Principles and Headlines

What is the Best City Ambition?

The Best City Ambition is our overall vision for the future in Leeds. It sets out in clear, simple terms what the council, partner organisations in the public, private and third sectors, and the Leeds public have agreed is important to us.

It is not another strategy or plan – we already have many of them covering important issues for communities and the activities of partner organisations. Instead, it aims to set out the bigger picture, the overall direction of travel that we share for Leeds. Once the Ambition has been agreed, future strategies and plans should reflect this direction and develop the detailed actions we will take as a city to get there. The Ambition will provide the framework to support those actions being better connected and joined up across organisations and within communities.

What is a ‘Pillar’?

To provide a framework for the ideas and priorities which make up our shared Ambition, we are proposing to further develop the Leeds Three Pillars – Health and Wellbeing, Inclusive Growth and Zero Carbon.

The Three Pillars are the way we as a city have chosen to look at and group together our big challenges and opportunities. Through engagement between partners and communities, we are suggesting they provide a broad enough framework to capture everything we think is important, while also being clear and specific enough to help us to think about actions and interventions we should take to improve people’s lives.

Each Pillar will be supported by its own strategy/plan and partnership infrastructure, but the Best City Ambition will describe and highlight the relationship between them, the interdependencies and where they must come together to achieve our shared goals. We want this to help everyone to see how they can break free from more traditional boundaries and play their part in full.

Achieving the Ambition is everyone’s business. We will sometimes use a ‘life-course’ lens to help make this clearer, thinking about the impact of all three pillars and the way they interact at each stage of a person’s life.

Leeds' Big Challenges

This section is primarily drawn from the Leeds Joint Strategic Assessment, but also engagement with partners and stakeholders, as well as the recent Covid-19 lessons learned exercise. It is not exhaustive but is intended to provide a summary of the major challenges facing the city, based on robust analysis and insights.

The challenges set out are drawn, both from early engagement with partners and stakeholders, and from recent research and analysis specifically the Joint Strategic Assessment and Covid-19 lessons learned exercises. The challenges are a key starting point for the development of the Best City Ambition. We have developed a Life-Course approach to the challenges, using the lens of life-course stages to frame the analysis, whilst also ensuring we cover the three pillars of the city ambition.