Agenda item

Report of the Director of Strategy, Design and Insight

This report updates on how the Council has approached setting, understanding, impacting and measuring the four Camden Missions agreed in December 2021 that sit at the heart of our We Make Camden strategy (agreed in April 2022). It summarises what we mean by our ambition to become a missions-orientated Council, and how we want to work with staff, citizens and partners across the Borough in taking a new approach to tackling complex problems and making real change. Our Missions are both about making this change, and also about learning new ways for Councils and public sector organisations to engage, catalyse, convene and facilitate innovation and community activity in places and across sectors.   

This report summarises the alignment between mission ways of working and our principles, ambitions and approaches set out in We Make Camden and The Way We Work. Since agreeing them in late 2021, we have made significant progress in understanding the challenges, issues, and gaps associated with the issues our Missions highlight. We have also invested in community, organisational and partner capacity to deliver our Missions – embodied in our Community Wealth Fund, our Good Life Camden resident prosperity framework and our We Make Camden kit. We have also invested in producing transparent and accessible updates, data and insight on our Missions and on the issues occurring in our Borough – our annual State of the Borough report contains data and measures aligned with our Missions as well as evidence on what is happening across Camden relevant to our We Make Camden priorities. We are also part of a growing number of public sector organisations taking a missions approach, and we welcome the opportunity to share learning and best practice as part of this network, including central Government.   

We welcome the opportunity to work with Councillors on our Missions. This report provides a summary of our missions-orientated work overall including key capacity building and we are encouraging Scrutiny Committees to receive further, more focused updates on each Mission relevant to their Committee terms of reference. 

Consideration was given to the report of the Director of Strategy, Design and Insight.

After an introduction by the Acting Director of Strategy, Design and Insight, the Committee discussed the report and made the following key comments:

Members were pleased that the work encouraged teams from across the organisation to work together, addressing siloed working, that could act as barrier to positive resident outcomes.

In response to questions from the Committee about the Estates Mission, participatory budgeting and learning from the pilot, the Acting Director said that each estate was its own complex system. Through the work Camden were learning what was working and what systems and areas would need to be developed. They said that residents were interested in learning about the resources of running an estate but that a balance would need to be found of having resident involvement in the system evaluation and without asking residents to effectively take on an unpaid roles. The Head of Participation and Partnerships said that part of Camden’s work was to share information about the budget, how it was spent and the outlook.

Members of the Committee were interested in the learning and evaluation framework and how that would work in practice. The acting Director said that for the past two years Camden had been mapping the system and had shared parts of proposed theories of change with the public, the Missions should be shared and worked on in public for transparency, utilising community and partner knowledge that the Council did not.  The Head of Insights, Learning and Impact said that through the State of the Borough report and the Good Life Camden framework, Camden were looking at ways to collect and analyse both quantitative and qualitative data, to gain insight and learn.

The Committee asked what the Missions added to the delivery of a Council. The Acting Director said that when consulting residents, it became clear that, in terms of vision for the Borough, they did not constrain the vision to bounds of council services. Residents viewed the Borough as a whole rather than as the Council. Using Missions were a good way of anchoring ambitions for a place within a local authority.

In response to a question about the language used when discussing or engaging around Missions, the Director of Participation, Partnerships and Communications said that through engaging with residents, Camden decided on the language to use to describe the Missions. All of the language used pulled together a core narrative that was shared with residents and Camden. The Acting Director noted that the language Camden was using around Missions would allow easier working with other organisations who were using missions-based approaches. The Cabinet Member for Finance and Cost of Living commented that it was important to engage new Councillors on the Missions structure.

Councillor Jenny Mulholland made a declaration that she worked for Old Diorama Arts Centre, which had been consulted as part of the State of the Borough report.

Members wanted to be kept up to date with the progress of the national Missions approach and how it was translated locally.

Action by: the Head of Missions

RESOLVED –

THAT the report be noted.