London Borough of Redbridge: Council of the Year Entry 2020 p1

London Borough of Redbridge Council of the Year Entry 2020

Changing our relationship with communities

London Borough of Redbridge: Council of the Year Entry 2020 p2

Introduction from Leader, Cllr Jas Athwal, and Chief Executive, Andy Donald

Redbridge is a borough of unique complexity and challenge. The Origins database, which tracks demographic change, shows that Redbridge arguably has the fastest changing population in the country, as people from inner London and around the world make their home in our corner of east London. The arrival of Crossrail next year will only make Redbridge more attractive.

We’re proud of how our hyper-diverse communities live successfully side-by-side, but we need to confront the challenges that come with rapid change: increases in crime, the need for more affordable housing and including our long-standing residents in the process of economic and demographic growth.

Despite this, people still know Redbridge as a leafy east-London suburb, and our funding reflects this, with the ninth lowest spend per head of any unitary council in the country.

We know that any response to our changing borough starts with excellent public services. In 2019 we demonstrated the quality of our work with a string of award nominations, including MJ Council of the Year and APSE best team of the year, and taking home the Children and Young People Now award for early years and the Keep Britain Tidy award for community engagement. We were recognised with an Ofsted outstanding rating for our children’s services. A Department of Health survey showed we received the highest satisfaction score for our Adult Social Care services in the country. We did all of this while delivering £15m budget savings by radically increasing commercial investments and successfully managing down demand for elderly care.

We built on these achievements to start implementing a range of regeneration schemes that will change the way our borough works, from new council housing and swimming pools, to securing £4m from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to transform our country park and co-designing the first of five new community hubs with our residents. A large part of our ongoing capital programme will

be funded by a groundbreaking £75m commercial bond, issued in the wake of the PWLB rate rise and demonstrating our appetite for financial innovation.

Our plan sets out four overarching goals to transform our council, renew our place and change our relationship with our residents.

Working jointly with our partners in the NHS, police, further education and the VCS, we took the first steps on this journey without our borough plan - Building a new Redbridge - which engaged over 2,000 residents, resulting in our vision of Brave New Towns, a scenario in which we deliver balanced and inclusive growth across the whole borough.

Council Leader Cllr Jas Athwal and Chief Executive Andy Donald

Regenerate our borough to benefit our residents and integrate new communities

Keep the borough clean and safe

Be a great place to live as a family

Tackle the root causes of social challenges

What makes us unique?Last year we showed the MJ Award judges how we transformed the council’s culture to deliver great results in the depths of austerity. But changing the council was only a prelude to changing our place: in this application, we’ll show you how we’re delivering real results to make the new Redbridge a reality by changing our relationship with our residents.

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Regenerating our boroughOur population is expected to grow by nearly 20% by 2025, as developments such as Crossrail make Redbridge even more accessible from central London. This year saw a major redevelopment of Ilford Station start, creating a symbolically vital new entrance to the borough from the Elizabeth Line.

We know we need more housing, better infrastructure and reformed public services to ensure that the homes we need for new residents don’t come at the expense of quality of life for our existing population. In 2019 we stepped up the hard work to regenerate our town centre in Ilford. Once the most popular high street in east London, the high road has declined since the opening of Westfield Stratford. The council has set out a bold plan to shorten the retail element of the high road, creating a new mix of cultural attractions and restaurants.

A large part of our town hall was turned over to new local artist studios, while the car park was closed for redevelopment by Mercato Metropolitano, a high-end food market. With locally-sourced ingredients and a commitment to local business, it will help us build community wealth and provide a whole new retail experience for the town centre.

Redbridge has failed to deliver enough new housing for generations, but in 2019 we started to address the problem with 140 new council houses using our own land and investment, and created a pipeline of 600 new affordable homes to be built through the HRA.

We’re working closely with our residents to begin designing a new generation of community hubs, enabling us to move out of 40 of our existing buildings into five new, purpose-built facilities, shared with police, NHS and other partners. We committed to co-designing each of these buildings and their service models with local residents. In 2019 we engaged hundreds of residents in Seven Kings and Gants Hill in an extensive process of design work, with the planning application for the first hub imminent. Each of the hubs will be built on council land through our new housing company, Redbridge Living.

SPACE courtesy of David Mirzoeff

Artist impression of Mercato Metropolitano

Building work on our 600 new homes

Residents at our Community Hub meeting

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Clean and safe

Clare (left), local community leader Loxford Lane

Our community police Loxford Lane

In spring 2019, communities on Ilford Lane, one of the borough’s main shopping streets, faced a crisis. In the evening the streets were thronged with sex workers – as many as 36 on some nights. Many were trafficked victims of organised gangs, working in conditions of modern slavery.

In response, the council built a new partnership with communities and the police that has now been recognised as best practice by MOPAC and nationally.

The council put in place a multi-faced 4 Es approach to combating this problem: engagement with the community, environmental improvements, exit programmes for sex workers and enforcement against users. The first step was the creation of a pioneering public space protection that created a borough-wide ban on soliciting sex, enabling our enforcement staff to hand out £100 fines and prosecutions. Working with the police, we created a dedicated team that disrupted prostitution along Ilford Lane. This has been supported by undercover police work to disrupt the trafficking gangs and get their victims to safety.

The number of sex workers on Ilford Lane has now fallen to practically zero, while local community groups feel safe to start reclaiming parks and streets with community litter picks and play streets. We’re currently working with the LGA on a new behavioural insights pilot to find ways to deter men from buying sex on the lane, ensuring that we address one of the root causes of this complex problem.

Clare, a local community leader, told us:

“Everyone has pulled together, including the community, the council enforcement team and the police. It helped create optimism that things are improving and more pride.”

Ilford Lane was one example of the council’s Our Streets approach to crime and grime services, a strategy we co-produced with hundreds of residents.

Since September, the borough’s four neighbourhoods are each served by their own integrated team comprised of a neighbourhood manager with dedicated resources tailored to meet the priorities, service needs and challenges of each locality.

This means everyone in Redbridge has an easily approachable local team who can help them get things done, unleashing a new wave of community activism, including eight play streets over the year. The teams lead regular action days with the police and other statutory agencies to tackle beds in sheds, messy front gardens and licensing violations. On just one of these days, we issued over 100 FPNs and removed 2.5 tonnes of waste. In 2019 the council supported the creation of seven new community gardening groups and helped residents plant 5,000 bulbs and 900 trees.

In 2019, the council also took the bold step of bringing its waste services back under council control in a new local authority trading company. The results have been dramatic, with missed bin collections falling by 75% and significant reduction in service cost.

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Redbridge has always had a reputation as a great place for family life. In 2019 we built on this with a range of new initiatives to improve the lives of our young people and their wider families.

These included opening a new swimming pool at Mayfield, starting another in Wanstead, and beginning the £6m transformation of Hainault Forest Country Park in partnership with the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Woodland Trust.

Our children’s services were recognised as outstanding by Ofsted. Our KS4 educational outcomes are in the top 10 authorities nationally, and almost all our schools are rated either good or outstanding. Our looked-after children numbers are almost half the national average and we ranked third in London for delivering outcomes against the troubled families programme.

We are building on our reputation for excellence in this area by becoming accredited as a UNICEF child friendly borough, which requires us to put the voice of children and young people at the heart of everything we do. The council has led the creation of a partnership with the VCS and the wider public sector, securing cross-sector commitment to this initiative.

Great place to live as a family

Young people have been invited to ask questions at special council and external scrutiny meetings.

As well as holding a council meeting dedicated to questions from under-25s, we asked the children at John Bramston Primary School to design a survey for us, getting coaches to ask questions on their tablets at sporting games.

We set three hundred 16-year olds a task to help us design how we can best engage young people through the National Citizens Service. We asked Highlands Primary School to help us design a lesson plan and we have turned up in classrooms across the borough to use it.

Children have helped us design the play equipment that will go into Ilford Town centre and will help us test their final choices once they are installed.

Ofsted referred to the leadership and management of children’s services as “exceptional” and “exemplary” leading to a “contented and skilled workforce.”

Engagement with school children on the play activities was carried out at the Unicef launch to gain their feedback and ideas of play equipment that can be introduced on the High Road

Child friendly borough launch day

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Tackling the root causes of social challenges

Our public health team expanded its highly successful approach to social prescribing in partnership with the VCS and the CCG. In 2019, the programme opened to 27,000 carers in the borough, representing a huge increase in coverage.

An independent evaluation from the University of East London praised the council’s effective leadership and commitment to person-centred care.

The council also became the first authority in the country to offer Buvidal, a weekly or monthly opioid replacement which means users no longer need daily methadone injections to manage their addiction.

Box Up session

Where next?Over the coming year, we want to further embed our approach to working with communities. Our new commission on growth in the borough will be designed to understand and address the psychological and emotional anxieties that come with change.

We will work with residents to start a debate about making our council and borough carbon neutral. And we will create a new community-led approach to community safety, building on our strong partnership work with the police.

Our goal is a new Redbridge for everyone, and in 2019 we laid strong foundations for a new decade of excellence.

We continue to innovate in children’s services, with the development of our new Family Intervention Team, which supports young people by working with the whole social system around them, and the arrival of Box Up Crime in the borough, a leading social enterprise which uses boxing to divert young people from gang activity.

The council has used CIL funding to provide Box Up with its own dedicated gym. We have extended our work with gangs by becoming the first council in the world to use family functional therapy to support families where young people are at risk of being drawn into gang activity.

In 2019, our adult care services scaled up their new People Matters approach from pilot sites into a whole-system intervention. This means Redbridge has moved away from a mechanistic, assessment-led approach to a model in which our staff engage in a rich dialogue with people in need of care, helping them to solve their own problems and remain independent in the community. The results speak for themselves, with user satisfaction significantly higher than the London and England averages at 77%, elderly care placement continuing to fall year-on-year and the overall adults budget remaining comparatively low despite a rapidly growing population.