Corporate Plan, Chapter 3: Our Corporate Priorities

Strong and healthy

A Strong Barnet

A strong Barnet is one where residents contribute to improving the area, both through their own behaviour and by working together with others and engaging in dialogue on how the area should develop. In a strong Barnet residents feel sufficiently empowered to make a contribution to, and influence decision-making in, their area, and actively get involved in taking responsibility for their own actions. This creates a virtuous circle in that people want to live here and take pride in our community, supporting Barnet’s success as a city-suburb.

Barnet is experiencing rapid social change and we need to build a stronger relationship with our citizens, having wider and deeper conversations to listen to them and understand their needs and preferences. Our role is to provide the space for citizens to debate with the council and public agencies, and with each other, the competing priorities and build a concensus on priorities for the area, and explain how decisions were reached. To ensure all citizens have an equal opportunity to participate in this conversation we need to find innovative forms of engagement and new ways of communicating with them.

A strong Barnet is also one which is cohesive, and in which our diverse communities co-exist peacefully and in which different groups are comfortable interacting with each other. For communities to be cohesive, good services must be provided fairly to all, and we need to be pro-active in understanding how the demographics of Barnet are changing, and working with communities, including new and emerging communities, to understand their different needs and provide services tailored to their needs.

Objectives for 2008/09 and beyond

Barnet has set itself challenging objectives for a healthier borough in 2008/9 and beyond. These are:

  • Creating a health supporting environment
  • Improving health and well-being
  • Bringing user experience to healthcare improvement.

Creating a health supporting environment

The council will do this by working with key partners through our strategic plans and Local Area Agreement (LAA) to tackle the social and economic factors underpinning health inequalities in Barnet such as poor housing, limited access to transport and shops, unemployment and crime and disorder. This includes ensuring that new developments provide for a quality of life that facilitates healthier lifestyles and mitigates against adverse local and wider impacts on health. We will continue to take a “whole council” approach and to consider the influence each service has on the health of the community.


Improving health and well-being

We believe that individuals and the community have a key role to play in improving their own health and influencing and encouraging the rest of the community to do so. Community engagement and participation will therefore be an integral part of our work with the PCT on health improvement in 2008/09.

We want to work alongside individuals and the community in supporting them to adopt healthy lifestyles. We will continue to support initiatives and campaigns to provide people with the information and support to give up smoking, take part in regular exercise and eat healthily. The council will also continue to work closely with schools to promote health messages and encourage children and their families to lead healthier lives.


Bringing user experience to healthcare improvement

As a council, we are responsible for scrutinising the effectiveness of local health services in the borough; ensuring that residents have a good experience of healthcare.   This includes ensuring that everyone who has contact with health services is treated with dignity and respect and that the services themselves are clean and safe.

We also continue to work with our colleagues in the PCT to ensure that local health services meet the current and future needs and preferences of Barnet’s residents and are accessible to all members of the community.

This year the council will also be responsible for setting up a Local Involvement Network (LINks) in Barnet, which will make it easier for local people to have a say about health and social care services. We are committed to ensuring that these views and the experience of users help to shape future developments in local health and social care services.


Priority Improvement Initiatives

Healthy Barnet

Our work programme for delivering better health in Barnet over the coming year will include:

  • Developing our Joint Strategic Needs Assessment in collaboration with the Primary Care Trust (PCT) and other strategic partners.  This will describe the current and future health, care and well-being needs of our population and the strategic direction of service delivery to meet those needs
  • Working with the PCT and other partners, such as the Police, Barnet Voluntary Services Council (BVSC), Brent Cross Shopping Centre and Barnet Homes, to tackle obesity, by increasing levels of physical activity and promoting healthier eating, and to reduce smoking rates, in order to tackle the fatal diseases of cancer, heart disease and stroke
  • Working with Barnet PCT in order to ensure that the Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Clinical Strategy takes account of and meets the needs of Barnet’s growing population
  • Promoting a healthy environment in new developments (Local Development Framework Core Strategy), including:
    • Developing the Supplementary Planning Document on Securing Health Facilities
    • Maximising Section 106 agreements to improve health provision in new developments
  • Implementing the Workforce Health Strategy
  • Implementing our Sport, Physical Activity and Physical Education strategy
  • Implementing the Alcohol Action Plan
  • Undertaking a series of scrutiny reviews to ensure the effective delivery of primary and secondary health care services
  • Introducing a Local Involvement Network (LINk) in Barnet.  

More detailed information on projects that the council is taking forward with the PCT and voluntary sector are contained in the shared Health and Well-being Strategy, which will be launched in summer 2008.


A Strong Barnet

  • Diversify the range of formats in which the council communicates with residents in order to engage those who do not respond to traditional print based media
  • Shift from quantitative to qualitative research programmes to get a richer understanding of people’s needs and wants for the area
  • Strengthen opportunities for the public to become involved in the democratic processes of the council
  • Prepare the borough to achieve excellent status under the new CAA framework by increasing organisational capacity to use data to better understand our communities, and by developing a Partnership Equalities Scheme with other Barnet public authorities.


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