In Part 1 I looked at what LATCo business plans have in common, and in Part 2 I compared them with best practice. The gaps were consistent: thin financials, weak KPIs, very little analysis on show, no risk appetite and no Teckal headroom.
But for most of the gaps, at least one company is getting it right. You don’t have to invent good practice. You just have to borrow it. Here are the examples I’d point any LATCo to.
Start with the approval timetable
The best place to start on a business plan is at the end: how it will be approved. The plans I saw approved on time had the board, shareholder committee and cabinet dates lined up before the year began. Barking and Dagenham’s Reside plan for 2026/27 went from the company board to the shareholder panel to cabinet, all before the year began. East Cambridgeshire Street Scene’s board approved its plan in early March, ahead of the shareholder committee later that month.
If your plan is regularly approved after the year has started, fix the timetable before you fix anything else.
Publish something, even if the detail is exempt
Commercial sensitivity is real, but it isn’t all or nothing. The best example I found of a council handling this was in Enfield, where the cabinet report on the Energetik heat network recommended making further loan drawdowns conditional on the company publishing a public version of its plan within 30 days. Stockport Homes publishes a short, well-designed corporate plan that sets out a golden thread to the detailed delivery plan it agrees with the council. Homes for Lambeth’s 2020-23 plan closes each section with “five things to know”, written for residents.
A public version with the commercially sensitive detail in an exempt appendix gives you the best of both.
Be honest about the journey
Cheshire West Recycling RAG-rates its previous year’s objectives in its new plan, including the ones it missed: “We missed our incident recurrence reduction target”. Rushmoor Homes’ 2021 plan sets its first plan’s targets alongside its estimated progress against them. Achieving for Children’s 2021-24 plan explains which projects it dropped at its annual refresh, and why. This is the background section done properly: positive, but not shying away from what went wrong and how it’s being fixed.
Show the numbers, and test them
Sutton Living’s ten-year plan is the best financial section I read. It has a full P&L, a cash forecast, and seven stress tests, including combined scenarios, each showing the effect on profit, cash, peak borrowing and the year the loan is repaid. It’s candid about the worst case too. BexleyCo shows how a 5% rise in construction costs would reduce profit, and separately sets out the benefit to the council from interest margin, dividends, land receipts and MRP. This Land’s plan, through Cambridgeshire’s cover report, set out baseline, upside and downside scenarios with the assumptions behind each.
If your company carries debt, this isn’t optional. It’s how the board and the shareholder satisfy themselves that the plan is robust.
Price the council contract at arm’s length
Essex Cares agrees a “small and transparent margin (agreed as 3%)” on its council contracts, with a dividend policy for profit above that. Care is Central’s founding plan commits the council to offering it rates “commensurate with” those it would offer other care providers. These are the arrangements that give a LATCo the reserves to invest and the cushion to absorb cost pressures, while staying on the right side of transfer pricing and subsidy control. On the subsidy control side, the rate on Sutton Decentralised Energy Network’s council loan was raised from 2% to 3%, which the plan says helps make sure it isn’t classed as financial assistance. That’s exactly the kind of thinking a plan should show.
Make the measures mean something
Ubico’s KPI table is a model of transparency: goals set in 2021, four years of actual performance, and goals for 2026, including the measures that have moved the wrong way. Achieving for Children gives every priority project a lead officer, a success measure and a milestone. Optalis sets out “outcomes by year 3” for each of its priorities, alongside a one-page roadmap. And Stockport Homes pairs every “we will” with a “success will look like”.
Measure social value properly
Goram Homes uses the National TOMs through the Social Value Portal and sets a target of £30,000 of social value per home. Bristol Waste and Cheshire West Recycling both measure social value using recognised frameworks. The next step for the whole sector is additionality: showing the difference the company has made compared with what would have happened anyway. Whoever gets there first will have the most credible evidence in the sector.
Use the tools, and show them
Cheshire West Recycling is the plan that comes closest to the full toolkit. It has a PESTEL and a SWOT, followed by goals and objectives with measures of success and target dates, a scored risk register, and social value measurement. It’s also the plan I’d most like to see go further, carrying the SWOT through to options and modelling recycle prices, given its own risk register notes a £3m swing between high and low prices. PSPS benchmarks its costs against three comparable councils in the East Midlands, reporting its services as 20% cheaper than each, and uses a capability maturity model to show where it is now and where it’s going. East Cambridgeshire Trading Company sets out the financial benefit to the council year by year, and puts its council support services on SLAs with “measurable performance indicators, break clauses and remedies”.
A checklist for your next plan
Pulling it together, here’s what I’d want to see in every LATCo business plan:
None of this needs a 150-page document. Most of it can sit in appendices, with a readable, well-designed plan at the front.
Where Nullam fits
This is exactly what the Nullam Method is designed to help with. The Strategic Purpose and Business Case module, alongside the Financial Management, Risk and Performance modules, takes a LATCo through each of these areas and shows where the gaps are. A workbook with the business planning tools I’ve referred to in this series is available — request it here and it will be sent to your inbox.
If you’re starting your 2027/28 plan in the next few months, now is the time to set the timetable. I’m always happy to talk it through.
Ian Skates is the founder of the Nullam Method, a diagnostic framework for Local Authority Trading Companies, and Nullam Financial. ian@nullam.org.uk