By Cllr Sarah Kerr
As the country falls into a cost-of-living crisis, you will have been seeing a lot of communications from the council about how we’re striving to work in partnership to protect those in need. You’ll also be reading a number of articles about the financial challenges the council faces.
The council’s financial situation is not exclusive to Wokingham, but is a challenge faced by all local authorities up and down the country.
According to leading business and financial adviser Grant Thornton UK LLP, one in sixlocal authorities will run out of money and be placed in special measures as early as next year without additional income or substantial budget reductions. This will have disastrous consequences for the communities they serve.
Whilst tackling poverty and the cost-of-living crisis is something that my colleague Cllr Rachel Bishop-Firth leads on, we work very closely due to the overlap in our portfolios. It’s crucial that when we work to alleviate poverty, we are not simply focused on helping people to survive, but to thrive.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation refers to Minimum Income Standard’ which sets out the living standards we, as a society, agree everyone in the UK should be able to have and participate in society. The cost-of-living crisis will mean that many who have always been relatively comfortable, will be making some tough decisions and looking for ways of reducing their spending.
Part of my portfolio includes arts and culture. We saw during the pandemic lockdowns just how important arts and culture are to us socially and for our health and wellbeing, let alone the economic importance of the sector (creative industries contributing £111 billion to the UK economy in 2018).
Arts and culture help tackle social injustice by being the beating heart of our towns and communities. Not only do they bring prosperity, they bring communities together and make life worth living.
Arts and culture should be for everyone and having widely available opportunities to participate in (whether that be in a creative capacity or as a consumer) is imperative, even more so during a cost-of-living crisis.
At the council, following consultation with our partners, we produced and adopted our first arts and culture strategy in 2020 and are working with partner organisations to deliver on it. You will most likely have seen that one of our partner organisations, Arts4Wokingham, will be paying for and delivering a landmark public sculpture in Wokingham Town centre, that everyone can access and engage with.
Public art improves the image and identity of an area, boosting the local economy (by attracting people and skills into the area), as well as the social benefits it brings such as improved wellbeing, community cohesion, sense of place and civic pride. Art shouldn’t solely be in galleries, but out in the public domain for all to enjoy.
We are also working on developing a Cultural Educational Partnership which will work to unite and improve cultural education for children and young people in the local area. Arts education helps children increase their chances of going into further education and obtaining employment by developing fundamental cognitive capacities, critical analytical skills, and providing learning experiences that have a significant impact on children’s educational achievement and social development.
We are very much at the start of our journey in terms of arts and cultural development in the area, and are focused on developing partnerships to enhance what Wokingham has to offer, and ensure that arts and culture is for everyone.
Another part of my portfolio is tackling the climate emergency and we are working on a number of initiatives that can help keep costs down for residents in addition to reducing carbon emissions:
We have launched a reusable period product scheme. Switching to reusable products will help households save £120 per year, per person who has a period in the family. It also minimises waste that cannot be recycled. Working with the Hardship Alliance, First Days and the Foodbank, they will be distributing reusable products for free, and we are working with Maya’s Refillables in Wokingham Town, where there will be a discount scheme to purchase these products;
We have nearly completed a survey of our social housing stock to assess their energy performance. Our aim is to get our stock to have an Energy Performance Certificate type C rating, and we are in the process of applying to the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund for a grant to retrofit some of our properties to achieve this. This will ensure our properties require less energy, and that energy where possible is renewably generated. This not only decreases energy bills but provides energy security and improves the quality of life for our tenants;
We have our Help to Heat Scheme, where we are supporting homeowners on low incomes to utilise the ECO scheme which provides insulation retrofits either for free or heavily subsidised;
We will soon be launching our Home Decarbonisation Scheme that will provide impartial advice on property specific measures to improve the EPC rating for all homeowners in the Borough, and signposting for available funding options;
We are circulating our monthly Climate Emergency newsletter where you can be kept updated with what we’re doing in this area, as well as signposting to available support and advice of practical measures you can take, what our partner organisations are doing, and case studies of what our residents are doing to tackle the climate emergency. You can sign up via www.wokingham.gov.uk/email-newsletters. If you would like to feature in our newsletter, then please contact the Climate Emergency Team at climate.emergency@wokingham.gov.uk.
Please also check out the latest Climate Emergency Action Plan progress report which was approved at Council on September 22, last year. The progress report contains the latest updates on our progress in delivering the Climate Emergency Action Plan and how we can do as much as we can to reach carbon neutrality by 2030.
The good news is that measures that help reduce our carbon footprint also help with the cost-of-living crisis.
Cllr Sarah Kerr is executive member for Climate Emergency and Resident Services on Wokingham Borough Council and ward member for Evendons
