extensive community involvement and engagement underpin these plans. Our Engage Dundee model commits to holding city wide engagement every two years as well as ongoing engagement, consultation and working with communities at a local level.

The Council has a number of plans and strategies that will be focussed on designing a modern Council.

These include:

• Long Term and Medium-Term Financial Strategy
• Capital Plan • Investment Strategy
• Transformation Programme
• Our People and Workforce Strategy
• Best Value Assurance Report and Self-Assessment Improvement Plan
• Communications Strategy
• Property Asset Management
• Digital Strategy
• Procurement Strategy

Given the financial challenges set out earlier, more radical transformation of services is key to delivering on this priority. We will not be able to deliver all services as they currently are.

Our modern Council for the future will:

• be lean and efficient with a clear set of priorities that deliver for Dundee citizens and communities, focusing resources where they can make the biggest difference;
• have a clear purpose and understanding about what the Council is best placed to deliver;
• have a structured approach to designing services with people and local communities;
• have adaptable and flexible structures which promote working across organisational boundaries with greater employee empowerment, integrated teams and agile workforce;
• help communities become more self-reliant and resilient doing more for themselves;
• work in collaboration more to moving partnership working across the city from good to great;
• have a values-based culture that will unlock and develop the skills and potential of our workforce

We will also continue to deliver Best Value for the Council by meeting the following objectives:

• Ensuring the Council remains financially sustainable and continues to provide good quality and efficient services.
• Continuing to invest, develop and engage with staff, ensuring that the organisation can address challenges and maximise opportunities.
• Fostering a culture of innovation and improvement and using greater business intelligence to ensure that services are designed and delivered to meet future needs.
• Strengthening local and national partnership working, maximising the opportunities arising from policy and structural change.

There are a number of key corporate programmes, strategies and plans that will support and enable the delivery of the Council Plan and these are being updated and will be reported to Committee during 2022/23 as follows:

 

Transformation Programme

Since 2008, the Council has been transforming services and initiated its long-term strategy to address the difficult financial environment in which it would be operating for the foreseeable future. Savings of over £147 million have been delivered so far.

Delivery of the sixth phase of the Council’s transformational programme, to be known as Transforming Dundee, will be critical in supporting future financial plans and long-term sustainability, better services to citizens and improving outcomes for all.

The new five-year programme will need to radically redesign services to meet changing demographics and demands, environment and technology, community empowerment and embracing new ways of working to address this challenge. Whilst the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will have longer term implications, it has also shown what can be done to deliver services in a very different way and at pace, so the Council must harness these opportunities as part of its future service delivery.

The key areas of focus within Transforming Dundee will be:

Property Rationalisation

The Council will adapt to hybrid working to reduce the amount of office space to match demand. Savings will arise from the disposal of surplus assets, operational (including energy) cost savings from vacant buildings and income from any accommodation consequently rented to third parties. The Council will implement the 365 schools’ model across the city for the delivery of school and community-based services reducing the Council estate, and associated costs.

Digital Council

The Council will accelerate its move towards being a digital by default council, increasing the scope of customer services and improving the range and accessibility of online services and reducing the need for face-to-face contact. This will also include maximising the use of O365 across services and the streamlining and digitisation of internal processes. Savings will arise from automation and reduced employee costs.

Services Re-design

Structure of the Council - The Council will have an effective and dynamic leadership structure with clear roles and responsibilities and will align common services for maximum efficiency.

Children & Families Service – The Council will ensure best use of all resources available across this service due to its importance in delivery of key priorities (e.g. child poverty, closing the attainment gap and our Promise commitments), demographic pressures and the substantial budget associated with this service.

Waste Services - The Council will consider options to improve the efficiency of waste services across the city including route optimisation, fleet review and collections which ensure compliance with statutory responsibilities. Changes deployed will also take learning from other councils to deliver improvement on our performance on recycling.

Leisure & Culture Dundee – in partnership with the LACD Board will develop a new model of delivery of services that reflects the move to 365 schools and ensures sustainability of services in the future

City & Regional Shared Services

Working with our neighbouring councils, partners and the 3rd sector on collaborative projects, initiatives and opportunities to deliver efficiencies across the city and region.

Payments and Income Generation

The Council will review all third-party payments in light of the new City and Council priorities, as well as explore any new or additional income generating opportunities.

As work on the areas above develops, this will generate reports setting out changes proposed and actions that may have financial implications for the Council, and when required, reports will be considered by the appropriate Committees.

 

Our People Strategy 2022-2027

Our People Strategy and workforce planning will be among the key ways the Council can transform itself to meet its priorities and balance its budget. The implementation of the People Strategy and workforce planning will require an ongoing process of engagement with the Trade Unions and services to bring about change and develop our people.

We will be an employer of choice. People will be attracted to work with us, be ambitious to be developed and stay with us because they have the best experience to grow; resulting in improved outcomes by providing professional, efficient and customer focused services. In essence our vision is to continuously improve service delivery and to support and enable initiatives which make Council services more accessible, more convenient, more operationally effective and cost effective.

To achieve this, the new strategy and implementation plan aims to meet the changing need and improve outcomes by upskilling existing staff or recruiting new staff in the new areas to include;

• An explicit Meaningful Employee Journey developed.
• Quality Conversations and surveys to engage and inform our workforce regularly
• Modernise workforce practices, change and policies. Market our competitive edge in the Employer of Choice arena and employee offer/experience. Modernising terms and conditions.
• Review and reinvigorate our Employee and Leadership engagement.
• Transactional Working - It is recognised that automation of digital transactions facilitates significant benefit whilst reducing costs for organisations. This is also true of internal People Services transactions where automation is just as important and can also deliver efficiencies.
• Mobile, Agile and Flexible working - Our employees will be able to work in remote ways, access systems from any authorised device and from any location, and we will support them to do so with skills, knowledge and confidence.
• Digital Learning and Teaching – Deliver digital technologies to support learning environments suitable for learning in the 21st century.

Some of the key elements of Our People Strategy 2022-2027 are in response to the environment most organisations have arrived at post pandemic, e.g., challenges around recruitment of key posts, different working patterns and the employer offer in a competitive environment and the retention of our talent to deliver on outcomes and supporting workforce change

 

Digital Strategy 2022-2027

Our Digital Strategy outlines our approach to embedding digital across all that we do in a way that aligns with our priority to design a modern council and ensures we work collaboratively to maximise opportunities from emerging digital technologies and new ways of working and doing business.

The Council already benefits from a stable and efficient IT environment. Building on this we aim to source and deliver digital technologies and processes which can support our people and our customers to work better together, get things done and contribute to an efficient and effective Council.

When fully implemented the strategy will lead to efficiencies, savings and improved services for Council staff and customers.

Our goals as a digital council are to:

• Be inclusive and put customer needs first

• Make services more efficient through the adoption of new ways of working enabled by technology.

• Put services online and encourage our people and customers to use them by default.

• Be automated with minimal manual processing

• Be secure and accessible anytime.

 

Communications Strategy 2022-2027

The Communications Strategy sets out a vision for how we promote awareness of Council services and priorities, engage with citizens, encourage positive behaviour change and collaborate across our workforce.

It is extensively shaped by learning from the Coronavirus pandemic, a crisis which demonstrated like never before the critical importance of effective communication, and builds on the progress made over the course of the previous strategy.

Having significantly grown the audience that the Council communicates directly with through digital channels, a key priority over the coming years will be increasing engagement. This will be achieved by providing useful and impactful content, encouraging appropriate dialogue and using analytics to assess the best times and platforms for sharing important information. There will also be an increased focus on inclusive communications, which are vital to ensuring all of our citizens are informed and empowered, and we will continue to engage with the media as platforms evolve to meet consumer demand.

The next phase of our Put Dundee on the Map city marketing strategy will help support the local tourism industry and encourage visitors not only to come to the city but to stay for longer.

Our employees all have a role to play in effective communications. Internal communications will be inclusive and two-way, as the Council continues to go through major changes, including the introduction of new technologies which are transforming the way we interact and collaborate.