PLANS to bring some outsourced council services back in house will be debated next week.
An extraordinary meeting of Wokingham Borough Council’s executive has been convened for 5.30pm on Thursday, March 18. Coming ahead of a council meeting that evening, the two committees will be asked to approve a proposal to return public health services to Shute End.
In 2012, the service, covering environmental health, licensing and trading standards, was moved into a partnership with West Berkshire. Bracknell Forest became a fellow member in 2016, with West Berkshire in the driving seat.
The aim had been to save £50,000 per year and the process is known as the public protection partnership (PPP).
Five years ago, Cllr Pauline Jorgensen was executive member for resident services at Wokingham Borough Council, and said: “Partnership services benefit from economies of scale and efficiencies by combining to create larger operations. They have better resilience and flexibility to respond to market conditions, and what our residents want.”
But now the aim is to bring some services back in house.
Leader of the council, Cllr John Halsall, said: “I have a vision, which is very much about Wokingham Borough Council being the golden thread that runs through the borough.
“It’s really the indispensable partner to any conversation you have in the borough.”
He said that under that vision, he is not the person at the top – residents are.
“We’re really only here to serve our residents,” he said. “The triangle is inverted with residents at the top, all 178,000 of them. The leader is the chap at the bottom with all these requirements filtering through.
“The vision is to have a service which wraps around our residents and provides them with more that the direct services.”
Cllr Halsall said that for most residents, life is guided by their environment and issues that come from that, such as litter, traffic, waste, loneliness and mental health.
“Historically, these sorts of things were provided by other people, but the health service has had to retrench, the police have had to retrench so the borough council really has to step in and fill that void.
“My vision is we should do that, subcontracting out a huge range of services means we can’t.
“We need to take control of these services back in house.”
He felt that by taking the service back from the PPP, it would be easier for residents to have speedier resolutions to nuisances such as neighbours playing the piano loudly at 3am in the morning.
“My vision is that our localities team, which we’re building up, will be able to knock on the neighbour’s door and say, ‘Did you know you’re keeping your neighbours up all night?’ and 99% of people are jolly decent and admit that they had no idea and will stop doing it,” Cllr Halsall said.
“Most of these situations just require some management at the front end.
“It applies to travellers, bonfires, fly tipping, antisocial behaviour and domestic violence.
“And that vision then means that we can better work with our partners in the police and in the health service.”
This would also extend to an equalities policy which Cllr Halsall says will be a framework to address issues as they arise and adapt to the current situation.
“If we correctly roll out the localities work, we should know where problems are in the borough,” he promised.
