Our Council
Priorities for
2025/26
Getting the basics right - a balanced budget and a modern organisation
We are committed to being a well-run organisation where excellence, accountability, and transparency are at the core of everything we do.
For residents, this means having access to reliable, high-quality services that improve their lives as well as residents having a clear understanding of what we can and can't do with the powers and resources available to us. This includes communicating effectively with residents whilst also celebrating our assets and successes. Partners, including business, community organisations, and public-sector services, will find a stable, well-managed partner that can champion, advise, and support their activities. Employees will benefit from a supportive and effective workplace where their contributions are clearly defined and valued. Overall, this priority is essential for our role alongside partners in enabling a thriving, inclusive, and sustainable district. Whatever we do, we do it well, striving to deliver services with the highest standards within the powers and resources available.
Areas of focus
- Build on our refuse collection performance, reduce contamination to improve recycling rates, and deliver on the new national requirements around simpler recycling.
- Deliver an effective road network to help people get to where they need to be, including repairing potholes in a timely manner and responding to extreme weather.
- Support our councillors to carry out their roles effectively, including building officer awareness of councillors' work and confidence in working with them.
- Build on the progress to design and deliver improvements in residents' and customers' access to and experience of our services, with a focus on reducing failure demand and establishing shared expectations.
- Deliver a programme of work to ensure managers are confident managing the budgets, performance, contracts, and staff in their services, supported by a technology strategy to help all staff use technology to make services more efficient and effective.
- Identify opportunities for further development of services through:
- continuing to use a range of data to benchmark our performance compared to other councils
- monitoring the activities of other councils and learning from national best practice
- strengthening connections with researchers and experts across the region.
- Develop and begin delivery of an action plan setting out how we will act on the recommendations from the Local Government Association Corporate Peer Challenge in November 2024.
- Deliver and monitor the agreed budget to ensure the sustainability and value for money of council services across the period of the Medium-Term Financial Plan, including reviewing the capital plan and rebuilding council reserves following demand and inflationary pressures in recent years.
- Bring in additional external funding for projects in Kirklees, both council-led and partnership-led, working especially closely with the local community sector, West Yorkshire Combined Authority, Homes England, and central government.
Protecting the vulnerable and achieving inclusion
Protecting the vulnerable and inclusion is key to our vision of being an organisation with a culture of inclusion and diversity, where our people and those we work with have equal access to opportunities and resources and feel valued for who they are.
Some people face greater disadvantages or structural barriers, requiring targeted help to reach their full potential. By addressing the needs of the most vulnerable, we want no one to be left behind and everyone to have the chance to contribute to and benefit from our collective progress. Inclusive and supportive communities are the backbone of a thriving society, where diverse perspectives and experiences are not only acknowledged but celebrated.
Areas of focus
- Implement 'The Big Plan', our offer to children and families with special educational needs and disabilities, with a focus on:
- providing the right support at the right time in the right place
- supported transition of children into adulthood, enabling people to live fulfilled adult lives.
- Work to ensure we have the right blend and availability of accommodation for people with social care needs, supporting the local care market to be diverse, high quality, and sustainable. In particular, we will do this by:
- accelerating delivery of more extra care units
- increasing supported living arrangements
- reviewing in-house and external market provision, working across our adults, housing, and capital programmes
- continue the partnership with our local care association (KirCA), including progressing work to improve the experience of local people who are LGBTQ+ and using social care services
- continue the focus on adaptations to enable people to live well in their current accommodation.
- As Corporate Parents, deliver the best services and outcomes for our children and young people, and provide continuing support for those that are care experienced, including:
- enhancing our foster carer recruitment and retention approach to increase the number of foster carers
- enhancing our corporate parenting responsibility by more widely implementing the concept of a 'family firm' for all our children in care and care leavers in Kirklees
- Work with partners to enable children in care and care leavers to access the services they need, including:
- employment and skills support
- access to housing, building on recent successes in ensuring wrap-around arrangements are in place for care leavers.
- Promote inclusion through workforce planning, including pathways for underrepresented groups that enable better representation in our leadership positions.
- Deliver on 'Year 1' of the action plan for the new Inclusion and Diversity Strategy.
- Review and improve the use of integrated impact assessments, which help services consider the impact of our decision-making on inclusion and equality, the environment, and access to services.
- Implement new support and guidance for employee networks, enabling them to support organisational and member priorities and expectations.
- Enhance our workforce data, ensuring we have the data we need to meet changing statutory requirements and our organisational ambitions for inclusion.
- Prevent homelessness and rough sleeping, ensuring those most in need can access the right help in the right place at the right time. We want to prevent homelessness occurring in the first place, and ensure rough sleeping is rare, brief, and not recurring. We will do this through:
- rapid early help and intervention
- strengthening partnership working to secure the right accommodation
- improve access to safe, decent, accessible, and affordable accommodation, whether long-term homes or temporary accommodation
- work with private sector partners to enhance and incentivise access to private rented tenancies and provide good quality rented, affordable accommodation available for long term tenancies.
Thriving people and communities - now and over the longer-term
We will work closely with local leaders and partners to foster thriving communities, recognising that each area has unique needs.
By focusing on health, education, sustainability, and early intervention, we aim to build robust support networks across our communities involving schools, healthcare providers, and community organisations. This collaborative approach ensures that everyone in our diverse communities receives the help they need to live healthy, independent lives, thereby creating a stronger and more inclusive society for all.
Our strategy is rooted in the fundamental role of community organisations, which are the backbone of our efforts. These local champions, passionate about their neighbourhoods, collaborate with a variety of partners including health, care, police, fire services, education, and local businesses. Together, we strive to provide accessible, high-quality services, enhance learning outcomes, and promote clean, safe, and healthy places.
Every one of our services are pivotal to these efforts, designing services that make sense alongside partners, and working alongside partners and communities to ensure tangible benefits for local residents.
Areas of focus
- Work with our whole family of schools and educational settings to develop longer-term plans for our operational arrangements and relationships.
- Build on our children's services continuous improvement plan and success, we will implement integrated models of care and preventative services to provide holistic support to our children, young people and families.
- Work with businesses and community groups in local places to support their efforts to build safe, clean, and green places where people want to live, work, and visit.
- Work with statutory partners, including the police and fire service, to coordinate enforcement activity and raise standards.
- Work with partners in agreeing a new shared Physical Activity Strategy for Kirklees.
- Ensure people are living in homes that are modern, safe, and warm, addressing all outstanding issues in compliance relating to fire safety, water quality, and damp, mould, and condensation.
- Raise awareness of the Environment Strategy, engaging with partners and communities on our shared role in delivering its ambitions.
- Work closely with ward councillors as local place-leaders, enabling place-based responses to the unique challenges and opportunities in each place with the support of place standard engagement and action plans.
- Continue to work with local places to support an excellent network of libraries.
- Continue to support the development and growth of a stronger community sector through our community sector infrastructure contract with Third Sector Leaders, supported by a clear plan for improving council processes and collaboration with the community sector.
Local economic growth, working with regional and national partners
We will enable local economic growth by making the most of partnership working through our role in the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and partnership with government bodies, businesses, communities, and other key organisations. This means attracting investments, promoting business growth, and creating jobs, in particular when it comes to benefitting from innovation and technology as well as national economic growth and devolution.
Enhancing our transport network is central to our plans. We want to ensure we benefit from our unique position at the heart of the north, with ever stronger connections into surrounding cities and towns. We also want transport to be better within Kirklees, whether that's road, rail, or active travel.
We are ambitious about sustainability and inclusion, ensuring everyone in this generation and future generations can benefit from economic growth. As set out in the Environment Strategy, we continue to aim for a greener, net zero, and climate-ready Kirklees by 2038 - that means mitigating and reducing emissions as well as adapting to the social, economic, and environmental impacts of climate change.
Our long-term programmes include our ongoing work to revitalise our town and village centres, creating good places to do business and vibrant, safe, and inclusive spaces, where everyone can enjoy the district's rich leisure, cultural, and heritage activities, including women and girls. This lies at the heart of our approach to growing the local economy.
Areas of focus
- Engage on and deliver the Inclusive Economy Strategy.
- Progress Phase 1 of Our Cultural Heart, an ambitious centrepiece for Huddersfield and the whole of Kirklees, including a new library, food hall, and events square.
- Progress the Dewsbury Blueprint through the Arcade, Market, Field House, Civic Spaces, and Bond Street improvements.
- Progress our smaller town regeneration plans across the district, including in Batley, Cleckheaton, Heckmondwike, Holmfirth and Marsden.
- Work with West Yorkshire Combined Authority, Huddersfield University, and Leeds and Bradford councils to deliver on the next stages of the West Yorkshire Investment Zone, focussing on the development of the Gas Works Street site for high value business expansion and relocation.
- Work with local, regional, and national partners across all sectors to promote investment in local places, including supporting:
- the relocation, retention and expansion of a major local IT company
- both new inward investors and existing indigenous companies looking to grow and locate within and adjacent to the Investment Zone and Station to Stadium Corridor areas.
- Produce, consult on, and begin delivery of the Kirklees Transport Strategy, setting the vision and framework for the future transport network in Kirklees.
- Strengthen rail links within the district and beyond, working with government and partners including Network Rail to deliver transformational change through improvements to the Penistone Line connections to South Yorkshire and the unprecedented investment in the Transpennine Route Upgrade.
- Deliver priority improvements to our transport hubs through a number of sites, including bus stations in Huddersfield, Dewsbury, and Heckmondwike.
- Work with local employers to develop workforce skills and support inclusive recruitment through promoting apprenticeships, and delivery of Skills Bootcamp and the Employment Kirklees programme in key sectors including textiles, construction, and early years education.
- Develop and deliver new employment programmes to support residents with long-term health conditions to access and remain in good work, in partnership with the Department for Work and Pensions and West Yorkshire Combined Authority.
- Deliver a range of adult learning programmes in several community settings including provision of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL).
- Progress planning and development on our key housing sites at Dewsbury Riverside, and Bradley Park, ultimately delivering 3,000 units for Riverside and 473 for the first phase at Bradley.
- Progress the refresh of the Local Plan in line with the revised National Planning Policy Framework ahead of submission to government in late 2027.
- Ensure Kirklees responds to and maximises the benefits from national changes in devolution as set out in the English Devolution White Paper published December 2024, particularly the opportunities that are likely to emerge through the West Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority.
