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Community Plan

Our values, purpose and objectives for the next four years.

Our Community Plan 2023-2027 sets out our values, purpose and objectives for four years.

It details what we intend to achieve in that period to improve residents’ quality of life and enable those who live, work and invest in Newark and Sherwood to prosper and fulfil their potential.

We hope that the plan expresses our passion and enthusiasm to make a difference, giving a useful insight into what we’re striving to achieve and how we intend to go about that.

Our purpose

We want to serve our local community in the best way we possibly can. As public servants we place a great emphasis on adopting a public sector ethos and seek to embody this in the way that we interact with you and with each other. The Council’s purpose and values make it clear what we are here to do and how we will go about it.

Underpinned by your views

Between May and June 2022, we carried out a major consultation exercise, receiving 4,577 responses from local residents in addition to feedback from parish councils, local businesses and other partners. You can view the feedback from this consultation on our Residents Survey page.

Because the Community Plan 2023-2027 is underpinned by this feedback, we can be confident that our focus is on the things that matter most to the people who live and work in Newark and Sherwood.

Our ambitions

The Community Plan 2023 to 2027 highlights our focus on the needs of the Newark and Sherwood community.

The seven ambitions that underpin our work are:

  • break down barriers to opportunity to enable residents and businesses to prosper and fulfil their potential
  • increase the supply of housing, in particular decent homes that residents can afford to buy and rent, as well as improving housing standards
  • improve health and wellbeing, with an emphasis on communities with lower levels of life expectancy
  • reduce crime and anti-social behaviour, improving community feelings of safety
  • promote, maximise and celebrate the diversity of Newark and Sherwood’s heritage, culture and community spirit
  • reduce the impact of climate change and protect and enhance green spaces
  • be a top performing, modern and accessible Council that get its everyday services right for the residents and businesses that it serves

You can find out more about these objectives and our action plan to tackle each of them in the Community Plan 2023-2027.

Working together

The Community Plan is not something that the Council can deliver on its own.

Tackling crime, improving health and providing new homes and jobs are just some of the many examples where we rely on the support from partners across the public, private and voluntary sectors.

And whilst our attention is on local priorities, it’s also crucial that we network and influence on a much larger scale in order to generate the investment that we need to provide major items of infrastructure such as the Southern Link Road and A46 northern by-pass.

How do we measure our performance?

The Community Plan lays out how we will deliver for our residents, but how do we, and our residents, know that we are achieving this? We do this by reporting every quarter (every three months) on our performance against the Community Plan. We examine data to look at the performance of services, we analyse customer feedback to highlight areas for improvement and show how we are progressing with delivering the activities outlined in the Plan. Understanding our performance is valuable as it allows us to both embed and disseminate good practice and quality service delivery, as well as identifying areas for improvement.

We report on a quarterly basis and the reports from the following periods are available:

LGA Corporate Peer Challenge Report

The LGA operate a peer challenge programme which supports continuous improvement by providing effective insight, guidance and challenge to enable continuous improvement, as well as assurance to local leaders and residents. Newark and Sherwood District took part in a Peer Challenge in October 2024 which involved a team of local authority peers visiting our Council headquarters to look at our approach across five core elements detailed below.

  1. Local priorities and outcomes
  2. Organisational and place leadership
  3. Governance and culture 
  4. Financial planning and management 
  5. Capacity for improvement.

The LGA team hold up a mirror to the organisation, acting as critical friends and let Councils know how we are performing. A Peer Challenge celebrates what we are doing well so we can build on it as well as making recommendation where we could improve. The team considered a wide range of experience of what ‘good’ looks like in other local authorities as they assessed our performance and provided a presentation on the last day which was followed by the final report which can be found here: NSDC CPC Final Feedback Report (PDF, 443kb)

The District Council considered the LGA’s report carefully and formed a cross-party working group to develop an action plan that would deliver the changes the LGA have recommended. This resulting action plan can be found here: Newark and Sherwood District Council Peer Challenge Action Plan 2025 (PDF, 326kb)

Progress Review

In December 2025, senior local government Councillors and Officers from other authorities across the UK formed a Corporate Peer Review team and undertook a progress review of the District Council. This was to check on progress being made since the original Peer Challenge back in October 2024.

The report of the review can be found here: LGA Corporate Peer Challenge - Progress Review (PDF, 366kb)