A responsive council with well-run services - what we’ve delivered 2023 to 2025

Innovation and technology at the heart of our strategy

We will rise to the challenge of meeting growing demand for our services, ensuring they are agile and customer-responsive, and doing so within our means. We consider digital technologies, including emerging technology such as AI, to be critical in meeting this challenge and thriving as an organisation that delivers for the people we serve.

We will research and invest in cutting-edge technologies that deliver tangible benefits in our services for residents and help us keep our running costs low; including agentic and generative AI, predictive analytics and robotic process automation (RPA) ensuring the council’s values are embedded in the way these new technologies are utilised.

We will devise a new internal ‘digital first’ strategy, placing technology at the forefront of thinking when planning our services, so that we can free up staff and resources to focus on more complex problems and on residents who most need help and support.

We will use technology to target our most complex and time-consuming processes. We recognise the urgency of many of our residents’ needs, and we will use the opportunities technology brings to find ways of delivering quicker, more simply, and to a high standard.

Learning from our residents and other customers

We will continue to drive customer service innovation and develop different ways for residents to access council services, including further enhancing face-to-face support at libraries and in the Best Start Family Hubs.

We will offer new features in our telephone services including a call-back option, allowing customers to retain their place in the queue, and a feedback option to give people the chance to tell us how we did. We will also consolidate our telephone lines to make it easier for residents to reach the right service quickly and efficiently.

We will continue to improve our website and digital service offer. We will champion digital content design that is accessible, user-friendly, quick and easy to access, and responsive to people’s needs. We are actively exploring how emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, can help us deliver a more efficient and responsive customer experience.

We will strengthen our approach to customer handling to ensure that we offer timely and appropriate remedies when things go wrong, using customers’ feedback and community insights to monitor performance and drive innovation and service improvement.

We will communicate timely and accurate information on how to access and use council services and opportunities to engage with the council and our missions.

We will learn from the people who use our services, including from people with lived experience of disadvantage and discrimination, drawing on their insights as well as data from a range of sources including the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment and population wide surveys such as Health Counts.

Transforming our ways of working

We are transforming our organisational culture to meet our ambition to become a learning council. We are operationalising our five pillars of a learning organisation to be: connected, confident, innovative and creative, diverse and inclusive, healthy and psychologically safe.

Our five pillars will drive our transformation to deliver change in our ways of working and continuous improvement in our services that’s responsive to the needs of our diverse communities. We will adopt an agile and iterative, test and learn, share and grow method to spark innovation in our services and encourage active participation from our staff, customers and communities, learning from their insights.

We will continue our work to recruit and retain a diverse workforce at all tiers of the organisation which reflects the communities we serve and has the modern skills we need to deliver our missions. We will embed anti-racist and neurodiversity understanding and practices with psychologically safe training and conversations to enable more effective working within our teams, partners and communities. We will monitor how we are making improvements in the development and progression of Black and Racially Minoritised staff, for example, through participation in the Workforce Race Equality Standards for our social workers.

We will strengthen our health and safety compliance to promote a safer working environment and practices for our staff and communities.

Information technology, digital and data remains a core area of focus to help staff to do their very best and deliver our services more effectively and efficiently. We will continue our work to get the basics right, innovate service delivery by using cutting-edge technology and harnessing the skillset of the Brighton & Hove technology and information sector. We will launch a programme of digital literacy to ensure our staff have the tools to support our residents quickly and effectively and the knowledge and skills to do this.

We will take forward a ‘digital first’ approach, placing technology at the forefront of thinking when planning our services, so that we can free up staff and resources to focus on more complex problems and on residents who most need help and support. This includes automating time-consuming processes and seeking to invest in cutting-edge technologies that deliver tangible benefits in our services for residents and help us keep our running costs low.

Ensuring good governance and financial resilience

We will ensure that we have clear processes and structures in place and that Members are well briefed, for example through holding all councillor briefings, attendance at Group Meetings and through a review of the overview & scrutiny process.

Changes brought by devolution and local government reorganisation will be a new area of focus going forward. Alongside East Sussex County Council and West Sussex County Council, we have successfully been enrolled on the Devolution Priority Programme. We will be preparing for creation of a Mayoral Strategic Authority and forthcoming mayoral elections in May 2026. Concurrently, we are also preparing for Local Government Reorganisation, which may see the boundaries of our authority shift. With both these major changes, we will work to ensure any decisions are evidence based and in the best interests of residents.

The council’s financial sustainability is a critical concern due to the very low level of reserves balances. Our recent Local Government Association corporate peer challenge fed back that ‘The council has very little, to no, tolerance in its financial resilience… it needs to prioritise a plan to increase the overall level of reserves at pace’. The council’s external auditors noted in their annual opinion that ‘a significant weakness in arrangements for financial sustainability remains’. The 2024/25 outturn position enables the council to begin to address these concerns. The target general fund reserves position will be increased to £12 to 15 million, and our refreshed Medium Term Financial Strategy for 2025 onwards puts in place a plan to move the Council towards improved financial sustainability.

We will develop our Innovation & Change portfolio of projects and programmes designed to deliver our Council Plan, Medium Term Financial Strategy and operationalise our Learning Framework.

We will work to ensure best possible management of available council resources through improved processes for managing contracts of commissioned services, ensuring greater oversight, value for money and cohesive, outcomes-based commissioning.

We will develop our strategic asset management plan to ensure we are making best use of our land and buildings. This will also aim to generate capital receipts to support our capital investment programme and financial strategy, supporting our work on financial sustainability. We will continue to ensure that our council buildings and schools are used effectively and creatively across the system to offer safe spaces which maximise their earning potential.

We know that our partnerships are key to delivering for the city. Whether that’s working collaboratively to grow a diverse and sustainable economy, improving health outcomes, creating opportunities for employment and skills with our public sector partners, or developing our youth strategy. We will continue to collaborate and utilise our strategic partnerships such as the City Leadership Board and work with our anchor institutions and thematic partnerships to enable us to be a connected and enabling council.