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
Feedback
Thank you to everyone who completed the 'New Era' survey and took part in the collaborative engagement sessions.
We listened carefully to our citizens, from public, business and community partners, and staff and we will continue to do so.
Summaries of the feedback we received from residents, our community connectors group, partners and voluntary and community sector are set out in detail in the documents below.
We heard that residents want us to focus on core services and to provide equitable support and investment across the borough.
We heard that people want the council to be more responsive to communities and to build long-term relationships with community partners built on trust.
We heard from public and private sector partners about addressing basic needs within our communities and tackling economic inequality, and that partnership working was central to addressing these issues.
As a result, we are now working with our partners and stakeholders to set out core missions which as a borough partnership we will unite to tackle in the decade ahead.
We will be inspired in these missions by the collective spirit instilled at the outset of Wigan Borough 50 years ago when 14 towns were brought together to create our borough.
This spirit was captured in the borough’s motto ‘Progress with Unity’.
We will communicate further via this page setting out those missions and how as a borough we are going to deliver them.
Thank you again for giving your views on Wigan Borough's 'New Era'.
