Corporate Plan 2022 to 2027: Principles for delivery

Cymraeg is part of who we are and everything that we do. It’s our language and belongs to us all. It is part of our history, our heritage, and our culture. In a time where we all face many challenges, celebrating and encouraging ein llais Cymraeg (our Welsh language voice) can bring us together. We want everyone to join us, no matter how much Cymraeg you know, wherever you come from and wherever you live now in the county of Conwy.

Our vision is for a bilingual Conwy where people are confident and proud of their llais Cymraeg (Welsh voice), where Cymraeg is spoken in the family, the community, and the workplace, and where Welsh culture is celebrated and people feel they belong.

We aim to set an example in how Cymraeg is used in the workplace and how we deliver our services. Promoting Cymraeg is also about family, about community, schools, businesses, tourism, and most of all about people. Language is a people thing, and this plan aims to support people to grow understanding, goodwill, and hopefully a love of Cymraeg and its contribution to the culture, society, and economy of Conwy.

We hope you will join us on the journey to a million speakers of Cymraeg by 2050. Are you one in a million? If you’re a fully conversant Cymraeg speaker we need you too, to support others and help create the opportunities where Cymraeg can grow. As well as increasing the number of people able to speak some Cymraeg, we want more people to speak Cymraeg every day. We are supporting this by working together with local partners and clubs, such as Menter Iaith Conwy, Urdd Conwy, Young Farmers’, Mudiad Meithrin, Cymraeg for Kids, Coleg Llandrillo, Parents for Welsh Medium Education, and others. Along with planners, educators, and Councillors, they are part of our Fforwm Strategol y Gymraeg (Welsh Language Strategic Forum), which has helped put together this Strategy and will support it going forward. The challenge ahead is an exciting one, and through setting a strong vision, we are confident that we will be able to work together to successfully promote Cymraeg here in Conwy. Amdani! (Forward!).

Visit our new Welsh language and education landing page for more information on our supporting plans and strategies, and for further information on available help with learning.

We want the future to change for the better, creating a more inclusive society that actively promotes equity and diversity and tackles discrimination. Since writing our Corporate Plan 2022 to 2027, we have published our new Inclusive Conwy Strategy. This document sets out our statutory equality objectives and represents our Strategic Equality Plan 2024 to 2028. It focuses on people and their lived experience, and no matter what a person’s background, we should all be able to live, work and visit our county and feel welcomed, accepted, and have a sense of belonging. Through our strategy we aim to embed a culture of awareness and individual responsibility amongst staff that, no matter your background or experience, we all have a collective responsibility to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion. We want all staff to understand ‘it doesn’t have to have happened to you, to matter to you.’ We strive to improve fairness, inclusivity, transparency, access and equity for all in both service delivery and employment, whilst ensuring that we manage our budgets and resources responsibly.

We cannot achieve this alone, and we will continue to work with communities, businesses (including social enterprises), and other organisations to create real and meaningful change. We have detailed the actions that we will take over the strategy’s four years. Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Steering Group (chaired by our Chief Executive) will help drive forward, monitor and report on our progress.

We want to ensure that through everything that we do, we work well with our communities and that their voices are heard. It is important to us that people feel informed, included, and listened to.

Through our Community Involvement Strategy, we want to nurture strong community networks, which includes working with our Town and Community Councils, that enable our residents to play an active role in what happens within their community, and are based on the principles of trust and respect for local diversity. We will make sure that we apply the principles of good communication and engagement practice, ensuring that the language that we use is at all times clear, plain, and accessible.

Alongside our existing compliments and complaints reporting, we aim to draw in more community voices and benchmarking information to help us understand how we are performing, celebrate good service, but also recognise when we have got things wrong, so that we can learn and improve as an organisation.

‘The county’ (the people and the place) is at the front of our minds in relation to everything we do. We always aim for continuous improvement, being innovative and openly exploring new approaches. We value our culture, our heritage, and our environment. We are determined to be a bilingual authority that respects and promotes the use of the Welsh language, and we commit to being a carbon net zero organisation by 2030.

Our values are at the heart of who we are, and represent the beliefs of our organisation. They inform how we work, behave, and deliver services.

Our values are:

• 1. We care about what we do:
  • We care very much about our colleagues and through a coaching and mentoring approach help them each to reach their potential.
  • We care about the people of Conwy, seeking to deliver services and opportunities that improve the lives and well-being of our people and our communities.
  • We value any external or internal challenge and feedback, and encourage self-assessment and reflection on our work as an opportunity to show that we care and to improve what we do.


• 2. We are fair to all:
  • Fairness to All isn’t just the Council motto, it is fundamental to our work.
  • We embrace and respect diversity.
  • And we listen.


• 3. We are innovative:
  • We innovate to improve what we do and how we do it.
  • We try new things and are not afraid of things going wrong because we support each other, especially if things go wrong because there is always an opportunity to learn and improve from experience.
  • We embrace change rather than fear or avoid it, and we are not afraid to stop doing the things that we have done traditionally.


• 4. We are team players:
  • We work together – no silos.
  • We have a collective as well as an individual responsibility.
  • We help each meet our statutory and regulatory responsibilities, as well as service needs.
  • We are open to fair challenge from team colleagues and will respond positively.
  • As a team, we are more than the sum of our parts.