Corporate plan

• Life expectancy in Buckinghamshire is 81.5 years for men and 84.5 years for women (2020 to 2022).
• People in Buckinghamshire live longer and healthier lives than the national average.
• The life expectancy gap between the most and least deprived residents is 5.8 years for men and 6.1 years for women.
• Only 48.8% of children and young people are meeting recommended levels of physical activity.
• 62.2% of adults are classified as overweight or obese.
• 27,000 residents hold a Blue Badge, enabling the County to be more accessible for all of our residents.

Buckinghamshire is a healthy and inclusive place to live, work and visit, but we have several challenges. These include building more affordable homes now and for future generations, providing extra help and support for an increasingly older population and improving the health of people who live in the more deprived areas of Buckinghamshire.

We want:

• Our residents to live independent, fulfilling lives, within strong, healthy, inclusive, and resilient communities
• To support existing business communities, especially our small to medium enterprises (SMEs), to grow and flourish
• To improve health and wellbeing, with a particular focus on reducing any gap in health outcomes
• To work more with town and parish councils, giving them the responsibility for services and assets where it makes sense to do so, and helping communities to help themselves
• To improve educational outcomes for our children and young people, particularly focusing on those most vulnerable

Working with partners, we will:

• Adopt our Leisure Strategy and seek to invest in our facilities where appropriate
• Deliver our refreshed strategy for Buckinghamshire Libraries to continue providing high-quality services which contribute to key local and national priorities and develop our proposed Library Flex model, which will mean that staff are available at the times of greatest customer need and self-operated technology will be available at quieter times
• Tackle health inequalities, through targeted initiatives designed and developed with local communities to shape activities to meet local need
• Encourage localism through our Community Boards, the devolution programme and working with local councils and voluntary community groups
• Ensure we are keeping our residents regularly informed
• Provide the affordable homes our growing communities need
• Continue our commitment to equality and inclusion, through engagement with ethnic minority communities, including regular engagement with faith leaders and partnership events, celebrating the diversity within our communities
• Maintain our commitment to the armed forces community by upholding the principles of the Armed Forces Covenant, recognising Buckinghamshire’s proud and historic military links
• Strengthen and ensure there is a more consistent approach across the partnership that supports the early identification of and response to emerging problems that children, young people and their families face
• Make every effort to find suitable local placements for looked after children so they can remain within their own community and maintain their existing relationships and connections
• Enable and promote physical and mental health and healthier lifestyles, wellbeing and quality of life for people in Buckinghamshire including through our new Be Healthy Bucks service which supports people to make healthy changes like stopping smoking, or losing weight and reducing their alcohol consumption, Better Points initiative which rewards people getting active, and through our Healthy Libraries programme which supports people’s mental and physical health through activities in their local library