By Cllr Jason Brock
We’re about to enter a ‘season’ of Council committee meetings, and that means an awful lot of business is to be considered by councillors over the coming weeks.
Some of it will, inevitably, get a greater share of media attention – perhaps especially some of the exciting plans for the Minster Quarter environs and the attached cultural offer.
Yet it’s too easy for councils to become associated with big physical projects – like infrastructure and roads – to the detriment of attention on our broader ranges of services and the smaller things that make a real difference to people’s everyday lives, so I thought I’d point out a few of the less immediately eye-catching things coming up.
The Housing, Neighbourhoods and Leisure Committee will be considering a lot of reports this week, including a presentation on the Council’s work to tackle empty homes in the Borough.
This kind of activity often goes below the radar, and it certainly isn’t going to solve the housing crisis, but empty homes do blight neighbourhoods and getting them back into use helps to revitalise streets.
More substantive are some updates to our Rent Guarantee Scheme, which has successfully allowed families to access homes in the private rented sector which they wouldn’t have been able to without Council support, keeping them out of temporary ‘bed and breakfast’ accommodation in the process.
Nestled alongside these housing reports is an entirely different project that I’m especially enthusiastic about – investment in the Tilehurst Library to implement an initiative that would allow easier access to both the building and the service out of hours, including being able borrow books and hire space for community use.
With our major leisure centres now moving forward, it’s right that we pay attention to the smaller, community-focused facilities in the town.
Libraries have always been about more than books and I’ve always been proud that no branch has closed in Reading, so I naturally want to see them thrive in the future.
Next week, the Policy Committee will, alongside the Minster Quarter matters I hint at above, also be considered an update on the myriad of schemes funded by the local element of the Community Infrastructure Levy, which is a payment that property developers make to both help mitigate the impact of their development on the community and provide the additional facilities needed for new residents to thrive.
The local element is used for small-scale projects, but they’re exactly the things that residents have asked for in their neighbourhoods. Improved street lighting, new bus shelters, upgrades to play areas, traffic speed restrictions, pedestrian crossings – exactly the kind of things that local councillors are lobbied about on a daily basis.
It’s a great pleasure to see so many of these day-to-day improvements being delivered, and I know that residents care deeply about them.
Finally, and casting a couple of weeks ahead, I would like to highlight something that will be on the agenda of the Adult Social Care, Children’s Services and Education Committee.
The Council has been working with a range of partners to develop a new All Age Autism Strategy, and the Committee meeting will signal the start of a public consultation on it. It will be an important policy document when finalised and help the Council to ensure it does its part for residents whose particular needs may not otherwise be fully acknowledged. It’s especially vital, then, that everyone with an interest takes the opportunity to respond to the consultation and share their comments when it launches.
Why does it matter that I’ve picked out a few things which you could have missed?
Well, you may think that some of them won’t matter to you, but they will matter to someone – maybe a friend, family member or a neighbour.
Under Labour, I always want the Council to be an organisation that thinks about Reading’s community in all its diversity, because the community – and not the infrastructure and roads – is what really forms our town.
Cllr Jason Brock is the leader of Reading Borough Council, and a Labour party ward member for Southcote
