Introducing the City Plan | Dundee City Council

Dundee is a dynamic, modern city standing on the brink of the biggest change in its fortunes since the opening of the Tay Road Bridge. A thriving port, a hub for creative industries, media and life sciences, a UNESCO City of Design committed to fairness and social justice, Dundee is determined to succeed. Each day the V&A Dundee reveals more of its breathtaking ambition and Dundee as a whole looks to match this transformation for everyone who lives, works or visits the city.

This is just the latest example of the work that has taken place to breathe new life into Dundee through the collective efforts of our communities, private, public and third sector partners working together through the Dundee Partnership.

Partnership working has long been the norm in Dundee. It’s what lets us drive progress in the city, and with our neighbours across the region, to improve the quality of life for our people. In doing this, we are also making a significant contribution to the Scottish Government’s national priorities of creating inclusive growth and reducing inequalities.

A) Our Vision for Dundee

Dundee has held true to a longstanding vision for the city, framed around jobs, social inclusion and quality of life.

Through Our Partnership, Dundee:

will have a strong and sustainable city economy that will provide jobs for the people of Dundee, retain more graduates and make the city a magnet for new talent;
will offer real choice and opportunity in a city that has tackled the root causes of social and economic exclusion, creating a community which is healthy, safe, confident, educated and empowered;
will be a vibrant and attractive city with an excellent quality of life where people choose to live, learn, work and visit.

This vision has underpinned the real change seen across the city over the last twenty years through the Dundee Partnership.

B) What are we going to do?

Our City Plan is Dundee’s first Local Outcome Improvement Plan. Through this plan, the Dundee Partnership aims to identify the biggest strategic priorities, opportunities and challenges ahead as we improve the city over the next ten years. We are not trying to describe everything the partners do together but are concentrating on the actions we can take that will have the biggest impact on our people and places.

The plan focuses on our strategic priorities - Fair Work and Enterprise; Children and Families; Health, Care and Wellbeing; Community Safety and Justice; and Building Strong and Empowered Communities - and tells you about the main actions we will be taking over the next few years to move forward. We then spell out in detail what we are going to achieve over the next 1, 3 and 10 years, with targets that are ambitious but realistic when set in the demanding financial and social context we face.

We are also keen to develop ever closer relationships with our communities. We will do this by continuing to emphasise the distinctive needs of our different neighbourhoods and by working with our Local Community Planning Partnerships to plan for and deliver safer and stronger localities and communities. How we’ve engaged with communities to listen to their views and plan for the future is summarised in Section 2B.

C) Strategic Themes & Priority Outcomes

This plan builds on a series of Dundee Outcomes which reflect and contribute to the national ambitions for Scotland. We welcome the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 and its advice to community
planning partnerships to focus on key priorities. We have met the expectations to:

Use our understanding of local needs, circumstances and opportunities to establish a clear and ambitious vision for Dundee and identify local priorities for improvement
Be clear about the improvement we will make locally in terms of better outcomes for specific communities, reducing the gap in outcomes between the most and least deprived groups and improving long term sustainability of public service provision
Place a clear emphasis on identifying local priorities which focus on how we will add most value as a partnership to improve outcomes and tackle inequalities.

The five strategic priorities listed below have been agreed as they promise to provide the biggest impact on outcomes for the city and its people. Each individually is important but even more essential is the way they overlap and connect to each other. Ensuring that we maximise our overall impact is a key priority for our Partnership.

This plan and the outcomes listed above are the biggest priorities for the Partnership over the next ten years, but they are only a fraction of the extensive work taking place to improve the lives of people in the city. The Dundee Partnership represents a complex and comprehensive range of partnerships and strategies which tackle particular issues affecting us all. There isn’t space in this plan to repeat all of the detail of this work. Instead, throughout this document, we will provide links to the various local and regional plans and strategies that give you the big picture and allow you to delve more deeply into the efforts of all our partners. It is the additional work undertaken between and across all of these themes that creates the full breadth and power of the whole partnership. The diagram below shows the main strategic documents that the City Plan builds on and connects to, and how these all fit together.

D) Fairness

Underpinning all of this plan is the city’s determination to tackle poverty and inequality which led to the formation of the Dundee Fairness Commission in 2016. This brought together leaders of key public sector organisations, academic and third sector partners and community representatives. Members considered evidence on local measures to combat poverty and compared these to national research and examples of best practice to determine where greater or more effective action could reduce poverty in Dundee. The Commission’s 56 recommendations were published in the report A Fair Way to Go. These were endorsed in full by the Dundee Partnership and a Fairness Action Plan was agreed in November 2016 framed around Stigma and Social Inclusion; Work and Wages; Reducing the Education Gap; Benefits, Advice and Support; Housing and Communities (including food and fuel poverty); and Improving Health.

A key contribution was the research that led to the report Gathering Experiences of Poverty in Dundee. This emerged from a survey, face to face interviews and focus groups held with 147 people who use support services at organisations in the city. A series of short films were also produced to portray individual cases that 'tell a story' of struggling against poverty from different perspectives and lived experiences.

The Dundee Partnership and Scottish Government are now jointly funding a new project to follow on from the Fairness Commission. The group will involve and equal number of people who have personal experience of poverty working alongside senior civic, political and business leaders in Dundee. Over the next 18 months they will develop a shared understanding between the two groups of commissioners and make proposals around key areas of anti-poverty work identified through their experience and knowledge. The process will be facilitated by Faith in Community Dundee, in partnership with Dundee City Council and the Social Justice and Regeneration Division of the Scottish Government.

E) Central Roles for the Third and Private Sectors

Third Sector

The Dundee Third Sector Interface (TSI) is a partnership between Dundee Social Enterprise Network, Dundee Voluntary Action and Volunteer Dundee and is recognised as an equal partner in the delivery of the City Plan. The Third Sector in Dundee employs over 2,600 people and spends almost £130 million each year.

Dundee TSI’s key priorities are to develop and support social enterprises and voluntary organisations and to promote and support volunteering. They aim to provide a coherent and collective voice for the Third Sector by strengthening engagement with community planning partners.

The TSI increases the Third Sector’s input in key areas of public policy in the city and impact on the delivery of public services by engaging with third sector organisations, community groups and citizens in Dundee. When communities are at the heart of local decisions, their needs can be better addressed. The Dundee Partnership recognises the third sector as full partners, sharing in the decision making and in the provision which delivers local outcomes.

The Dundee TSI influences partners’ decisions with the views and contributions of the third sector in order to meet wider community needs across a range of topics from health and social care, early years provision, community transport, community safety and other areas of work determined locally or by national policy priority.

This is demonstrated by TSI staff co-chairing strategic planning groups in Health & Social Care, staff commissioned to work in multi-agency roles such as Learning and Organisational Development, Technology Enabled Care, Respite Care Development, Preventing Under-nutrition, secondment to the Children & Families Team and collaborating on funding applications.

The TSI does not fulfil all of the third sector engagement requirements itself. It increasingly provides a bridge that connects local decisions to the local third sector and ensures that the value of increasingly limited public expenditure is focussed on local need.

As part of its ongoing development, the Dundee TSI has decided to recruit an independent chair and to look at reviewing its overall partnership structure. It has also taken steps to strengthen the representative role played by the third sector on Dundee Partnership groups to ensure that it is effectively connected at both a city wide and local level.

Private Sector

Strong partnerships have been forged with the private sector in the city over the years. These include joint working and funding partnerships that are enabling us to improve the city and close the inequality gap. Together we have produced creative and sustainable solutions to some key challenges across the entire community planning agenda. These include developing our biggest tourist attractions; creating businesses and employment and training opportunities; mentoring pupils and working in partnership with whole schools; delivering holiday programmes and responses to food poverty; and supporting people recovering from substance misuse or offending behaviour. Much of this takes place behind the scenes but, although their profile may be lower, the contribution of the private sector partners – led often by the Dundee and Angus Chamber of Commerce - is significant and crucial.