Blue Orange Marketing, has built a national website that provides support to Local Improvement Advisers.

Over 100 Local Improvement Advisers (LIAs) have been recruited to provide specialist advice and support to those delivering Local Area Agreements (LAAs) across England.

What sort of place you want to live in and the priorities that will make a town, city or community a better place are all covered by LAAs. They are agreed between central government and a local authority, local strategic partnership and other key local partners. LAAs are used to simplify central funding, join up public services and allow flexibility in the provision of local solutions to local issues.

The national LIA programme is being managed by Improvement & Efficiency West Midlands (IEWM). David Galliers, Assistant Director – LAA Support, said: “This is a major programme of funding for improvement and efficiency activities. LIAs can help partnerships learn how to do things by themselves by offering face to face advice, coaching, training and mentoring to support local partnerships deliver public services through the new performance framework and LAAs/Multi-Area Agreements (MAAs).”

Blue Orange Marketing, who works with a number of non-governmental organisations, designed and built the website to enable partnerships to advertise requirements for help and for LIAs across the country to express an interest in offering support.

Sharon Kendal, managing director, explains: “The website is a forum where partnerships can request help in specific knowledge areas from any registered LIA across England. It’s already proving successful with a number of projects currently being provided and some already complete.” She added: “We have designed a number of specific reports that provide statistics about the programme which will assist IEWM report to central government.”

The website is at www.lia.communities.gov.uk.