Wigan Borough's New Era
Thank you to everyone who completed the 'New Era' survey. We had a fantastic response.
This has given us valuable insight, with thousands of thoughts and ideas.
Information from this digital survey, together with feedback gathered from our face-to-face engagement activity, has now being analysed to help inform the future direction of the council and its priorities. Please scroll down this page and click on the 'Feedback' stage to read over the engagement summaries.
About this conversation
Understanding what the people who live and work in the borough want from their council is core to enabling us to do a good job for our communities. We know that many people are facing difficult times and that challenges around the cost of living are unlikely to go away anytime soon. Despite this, we know people and communities are doing amazing things across our borough, and we want to play our part to support this.
As a council, one of our most important responsibilities is to work in partnership with our communities to support and enable people to meet and overcome the challenges they face and to make the most of and create opportunities.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve been trying to do this through something we’ve called The Deal - a way of doing public services based on the Council having a deep understanding of local communities and what matters to them; staff being positive, accountable and having the courage to do things differently; and enabling communities to do what they do best by valuing the strengths and talents of communities.
We know that the world has changed since then, so now we want to take stock and re-set. We’d like to understand what your experience of the council and the borough is like, what has worked and what hasn’t over the last ten years and where you think we need to focus for the future.
Over this time lots of people have shared their views with us and we’re thinking hard about how we can engage more deeply, more often and with more people to understand what matters to you most and how we can work better as a council to make as much difference as we can.
In addition to the online surveys, we have conducted a number of other engagement opportunities for different people to take part:
- Community-led engagement through the Community Connection Group: A group of community leaders who are working alongside us to shape this process, engage their networks and communities to explore these questions, and help us interpret the feedback we get to develop recommendations.
- Stakeholder interviews with approximately 25 key stakeholders from across the borough including Council staff, Cabinet Members, public service partners, schools and colleges, voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise sector partners and businesses.
- Focus groups and workshops with young people, staff and teams across all council services.
- Community engagement through conversations and events at various locations in the borough: Council staff and members of the Collaborate CIC will be out and about in the borough at various point speaking to people at community venues and town centres and interacting with Council services.
Phases
Outcome: Progress with Unity
As a partnership between residents, businesses, public services and community organisations we have reflected deeply on what our borough's strengths are and also the challenges we face in the decade ahead.
‘Progress with Unity’ is a new movement for change which is built around the successes and opportunities for our borough and the lessons we have learned along the way.
Through conversations we have designed two key missions and are committed to delivering these as a partnership within our borough.
This is not the final version of our movement. Its foundations are built on the deep engagement we have carried out, but it will change and adapt over time.
This is the start of a new era and we will work as a partnership to keep listening and learning from residents and our response will continue to evolve.
We have a unique and genuine commitment to work together as a collective for the good of the borough.
The success we’ve had has come from our culture, behaviours and approach to working alongside our communities.
Through ‘Progress with Unity’ we will strengthen the way we work through the following six ways of working to achieve long-lasting change.
Please read our strategy document attached below to find out more.