Westminster’s first Local Area Agreement (LAA) was signed by the WCP and central government in April 2006 as a three-year agreement.
The primary objective of the LAA is to deliver better outcomes for local people.
This is underpinned by improved local partnership working, improved relations with central government and better use of resources.
The LAA aims to simplify the rules on how the Council and partners use some of the money received from government, so that it can fully focus on tackling local priorities. The LAA will develop more localised approaches and improve service delivery.
The 2006-09 LAA has a reward element based on a previous government programme (Local Public Service Agreements) which means that Westminster could receive up to £7m in 2009 if the most demanding LAA targets are reached.
LAAs aim to focus on what really needs to change in each local authority area. Both the Council’s and its partners’ performance will be assessed by the Government on the basis of how successful we are in achieving our improvement targets.
Progress on the LAA
An annual report has recently been submitted to the Government Office for London. Overall it demonstrated extremely positive performance. At the end of the second year of Westminster’s LAA, 73% of measures (including the outcome and stretch indicators where information was available) show improving performance from the baseline position. We are confident that they are on track to achieve target by 2009.
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