Corporate peer challenge 2018
In March 2018, the council invited the Local Government Association to conduct a corporate peer review.
Islington Corporate Plan 2018-22
As part of the review, eight experienced elected and officer peers spent a week at the council, speaking to over 130 staff and councillors through one to ones and workshops and reviewing all the council’s key financial and strategic documents. They also interviewed the council’s public sector partners in health and the police, as well as the voluntary sector and local businesses to get their view on working with the council.
The peer challenge made several positive observations about the council:
- they praised the council’s vision and commitment to building a fairer Islington
- they found that services were generally well run
- the council’s values are felt strongly throughout the organisation
- there are high satisfaction rates amongst residents (link to residents’ survey)
- the council was found to have a thoughtful and unified leadership and to be a trusted partner, civic leader and problem solver
Against a backdrop of huge financial challenges as a result of government cuts, the review also recommended some areas the council should focus on. These include the need better prioritise our work, tighten our programme management approach and build capacity in order to manage wide scale and rapid change and to make better use of data to improve decision making and service design.
The peer challenge also identified that the council needed to better integrate with its partners as it works to support communities and individuals to build resilience as this ambition cannot be achieved in isolation.
Next steps
The council has since reflected and acted on the recommendations made by the peer challenge. As part of this the council has:
- Agreed seven corporate priorities for the next 4 years, underpinned by a strategic approach of helping people and communities become more resilient by preventing problems where we can and intervening early where they do arise. You can read more about this in our corporate plan
- Established a programme office to make sure our ambitious change programme is managed robustly and at pace
- Started conversations with our key partners about how we can integrate our work to deliver the best services for residents
- Set in train a programme to modernise and streamline our services to make it as easy and efficient for residents to interact with us as possible
