We will renew our essential public services – social care, public transport, highways, arts and leisure – essential to the quality of life of our residents.
- We will renew the model of adult social care provision in Wiltshire by:
- Delivering a new Social Care Strategy addressing how Wiltshire Council commissions services and how it can:
- improve staff skills, qualifications, working conditions and staff retention;
- provide support to unpaid carers;
- tackle the mental health issues associated with loneliness and isolation among older people;
- better integrate and collaborate with the health and voluntary sectors.
- Piloting bringing services back in-house and expanding this if successful.
- Better integrating services with the health sector to manage the care of older people more efficiently and sensitively.
- Ensuring support for keyworkers so that disabled people are able to live independently.
- Improving the pathways for young disabled people to move from education into employment and work experience, by collaborating with existing providers such as Fairfield College.
- We will improve the skills and conditions of care workers and support unpaid carers by:
- Paying care workers at least the living wage, ending zero-hour contracts and paying for travel time between visits, making Wiltshire an Ethical Care Council.
- Raising skills for better integration with the health service (such as providing healthcare), delivering better outcomes for clients and improving staff retention.
- Working with the voluntary sector to support unpaid carers with advice, training, help accessing financial and wellbeing support, respite care, day-care centres and support groups.
- We will improve and extend public transport to offer a real alternative to car use by:
- Bringing local bus services back under Wiltshire Council’s control, using powers to be restored under Labour’s Better Buses Bill, ending the chaos and inefficiency brought about by deregulation.
- Establishing new routes and more frequent services, particularly in rural areas: using both regular and demand-responsive services (such as the Pewsey Vale Wiltshire Connect service).
- Providing a mobile phone App through a Wiltshire Council IT platform as a simple one-stop service for: finding bus routes, getting real-time information on bus movements and booking demand-responsive services.
- Establishing and supporting community transport options and link schemes where regular services are not viable.
- Supporting plans for combined bus and rail tickets and pushing for pilot schemes to integrate ticketing.
- We will improve the condition and safety of the county’s roads and pavements, for all users - motorists, pedestrians and cyclists by:
- Investing in properly scheduled road maintenance to restore the road network to a steady state, enabling preventative maintenance rather than reactive and inefficient pothole repairs.
- Investing in road safety improvement schemes, informed by local data and evidence.
- Developing more 20mph zones in residential areas in consultation with local communities.
- Putting more resources into safety education, training and publicity.
- Better maintaining pavements and developing better access on frequently used pedestrian routes, including dropped kerbs and crossings, and tackling dangerous pavement parking.
- We will protect and develop arts and leisure facilities in Wiltshire by:
- Keeping all libraries open, including mobile library services, and extending opening hours where possible. Promoting libraries as wider facilities for our communities, following the Community Hub model and encouraging them to organise promotional events, such as readings by authors.
- Investing in sports facilities, using a proportion of the Community Infrastructure Levy money raised from new developments.
- Supporting music and arts venues, theatres, museums, galleries, festivals and cultural events, with funding, publicity and promotion.
- Helping local applicants for grants either directly from the Area Boards, or by mentoring them in applying to e.g. the Arts Council and National Lottery Fund.
- Promoting community arts projects, particularly those that focus on community topics and schools/young people.
