Council Plan: Foreword

The Way Ahead: Foreword by Cllr David Rouane, Leader of South Oxfordshire District Council

I am pleased to welcome you to ‘The Way Ahead’, our new council plan to guide how we will seek to do things for the next few years.

Our aim is to create a fairer, more inclusive South Oxfordshire where all residents can thrive both now and in the future. It’s important this plan reflects the priorities and aspirations of the communities we serve, so last year we spoke to many of you about our ideas for this plan. I’m so grateful for everyone who took the time to give us their valuable thoughts, which have helped shape the plan we have now.

‘The Way Ahead’ outlines our five key priorities for the future. It builds on what we have achieved over the last four years, using our previous plan as a foundation and overcoming significant challenges along the way.

With big challenges in mind, ‘Action on climate change and nature recovery’ is at the forefront of everything we do. We have made strong and positive progress in our goal to achieve net zero and have nearly halved our carbon emissions since 2010. This progress has been driven in recent years by our ambitious targets.

We will continue to strive for genuinely affordable homes and good local infrastructure and I’m incredibly proud of our work to become social landlords for the first time in over 20 years, helping us to help those in most need. Our innovative Joint Local Plan will require half of the homes on large new housing sites to be affordable.

We continue to invest in quality, cost-effective local services and facilities – with leisure, arts and community projects supporting our ‘Thriving and healthy communities.’ Our services, such as waste and recycling and prevention of homelessness, rank highly in national league tables.

Providing services that are inclusive, accessible and accountable is important to us all, as is communicating in a way people can understand and being open and clear about how we make decisions. We’ve been shortlisted for awards thanks to our innovative approach to engaging with residents in the past few years and we would want to take that to the next level.

Financial stability and innovative transformation form the bedrock of everything we seek to achieve. Thanks to our careful budgeting and targeted investment in recent years, our financial position remains positive. We do not take this for granted, nor will we take the eye off the ball – we continually seek to improve how we do things to ensure we offer the best possible customer service for the communities we serve.

I hope the following plan will give you a greater understanding of the priorities we are working towards. We will in an emerging delivery plan detail the ways we will achieve our aspirations in the next few months. We acknowledge central government’s plans to reorganise local government and we will reflect this in our plans as and when that develops further.