Author: davepickering

Where do communities fit into community planning?

Over the last year, the Edinburgh Partnership has been looking at how we organise ourselves to make us more open and improve how we work across the city (writes Cllr Adam McVey, city council leader and Chair of The Edinburgh Partnership).

Our major goal was to agree a new way of working which helps us to create a city where everyone can share in our success; a city where people have enough money to live on, can access jobs, learning or training opportunities, and have a good place to live.

At our meeting on 2 April 2019, the Partnership agreed the new structure which will support this way of working. This new structure will give us a better focus for partnership working in the city. We will have four city-wide partnership groups, four local community planning partnerships, and 13 neighbourhood networks. Each group will take responsibility for a theme or plan to achieve our goal of a city where poverty and inequality are reduced. They will all feed into the Edinburgh Partnership Board.

More detail about the new structure is on the Edinburgh Partnership page on the Council website [www.edinburgh.gov.uk/edinburghpartnership].

These are the next steps for setting up the new groups:

Neighbourhood Networks

Strengthening how we work with communities has been an important aspect of this process. Building on the former Neighbourhood Partnerships, we are setting up 13 Neighbourhood Networks. Members will include community councils and other community groups in the area, such as residents’ organisations and parents’ councils, together with councillors and voluntary groups.

The final make-up of the membership will be for each Network to determine. This recognises your feedback that the Networks should reflect the diversity of each area.

We will set up an initial meeting, based on groups already involved locally, to decide how they want to work and to nominate a representative to sit on the Locality Community Planning Partnership.

Each Neighbourhood Network will decide locally how they will operate. They must hold an annual meeting at which they must nominate a community member to sit on the Locality Community Planning Partnership. The Networks will identify the priorities and outcomes for their areas, with this informing what the Edinburgh Partnership Board, and the groups in the new structure, will do.

Local Community Planning Partnerships

We are setting up four Locality Community Planning Partnerships to deliver the locality improvement plans. We will ask public bodies, such as NHS Lothian, Police Scotland, and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, to nominate their representative. Members will also include a councillor for each ward and a community representative from each of the Neighbourhood Networks.

Next steps

• The Council’s localities teams will be organising the initial meetings of the Neighbourhood Networks. They will be in touch with councillors, and community and voluntary groups in their areas to organise the meetings in May.
• We will ask members of the Edinburgh Partnership Board to confirm their representative for the four Locality Community Planning Partnerships. Councillors will agree their representation at a Council meeting in May.

I hope you agree that this is an exciting time for the city and gives us a real opportunity to do things differently. I would like to thank you for taking part, whether it was in the initial review, consultation and, more recently, the localities events. We look forward to continuing to work with you to make this a success.

Adam McVey

Chair, Edinburgh Partnership and Leader of The City of Edinburgh Council