This area of the Council provides services such as maintaining roads, managing planning applications, licensing premises, collecting household waste, maintaining public spaces, supporting local economic growth and engaging with local communities. Overall, the current budget for this area is £57 million.
Key priorities in this area, particularly as we move forward from COVID-19 are as follows:
| Priority | Areas of focus as we recover from COVID-19 |
| Grow our local economy and deliver good jobs with fair wages for our residents | - Taking action to address unemployment and reskilling
- Enhancing support to new and existing businesses
- Delivering regeneration programmes to drive local growth
- Providing support to key sectors of the local economy
- Delivering new and improved infrastructure and transport to drive sustainable growth
- Driving housing delivery programmes for both new build and energy efficient retrofit
|
| Tackle the climate emergency | - Ensuring the Council is carbon neutral
- Delivering more sustainable housing and development
- Supporting reduction of carbon across industry and business
- Developing further green spaces and tree planting
- Embedding more sustainable transport
- Bringing forward proposals on a new waste strategy to reduce waste and increase recycling
|
| Make our neighbourhoods even better places to call home | - Developing new approaches to engaging local people in local decisions and local services
- Transforming community assets to enable local residents to have joined-up and affordable facilities that meet the needs of each area of the borough
- Developing a new deal with the voluntary and community sector to ensure they can play their full part in tackling shared challenges
|
To balance the budget and ensure there is enough money to tackle the priorities set out above, the following proposals are under consideration:
(2.1) New ways of dealing with waste: In April 2020 we successfully transferred our waste services from a private contractor to Cheshire West Recycling, a Council-owned company operating on cooperative principles. How we manage waste has a real impact on our ambitions to address the climate emergency. Reducing the waste we produce, reusing and recycling are all goals where we have made great progress but we want to go further. A waste strategy is being developed covering collection arrangements, disposal arrangements and household waste recycling centres. The strategy will be subject to further consultation with the public. Depending on the options agreed there is the potential to save £982,000 while, at the same time, addressing our climate emergency priorities.
(2.2) Efficiencies and income generation in highways and street cleaning services: A range of measures could be taken to increase the efficiency and income within this service including more efficient cleaning of gullies; more coordinated administration of insurance claims; raising income for sweeping and ground maintenance from other organisations; charging for events; gathering income from new developments for highways; delivery of efficiencies in Christmas lighting and using technology more to better manage the inspection of streetlighting. We are also consulting on introducing a wildflower approach to grass verges where appropriate. Overall, this could save £671,000 without a major impact on service quality.
(2.3) A review of community buildings: Community buildings can be vital assets to our neighbourhoods, bringing together local groups and supporting the delivery of local services. However, not all of these buildings are well-used, and they are of varying levels of quality. We also need to consider that more services are being delivered through digital means and fewer buildings may be required overall. There may also be more opportunities for communities to have a greater role in the management of some buildings. Overall, a review could save up to £201,000 subject to further local consultation.
(2.4) Strengthening enforcement: By strengthening and increasing our enforcement activity we are likely to identify more issues that will levy a fine for behaviour that contravenes current policy and adversely impacts on residents’ lives. Overall, this could raise income in the region of £238,000 a year to meet the costs of service delivery.
(2.5) Staffing restructures: We will look at staffing restructures across a range of services in this department to reduce duplication and ensure that we have the right skills in the right place to deliver the Council’s priorities. Where possible we will manage this by deleting vacancies. Overall this could save £958,000.
(2.6) Efficiencies with shared services: We share several services with Cheshire East Council and other authorities. These include administration support for libraries, archives and an education library service. By strengthening collaboration, we believe a saving of 5% could be achieved; which is around £53,000.
(2.7) Concessionary fares: We manage a scheme to provide low fare public transport for older people and other groups. Due to less than anticipated passenger numbers and a review of our administration costs, the budget in this area can be reduced by £170,000.
(2.8) A joined-up approach to tackling unemployment, homelessness and support to individuals and families in poverty: We are seeing an increase in unemployment, pressure on homelessness services and increased benefit claims driven by reductions in household income. We believe a seamless and joined up response is essential. By bringing a range of services and contracts together, redesigning some of our processes, using more technology and by eliminating duplication, we believe we could reduce our costs by £218,000.
(2.9) Driving further rental income by building more supported housing: Additional supported housing schemes for people with ongoing support needs are being developed and acquired by the Council, and these will bring in additional rental income to the authority in the region of £95,000.
This area of the Council provides services such as maintaining roads, managing planning applications, licensing premises, collecting household waste, maintaining public spaces, supporting local economic growth and engaging with local communities. Overall, the current budget for this area is £57 million.
Key priorities in this area, particularly as we move forward from COVID-19 are as follows:
| Priority | Areas of focus as we recover from COVID-19 |
| Grow our local economy and deliver good jobs with fair wages for our residents | - Taking action to address unemployment and reskilling
- Enhancing support to new and existing businesses
- Delivering regeneration programmes to drive local growth
- Providing support to key sectors of the local economy
- Delivering new and improved infrastructure and transport to drive sustainable growth
- Driving housing delivery programmes for both new build and energy efficient retrofit
|
| Tackle the climate emergency | - Ensuring the Council is carbon neutral
- Delivering more sustainable housing and development
- Supporting reduction of carbon across industry and business
- Developing further green spaces and tree planting
- Embedding more sustainable transport
- Bringing forward proposals on a new waste strategy to reduce waste and increase recycling
|
| Make our neighbourhoods even better places to call home | - Developing new approaches to engaging local people in local decisions and local services
- Transforming community assets to enable local residents to have joined-up and affordable facilities that meet the needs of each area of the borough
- Developing a new deal with the voluntary and community sector to ensure they can play their full part in tackling shared challenges
|
To balance the budget and ensure there is enough money to tackle the priorities set out above, the following proposals are under consideration:
(2.1) New ways of dealing with waste: In April 2020 we successfully transferred our waste services from a private contractor to Cheshire West Recycling, a Council-owned company operating on cooperative principles. How we manage waste has a real impact on our ambitions to address the climate emergency. Reducing the waste we produce, reusing and recycling are all goals where we have made great progress but we want to go further. A waste strategy is being developed covering collection arrangements, disposal arrangements and household waste recycling centres. The strategy will be subject to further consultation with the public. Depending on the options agreed there is the potential to save £982,000 while, at the same time, addressing our climate emergency priorities.
(2.2) Efficiencies and income generation in highways and street cleaning services: A range of measures could be taken to increase the efficiency and income within this service including more efficient cleaning of gullies; more coordinated administration of insurance claims; raising income for sweeping and ground maintenance from other organisations; charging for events; gathering income from new developments for highways; delivery of efficiencies in Christmas lighting and using technology more to better manage the inspection of streetlighting. We are also consulting on introducing a wildflower approach to grass verges where appropriate. Overall, this could save £671,000 without a major impact on service quality.
(2.3) A review of community buildings: Community buildings can be vital assets to our neighbourhoods, bringing together local groups and supporting the delivery of local services. However, not all of these buildings are well-used, and they are of varying levels of quality. We also need to consider that more services are being delivered through digital means and fewer buildings may be required overall. There may also be more opportunities for communities to have a greater role in the management of some buildings. Overall, a review could save up to £201,000 subject to further local consultation.
(2.4) Strengthening enforcement: By strengthening and increasing our enforcement activity we are likely to identify more issues that will levy a fine for behaviour that contravenes current policy and adversely impacts on residents’ lives. Overall, this could raise income in the region of £238,000 a year to meet the costs of service delivery.
(2.5) Staffing restructures: We will look at staffing restructures across a range of services in this department to reduce duplication and ensure that we have the right skills in the right place to deliver the Council’s priorities. Where possible we will manage this by deleting vacancies. Overall this could save £958,000.
(2.6) Efficiencies with shared services: We share several services with Cheshire East Council and other authorities. These include administration support for libraries, archives and an education library service. By strengthening collaboration, we believe a saving of 5% could be achieved; which is around £53,000.
(2.7) Concessionary fares: We manage a scheme to provide low fare public transport for older people and other groups. Due to less than anticipated passenger numbers and a review of our administration costs, the budget in this area can be reduced by £170,000.
(2.8) A joined-up approach to tackling unemployment, homelessness and support to individuals and families in poverty: We are seeing an increase in unemployment, pressure on homelessness services and increased benefit claims driven by reductions in household income. We believe a seamless and joined up response is essential. By bringing a range of services and contracts together, redesigning some of our processes, using more technology and by eliminating duplication, we believe we could reduce our costs by £218,000.
(2.9) Driving further rental income by building more supported housing: Additional supported housing schemes for people with ongoing support needs are being developed and acquired by the Council, and these will bring in additional rental income to the authority in the region of £95,000.
