Question
Whist there is much to congratulate the Officers and participating Members for their dedication and action during the Covid emergency, it has invoked much change in priorities, operations and outcomes.
Can the Leader outline what the Council has done well, not done well, that is within and outside the Council’s control and as part of the answer, could the Leader outline lessons that have been learnt for the future operations of the Council?
Minutes:
Question
Whist there is much to congratulate the Officers and participating Members for their dedication and action during the Covid emergency, it has invoked much change in priorities, operations and outcomes.
Can the Leader outline what the Council has done well, not done well, that is within and outside the Council’s control and as part of the answer, could the Leader outline lessons that have been learnt for the future operations of the Council?
Answer
It is almost three months to the day that I was first notified of a Covid case in Wokingham Borough. It has been a long three months.
The Chief Executive, Directors and the Members of the Executive have been magnificent. All our Officers have been exemplary during this period and prepared to turn their hands to anything. The voluntary sector worked with our Officers to achieve the unachievable and I am hugely grateful to both. Residents have volunteered in huge numbers and largely espoused the conditions which have been forced upon them. There have been innumerable local volunteer groups supporting each other. Councillors from all parties have contributed massively to our efforts and suspended political activities although I know they are creeping back. A big thank you to you all.
The impact of Covid-19 on Council services has been very profound. It has affected all the aspects of the Borough Council and the Borough. We have focussed on the very immediate matters such as supporting care homes and working with our valuable partners on our community response. We have sought to deliver our universal services in the same way as far as possible. We have redeployed staff extensively throughout the organisation to ensure we have staff in the right places and flexible arrangements to ensure we can easily change should that be required.
My Executive colleagues will all have covered in more detail our actions regarding care homes, our community response and Children’s Services and my focus will be on our universal services and lessons learnt.
We have done all that we can to keep those services going that most affect, if not all of our residents eg. waste collection and recycling, and highways maintenance. We have not only achieved this in most services, we have also escalated improvement and repair work to the Borough’s highways, taking advantage of the opportunity of far fewer cars on the network. This has included ‘hard to do’ works including Showcase Roundabout. Works have started on a programme of seventeen accelerated carriageway resurfacing schemes on 6th April 2020 and should be completed by mid-June. At the same time we quickly suspended civil parking enforcement.
We decided to continue to collect garden waste, and as a result, whilst the Re3 Partnership was forced to close the household waste recycling centres, which have now re-opened, we have not seen exceptional increases in fly-tipping that have been reported elsewhere in the country. Our Localities Enforcement Team have continued working and dealing with a full range of issues.
We have kept our country parks open, unlike our neighbours, allowing residents to enjoy open space and whilst we have had to close the car parks for the early weeks of the emergency, we have now reopened them and provided additional staff resources to ensure that social distancing is maintained.
Despite most of our staff working from home we have managed to maintain a full front-line service to residents contacting the Borough through our Customer Delivery service, with staff dealing with online and telephone requests. We are largely paperless and can access the information we need. We have only stopped those services such as weddings, citizenship ceremonies and birth registrations where the Government has requested us to do so.
We acted fast to provide safe emergency accommodation for homeless households, rough sleepers, children in care and repatriated residents as well as temporary accommodation for key workers. We have liaised with local bus operators to ensure that the much reduced levels of service still meet the essential needs of residents and key workers.
Whilst we have had to close our libraries in line with Government restrictions we have expanded and promoted our range of online services to include electronic books and magazines, added free music streaming and a whole series of online virtual events. A large proportion of the library staff were rapidly redeployed to provide additional assistance to the most vulnerable.
Using staff redeployed from services which have had to scale down this has meant that funding crucial for their survival has been allocated quickly and efficiently.
Lessons learnt for future operations. Fundamentally we have learnt that our resilience and business continuity plans are sound, and have worked well. The Council’s investment in digital technology to enable our staff to work from home has proved its worth beyond doubt.
We have also learnt that we are able to flex and adapt fast and that our vital relationships with key contractors, such as our waste and highways contractors, are strong and have enabled us to keep delivering when some other authorities have struggled or stopped.
Our experience of social distancing will be built into all future arrangements including reception points and libraries when they reopen.
We hope to continue to build on and expand our range of online and telephone assisted services and continue to offer organised telephone/video appointments going forward for the convenience of our residents and customers.
In the future we will develop our relationships with local businesses further particularly regarding promoting and accessing grants, and assisting with health checks, and look to see how we can build on any benefits/opportunities around climate emergency.
Similarly the fantastic work that we have built with the voluntary and community sector will be the foundation of our future relationship. At the same time because our contact with vulnerable people in the Borough has been extensive, using many extra staff, we now know much about the community which can be fed into our future thinking about service provision.
As we are still very much in the midst of our response, we are not in a position to have identified all the lessons; we will do this in the coming weeks and months.
Supplementary Question
Thanks for that answer which covers a great breadth of work done by the Council and it is, as you say, early days and very much a work in progress to make change. As unlocking and understanding the new norm evolves it would be easy to slip back into the old ways and lose momentum in making improvements for all Wokingham Borough’s residents. What do you think we should be putting in place to avoid any such slippage?
Supplementary Answer
This Administration has been in post for just 12 months and a key ambition was to build morale within the Council staff and create a can-do attitude where staff are encouraged to make decisions and take risks, learn from mistakes and be open about them. Our response to Coronavirus has been just that. Officers at all levels took decisions quickly and courageously. They did and are continuing to do a magnificent job.
Another key ambition was to focus on serving our residents and I am sure that everybody will agree that the Borough was an exemplary. We will not go back to our old ways we will build a Council where Officers are proud to serve our residents who in turn are proud of their Borough Council.
I am pleased to announce that we have created a new post, with a Director Keeley Clements, to focus on our resident services and localities and Keeley started this week.
Another key ambition was to create a new environment to work with our voluntary sector partners and so during the next few months we will be working hard as our current level of support diminishes to ensure that the co-operation achieved continues.
But it does not end there we have been working well with our excellent GPs, throughout the Borough, and NHS partners with whom we wish to extend this relationship.
Lastly, but not least, we need to build on the excellent relationships we have enjoyed with the Police and other blue light services.