With so many alarming developments on the international stage in the last few weeks, it seems more important than ever to count our blessings.
We are fortunate to live in a liberal democracy, with safeguards in place to stop misuse of power and with fair and free elections, giving us the opportunity to replace those in charge without bloodshed or disorder.
We are fortunate to have a free press and freedom of speech, so those in power can be held to account and governments can be criticized.
We are fortunate to live in a tolerant society, where diversity is seen as a strength, not a weakness, and personal freedom is celebrated rather than supressed.
These national virtues, as I see them, are shared across our country, but we also have local blessings that we can all too easily forget.
We live in an area with beautiful countryside, despite the pressure of large-scale housing development, and valued parks and green spaces for recreation and leisure.
We have excellent schools that provide a great education for our young people and a world-class university at least partly in our borough, which contributes to the wider community.
We have great places to live – towns, villages, and parishes – with a strong sense of identity and community, where people look out for each other.
We have a great range of local clubs and societies, catering for a kaleidoscopic array of interests and activities, and a voluntary and charitable sector that is the envy of many less-fortunate places.
We have great businesses, large and small, which provide opportunities for employment and play an important part in serving the community.
There are, of course, many things that we might want to be better. But we should recognize our strengths and seek to build upon them.
Here at Wokingham Borough Council, we are trying to do our bit – in very difficult financial circumstances – to make our borough an even better place to live and work.
Perhaps the most important thing we have done in recent years is recognize the value of working with others. Partnerships with other councils, with the voluntary and charitable sector, with the University of Reading, and with local businesses all help to maximize our ability to support and sustain our community in challenging financial times.
Partnership working involves the pooling of resources – human, material, and financial – to achieve together what any one of the parties could not achieve on their own.
To me, partnership working makes great sense when the council lacks the money to do all that it would like to do for our community. But it has other important advantages. By working with others, we draw on expertise, knowledge, and data that is not available within the council. We not only do more, we do it more effectively and in a more targeted way.
Councils that work in partnership generally achieve far more than councils that continue to try to do everything on their own. A recent survey by the consultancy Impower assessed the efficiency of all councils providing the same range of services as Wokingham, measured by outcomes achieved per pound spent. Impower rated Wokingham fifth out of more than 150 councils. The top ten councils in the Impower survey have all embraced the opportunities provided by partnership working.
The Impower survey confirms what we know from our own experience – working in partnership enables us to achieve far more than we could possibly achieve on our own.
