The LGA Corporate Peer Challenge (CPC) in July 2024 was a key turning point for Bolton Council. The recommendations arising from the CPC have been instrumental in helping us to drive change and transformation, reshaping the way we work for the benefit of our residents and helping us to strengthen our focus and impact, whilst maintaining focus on the financial challenges faced.
Guided by a newly established Golden Thread, a refreshed performance framework, and a suite of supporting and enabling strategies, the council is embedding a culture of continuous improvement. At the heart of this approach is our new integrated dashboard, which unifies performance, finance, and risk data into a single, easy‑to‑use platform.
This new approach connects strategic priorities with frontline delivery, ensuring that actions directly translate into better outcomes for residents and communities. Bolton is now focused on demonstrating impact, turning insight into action and ambition into measurable progress through a more coordinated, transparent, and accountable way of working.
The challenge
The past few years have brought significant changes. The pandemic forced people to adapt to unprecedented ways of living and working, technology has advanced rapidly, and individuals have had to navigate numerous pressures simultaneously, including economic uncertainty, mental health challenges, and social isolation.
These wider shifts have underscored the need for the council to reconsider how we plan and deliver our work, taking stock of existing approaches, ensuring priorities are aligned, and reinforcing the connection between our long‑term vision, strategic intent, and day‑to‑day delivery.
Within this context, the CPC recommended that we strengthen the council’s key strategic plans and strategies to ensure we can more clearly articulate (and measure) our overarching vision, priorities and the outcomes we want to deliver for residents.
In response, the council has begun refreshing its Golden Thread, with the aim of creating clearer links between strategic objectives and the work of teams across the organisation.
Response to CPC – refreshing our Golden Thread
The LGA Corporate Peer Challenge reinforced the case for change, emphasising the importance of refreshing our strategies and the way we monitor and deliver them. Addressing this required a new way of working, one that meaningfully connected people to the council’s plans and made performance management more transparent, relevant, and purposeful. Bolton Council’s traditional approach to business planning was largely top-down. While this provided clear strategic direction, it often limited collaboration across directorates and left some teams feeling disconnected from the wider organisational vision. As a result, when new business plans and strategies were introduced, staff did not always feel a strong sense of ownership or fully understand their role in delivering them. Similarly, it was not always clear how residents were considered in these plans, or how they could influence or benefit from them.
At the same time, the council’s processes for measuring progress were still evolving. Key performance indicators (KPIs) were not always consistently defined, and data collection relied heavily on manual effort. While these processes offered some insight, they were resource-intensive and made it challenging to track progress against corporate priorities in a timely and coherent way. This highlighted an important opportunity: to build on existing practices by streamlining measurement, clarifying performance expectations, and strengthening the connection between strategic objectives, staff contributions, and outcomes for residents.
Approach and Impact
In response to the LGA Corporate Peer Challenge (CPC), the council’s Corporate Leadership Team implemented the Corporate Peer Challenge Delivery Plan to set the foundation for a new way of working that would improve how the council delivers its business.
Clearer Strategic Focus
One fundamental change the Council introduced, critical to the success of wider transformation, was refreshing the plans within its Golden Thread, beginning with the Vision for Bolton. Working closely with partners, significant effort was made to declutter a busy strategic landscape and establish consistent governance and outcomes across the borough. The result of this is Bolton2040, a 15-year borough plan, which aligns all strategies with shared outcomes, ensuring resources drive a collective vision of a thriving Bolton where people choose to live, work, study, invest, and visit. Importantly, it also strengthens connections with the wider Greater Manchester Strategy ensuring Bolton’s ambitions are integrated within and contribute to regional priorities.
To ensure alignment between our new Borough Plan and Council Plan, we have made a deliberate shift from an action-based Council Plan to one that is outcomes-based. We have dedicated time over the past year to ensure we developed the Plan collaboratively as a council, through engaging with staff at all levels. The result of these conversations means the new Council Plan, supported by directorate and service plans, reflects this alignment, enabling the organisation to better understand its impact across the Bolton2040 missions and to provide clearer strategic direction on how we organise ourselves to deliver more effectively.
Crucially, this now cascades into staff personal development reviews, helping our staff to more clearly see how their individual roles contribute to delivering outcomes for Bolton, strengthening ownership, accountability, and connection to the borough’s long-term vision.
Integrated Performance, Risk and Finance
One of our key actions has been strengthening corporate oversight of quarterly performance, risk, and financial monitoring, often referred to as the “golden triangle.” To support this, we have refreshed and enhanced our performance framework, accompanied by a comprehensive staff handbook designed to help colleagues at every level embed our strategic priorities into their day-to-day work. By clarifying how individual roles contribute to organisational outcomes, we aim to reinforce a positive workforce culture and support staff wellbeing.
Central to this approach is our new integrated dashboard, which brings together performance, finance, and risk data into a single, accessible platform. Performance parameters are embedded within the dashboard, allowing us to monitor progress consistently, identify emerging challenges, and uncover opportunities in real time. This integration has streamlined what was previously a process involving over fifty meetings each year into just four, creating a more efficient, data-driven system that provides clearer insights and supports more effective decision-making.
To complement the dashboard, we have established performance boards within our directorates that provide a dedicated space to deep dive into specific themes or service areas. Using insights from the dashboard, these boards explore underlying trends, assess the effectiveness of actions, and agree targeted interventions where needed. This structured oversight strengthens accountability and ensures that our efforts are focused where they will have the greatest impact.
By aligning performance, risk, and finance through this integrated system, we can review the financial viability and risk profile of our priorities more holistically. This approach enables us to navigate challenges proactively, seize opportunities early, and ensure that our collective efforts deliver tangible results.
Strengthen Community Engagement
Building on the strong community and locality based working initiatives
in place, the CPC also recommended that we look to strengthen direct resident
engagement and consultation. In doing this, we recognised the need to better co-ordinate our engagement activities and ensure a consistent, reliable approach across the council. Our Director Adult Services (DASS), Communities & Integration brought together a cross-council working group to share expertise, define our ambition, and develop Bolton’s Community Collaboration Framework. This framework sets out our engagement principles and the council’s commitment to working with communities and is due to launch in early 2026 alongside various toolkits for different types of engagement.
The framework helps service teams choose the appropriate level of engagement for their circumstances, ensuring alignment with Bolton’s values and behaviours. The Framework also incorporates the Ways of Engaging Wheel, clarifying what we mean by different terminology and establishing basic standards for each form of engagement and strengthening our processes on how we engage and feedback with our residents.
Overall, we have made significant progress on our journey to build consistent, meaningful, and well-coordinated engagement across the council.
Reenergised Staff Engagement
With over 70 per cent of our workforce living in Bolton, it’s vital that our staff not only understand our plans but feel genuinely connected to them. This recognition prompted us to rethink how we engage colleagues, raise awareness, and strengthen the relationship between senior leadership and staff.
To support this, we launched the first of many corporate leadership roadshows, an opportunity to openly share our priorities, explain how every team contributes to delivering them, and create space for honest conversation. Staff were encouraged to ask questions on anything that mattered to them, from day-to-day workplace concerns to wider strategic issues.
Alongside the roadshows, we have reintroduced Heads of Service sessions. These sessions provide a focused setting for communicating key strategic messages to managers and building stronger links between them and senior leadership.
We are committed to keeping up this momentum. By continuing these conversations, maintaining visible leadership, and creating regular opportunities for staff to engage, we aim to build a culture where people feel informed, valued, and confident about the future direction of the organisation.
Transformation
Our CPC also identified a need for the council to undertake further work to
engage officers and councillors on a clearer corporate vision and aims for
transformation including how this is aligned to our strategic plans outlined above.
We have been moving at pace and with significant purpose to deliver a coherent and purposeful approach to transformation in response to this recommendation.
A comprehensive engagement programme with staff has been undertaken to understand hopes, worries and ideas from across our staff network and this has informed our Transformation Strategy, recently agreed through Cabinet. Transformation with our customers at the heart, is the lifeblood of this strategy.
The strategy, which has two clear ambitions, is now operational, with delivery supported through a council wide collaborative Transformation Action Group who are assuring our recently established Transformation Board.
Ambition 1 is well underway with the completion of the in-housing of the Corporate Property service on time and in full by May 2025. Similarly, an extensive upgrade of our ICT hardware is underway which is transforming capability and productivity.
Work on ambition 2 priorities has commenced with the transformation of Children’s Services spanning both national reforms and local priorities, a reconsideration of how we use our complaints process to drive improvement and a deep focus on how we organise our corporate services to drive a more collaborative and co-ordinated work programme.
Born to Perform
Further findings from the CPC highlighted a clear opportunity: Bolton wasn’t making enough noise about the great things happening across the borough. To change that, the council supported the creation of a fresh, stakeholder-led place brand “Bolton is Born to Perform.” Launched in February 2025, the new identity is designed to put Bolton firmly on the map. With striking imagery and a confident narrative, it has already gained strong momentum.
Overseen by an independent Place Board, the brand combines bold visuals with an inspiring story that reflects Bolton’s spirit and potential. A major driver of its success has been the We Are Bolton Ambassador Programme, which now includes more than 245 members from businesses, community groups, organisations, and neighbourhoods. Four Ambassador events, averaging 143 attendees, have helped showcase and strengthen the projects, services and initiatives that make Bolton a fantastic place to live, work, study, invest and visit. The Ambassadors are actively telling the Bolton story locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.
To make the brand truly visible across the borough, we’ve embedded it into a wide range of touchpoints, from videos and public-space visuals to a standout collaboration with Bolton Wanderers FC. Their 2025/26 third kit features the “Born to Perform” identity, and We Are Bolton branding is now woven throughout the stadium, taking the message to an even wider audience. To reinforce the connection between brand and place, the Bolton2040 Borough Plan strapline mirrors the brand language, creating a clear and consistent thread across all our communications.
Lessons Learned
The work undertaken since the LGA Corporate Peer Challenge has provided Bolton Council with valuable insights into what drives effective organisational change. A central lesson has been the importance of clarity and coherence. By decluttering the strategic partnership landscape and aligning plans through a strengthened Golden Thread, we learned that staff and partners engage more confidently and purposefully when the council’s direction is consistent, well-communicated, and clearly connected to the work they do each day.
We also learned that collaboration must be intentionally designed. Historically, siloed working limited how well teams understood shared priorities or contributed to collective goals. Through co-developed plans, cross-council groups, and improved engagement mechanisms, we have demonstrated that involving people early, whether staff, partners, or residents, leads to stronger ownership, richer insight, and more effective delivery.
Another important lesson has been the value of integrated oversight. Bringing together performance, risk and finance into a single dashboard and governance cycle has shown that streamlined processes not only reduce duplication but significantly enhance the quality and speed of decision-making. This has helped shift the organisation toward a more proactive, data-informed culture.
Another key observation is that transparent and visible leadership matters. Staff roadshows, manager sessions, and ongoing two-way dialogue helped rebuild trust and improve understanding of corporate priorities. Maintaining this visibility and continuing to listen will be key as we embed further changes.
Equally, the development of our Transformation Strategy and place brand taught us that momentum is powerful but must be purposeful. The pace of change has energised staff and partners, but it has also reinforced the need for clear governance, strong communication and well-sequenced delivery to ensure that ambition translates into sustainable progress.
Finally, we learned that residents expect to see how their voice shapes decisions. As we continue strengthening our engagement approach, building consistent standards, and improving feedback loops this has further clarified that meaningful involvement is not an add-on but a core part of how we design and deliver services.
Across all these areas, the overarching lesson is clear: change is most effective when it is connected, collaborative and continuous. The challenge now is to maintain this momentum, embedding the new ways of working, deepening engagement across the organisation, and continuing to use insight, data, and partnership to deliver lasting improvements for the people of Bolton.
Contact
Michael Kane, Head of Strategy, Policy and Area Working: [email protected]
Further information
Bolton Council Plan 2025-2028
Bolton Council Dashboard 2025-2028
Bolton2040: Borough Plan