From the Chamber: Working with Others is the future for Councils

First published in Wokingham Today on 28 November 2024

Regular readers of Wokingham Today will be familiar with the financial challenges faced by your borough council, which receives the lowest level of core revenue funding from central government of the 151 English councils responsible for adult social care and children’s services.

While other councils have become insolvent, Wokingham Borough Council has managed to keep its head above water.  Our survival can be attributed to a variety of difficult decisions we have taken on savings and income generation.

A less conspicuous ingredient is partnership.  While other councils have turned in on themselves in response to financial pressure, we have looked outwards and embraced the opportunities that working with others can offer.

Partnership working involves the pooling of expertise, experience, data, and resources – human, material, and financial.

To make our limited resources stretch further, in other words, we work alongside others to deliver for the people the council is here to serve.

Three examples will, I hope, help to illustrate the benefits that partnerships can bring.

First, the Hardship Alliance, a body comprising the borough council and local voluntary and charitable sector organizations. All the partners are seeking the same objective – to help those most in need.  By working together, we have been able to do much more than any of us could have done on our own.  The tangible results for our residents are clear – more support for more people. That outcome has been achieved by mobilizing more information, more expertise, and more resources than the council could possibly have mustered on its own.

My second example is the strategic partnership we have established with the University of Reading.  It enables us to benefit from the world-class research and expertise of a leading higher education institution, and for the university greatly to increase its chances of external funding by demonstrating impact beyond the world of academia.  Both partners, in short, are winners. For the council, the great advantage is help with our local climate emergency response, our emerging Town Centre Strategy, and our education, employment and skills ambitions.  

My final example is the creation of the Berkshire Prosperity Board.  This new body has emerged after discussions and negotiations between the six Berkshire unitary councils.  Despite our political differences, we have been able to work together and reach agreement on the way forward.  The Berkshire Prosperity Board is a formal partnership that will be able to bid for substantial government funding for major infrastructure projects – the kind of funding we could not hope to acquire on our own.  I feel proud that Wokingham has been a key player in the creation of the board, which will benefit all six Berkshire unitary councils at a time when we need all the financial support we can get.

We have a new government philosophically committed to public services, but it doesn’t have a magic wand to conjure up lots of extra money for local government.  Other areas of the public sector – the NHS, defence – are surely going to take priority.  That means councils must adapt to survive.  Partnership working is an important part of that adaptation.  

We can achieve far more together than we can on our own.

Cllr Stephen Conway is the Leader of the Council and member for Twyford, Ruscombe and Hurst.