By Cllr Stephen Conway
Wokingham Borough Council began last year a new way of establishing its strategic priorities.
In place of the old, top-down method, we are seeking to bring in a truly bottom-up approach, which puts residents’ ambitions for the borough at the top of our agenda.
In the past, the council has drawn up a strategy, based on its knowledge of local problems and challenges, and then consulted the community.
Though always well intentioned, this approach has often led to unsatisfactory outcomes; the council officers and councillors who have authored the strategy, having invested time and effort in drawing it up, are understandably resistant to making significant changes at the last-minute in response to a consultation that comes at the end of the process.
The public, for their part, often react with understandable suspicion when confronted with a decision that seems already to have been made.
Now, we are trying something very different; a radical alternative to what has been done before. Last year, we began a process of asking community groups for their views on what the borough should look like in the future.
We held two multi-group plenary events, and a series of workshops aimed at engaging with specific groups, such as the voluntary and charitable sector, business, the town and parish councils, and young people.
The plenary sessions and the workshops were not led by the council, but by an external and independent public engagement group, which has established expertise in facilitating community-led projects.
We have now formed a steering group, with membership from across the different groups, and are developing a plan for gathering the views of the wider community. I have been very committed personally to this new approach and have done my best to facilitate it. But I want to reiterate that this will be a community vision for the future, not a council vision. It will be jointly authored; the council will just be one of many contributors to the process.
What benefits will it bring? First, it will give the borough council a much better sense of what the community really wants, as opposed to what the council thinks the community wants.
Second, it will empower the citizens of the borough, giving them a stronger voice in what the council does; you will have a bigger say.
Third, it will lay the foundations for more effective partnership working between the council and key groups in the community, which will make it easier to deliver the outcomes that the community desires.
I don’t underestimate the challenges involved in this new approach. Different groups will have different priorities; some may be perfectly compatible, but others may conflict. Reconciling differences will be no easy task. Some wishes may simply be too expansive to deliver, especially in these cash-strapped times (though working together, in equal partnership with other bodies in the borough and beyond, may make some things possible that the borough council could never be able to do on its own).
The council itself will need to change to gear up to more effective collaborations with external partners; some areas of the council do this very well already, but others still have some way to go. Cultural change within an organization, especially a rules-based organization like a council, is not an overnight process.
But whatever the challenges, my sense is that all those involved – the many groups and individuals who have attended our workshops and plenary sessions; all those who volunteered to serve on the steering group – have entered into the process in the right spirit and want it to work.
With goodwill and a willingness to accommodate difference, we can make a big difference. The prize, it seems to me, is well worth the effort.
I want to close with a big thank you to all those who have given up their time to this ambitious project. Council officers have worked very hard to progress the community vision, but they could not have be able to do what they have done without the participation of all the community groups that have contributed so fully and enthusiastically.
I’m enormously grateful for their input and look forward to continuing our work together over the coming weeks and months.
Cllr Stephen Conway is the leader of Wokingham Borough Council and ward member for Twyford
