‘Valuing People Now – A Three Year Strategy for People with Learning Disabilities’ sets out a new vision for improving services for people with learning disabilities across health, housing, employment and community care services. But a leading charity supporting disabled people has questioned whether it will be delivered.

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Public services across the North East are delivering outcomes well below the English average, according to a report published by the Commission on Public Sector Reform in the North East.

The new report from the Commission, says that despite some notable improvements, the region has still not caught up with outcomes in other regions because it started out from a low base. Results in education show that in 1997, the North East was 7.6 per cent behind the national average for the number of pupils achieving 5 A*-C grades, but is now 0.9 per cent above it. Yet in health, while life expectancy rose for both men and women by three to four years between 1991 and 2007, people in the North East still live on average nearly one and a half years less than the national average, and more than two years less than people living in the South East.

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The ten year life of the New Deal for Communities Partnerships is drawing to a close and this document looks at how the partnerships are planning for the future. It describes the leaning gained and how far they have progressed in putting the succession strategies into place.

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