By Stephen Conway
Wokingham Borough Council has embarked on a revolutionary new way of establishing its priorities.
We are working in partnership with other bodies in the borough to produce a Community Vision, which emcompasses the hopes and aspirations of different parts of the community and will influence the council’s direction of travel over the next decade and more.
The council’s recent practice has been to draw up a council strategy and then consult on it.
With the ink already dry, there has been an understandable reluctance on the part of councillors and council officers (who have invested time and effort in formulating the strategy) to make major changes at a late stage.
As a result, consultation has been more of a litmus test of the popularity of the council’s own proposals than a meaningful exercise in shaping future priorities that reflects the hopes and aspirations of the people we are here to serve.
Over the last 17 months, the new administration at Wokingham Borough Council has adopted a different approach, which is less top-down and more bottom-up. We have been bringing in key stakeholders to get a sense of what they think the council’s priorities should be.
We have had successful workshops with the voluntary and charitable sector, town and parish councils, and businesses and two forum sessions with a wider range of stakeholders, including the probation service, the chamber of commerce, health providers, the fire service and police, faith groups, educators (including the University of Reading and local schools) and the Youth Council.
All have been involved as equal partners with the council, and the enthusiasm to participate on that basis has come across strongly.
A steering group has been formed to carry forward our ambition of a jointly-authored Community Vision, which will establish the key hopes and aspirations of the borough and will help set the agenda for the council.
The steering group includes representatives from business, the charitable sector, health providers, faith groups, the Youth Council, Reading University, Wokingham Today, and council officers.
The chair is Nick Fellows, of the Wokingham Volunteer Centre.
The leaders of the political groups on the council have a standing invitation to attend and, as this is an initiative that I feel very committed to, I do my best to be at every meeting.
After all the important preparatory work done over the last year or more, we are at the point where we want to open up the conversation to the wider population, beyond those groups with which we have already engaged. We are trying to include as many people as we can, to ensure that the final Community Vision reflects as many viewpoints as possible.
This is where you can play an important role. Please gives us your views on what you want the future to be like in our borough.
The council’s Engage Platform now carries two surveys – a short one and a slightly longer one. The short one can be completed quickly, but we would be grateful if you were able to answer the questions on the longer survey, too.
The questions on the short survey are very open, so you will have ample opportunity to give us your own views on what you like about the area now, what you would like to change, and how you would like to be able to describe the place you live in the future.
Just go to engage.wokingham.gov.uk
For those without internet access, and to reach those whose voices are not always heard, we have also produced a postcard which can be distrubuted at events organised by the council or any other body in the borough.
If you would like copies of the postcard, either for yourself or to share with a group with which you are involved (a community association, for instance, or a local club or society) please don’t hesitate to phone the council on 0118 9746066 or, if you have access to the internet, by sending an email to cem@wokingham.gov.uk.
I hope you will take this opportunity to influence the future of our community.
Once the Community Vision work is completed, the next step is for the council to use the Vision as a guide for drawing up its own strategy and the policies that flow from that. There will be periodic refreshes in the years ahead, to make sure the council is still heading in the direction that the community wants.
To secure agreement on what the future should look like is not going to be easy. Reconciling different interests and aspirations, from different parts of the community, will be challenging.
So far, the work undertaken by the members of the steering group and the stakeholders who have contributed in earlier meetings and workshops has been very constructive and is producing a surprisingly high degree of consensus. If the wider community engages with the process in the same contructive way, I am confident we can produce much better outcomes than in the past.
Cllr Stephen Conway is the leader of Wokingham Borough Council and ward member for Twyford
