Foreword
As Chief Executive of Belfast City Council, I am pleased to share our Self-Assessment Report 2023-24 which sets out council’s commitment to continuous improvement. Just like our citizens, businesses and stakeholders across the city, the council continued to face significant challenges such as cost-of-living and inflationary pressures, adverse climate, and ecological impacts, alongside new and increasing demands on council services. We are therefore proud to be able to deliver improvement during these circumstances.
We hope that our Self-Assessment Report 2023-24 demonstrates the importance that we place on improvement across our organisation. Whilst we reflect on the achievement of our five performance improvement objectives, we are also keen to highlight other corporate successes and achievements during the year. We worked tirelessly with our community planning partners to update and refresh the city’s community plan, The Belfast Agenda. This sets out our renewed focus to help ensure that Belfast can fulfil its potential and improve the quality of life for all our residents. We also launched a new People Strategy to enable us to attract, recruit, and retain a talented workforce that is motivated to achieve our ambitious plans for the city.
The continued delivery of our award-winning Leisure Transformation Programme has helped to enhance our leisure provision across the city and supported a 10.6 per cent increase in the number of people using our leisure centres in 2023-24, enabling more of our residents to become more physically active. We have also strived to ensure that our residents and communities are more engaged in decision making. This is reflected by a 24 per cent increase in the number of responses to our consultation surveys and embedding participatory budgeting into a growing number of small-scale funding programmes.
We supported 572 local businesses and participants through business start-up and growth support initiatives and promoted 158 jobs through the ‘Go For It’ programme to help grow and develop our local economy. Our efforts to protect our climate continued and we have helped to reduce our carbon footprint through ensuring that the majority of our fleet are now using an environmentally friendly alternative fuel with Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HV0) accounting for 90.2 per cent of our vehicles’ fuel consumption. We also supported some of our most vulnerable residents through the cost-of-living crisis, with 13,792 people accessing our cost-of-living support and advice services and 2,161 people availing of our warm and welcome spaces.
Whilst we are pleased that the Self-Assessment Report has enabled us to reflect on how we continue to develop and grow as a council, we are cognisant that we must continually strive to improve to ensure that Belfast is a great place that we can all be proud of. We welcome the opinions of our citizens, businesses, employees, Elected Members, and service users at any time throughout the year.
If you have an idea for improvement, we would like to hear from you. Please contact us at [email protected], or visit our Performance and Improvement YourSay page (link opens in new window) where you can leave feedback.
