Foreword
I’m delighted to introduce Belfast City Council’s Performance Improvement Plan 2024-25. This year’s improvement plan has been developed alongside the city’s refreshed community plan, The Belfast Agenda 2024-28 and our draft Corporate Plan 2024-28 which sets out a renewed focus, vision, and energy for what our organisation and our city want to achieve over the next four years. This is an exciting time for the city and as an organisation we remain fully determined to ensure that Belfast fulfils its full potential as an attractive place for people to live, work, visit, learn and invest in.
Whilst we are always determined to look ahead, the significant planning and engagement that took place during the development of our new strategies and plans has also enabled us to look back and reflect on our achievements, of which we can be proud. Notably, we’re delighted that we met all our improvement objectives set out in our Performance Improvement Plan 2023-24. This included meeting or exceeding 81% of our key performance indicators whilst 86% of our key performance indicators either maintained or showed improvement on previous years which highlighting the positive impact that the work of council staff continues to have on our residents and stakeholders.
During 2023-24, the number of people using council leisure centres increased by 10.6%, highlighting the role that our facilities have in encouraging people to become more active. We’ve also worked hard to provide more opportunities for our residents and stakeholders to be more actively engaged in consultation and decision making. We’ve built on our work in relation to Participatory Budgeting, an approach which allows local people to influence small scale funding decisions. We have also seen a 24% increase in the number of responses to our consultation surveys in the last 12 months.
Through our work on climate and the environment, we’re pleased to have been awarded a silver NI Environmental Benchmarking Survey rating. The survey rates the actions that we are implementing to improve our environmental performance. This is demonstrated through our continued commitment to reducing our organisation’s carbon footprint. For instance, in 2024-25 90.2 % of the fuel consumed by our council fleet was Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil ensuring that the majority of our vehicles are using fossil-free paraffinic diesel as an environmentally friendly alternative fuel.
Our economic development team supported 688 local businesses and participants through business start-up and growth support initiatives, which included the production of 263 business plans. We also promoted 165 jobs through the ‘Go For It’ programme, helping to support more local people into employment.
We have also continued to support our most vulnerable residents through the ongoing cost-of-living crisis with 19,853 people supported through our online cost-of-living support and advice services and a further 2,161 individuals accessing our local warm and welcome spaces.
However, whilst much has been achieved, we remain committed to continually improving to ensure that Belfast is a great place that we can be proud of. Through this year’s performance improvement objectives, we will continue to focus on what matters most to you – improving our services; supporting our people and communities; enhancing the quality of our place; protecting our planet; growing our economy and being a compassionate city.
Our dedication to continually improve underpins all of our work as we strive to improve the quality of life for all our communities, as we seek new and innovative ways to build a city that we can all be proud of.
John Walsh, Chief Executive
