Introduction by Councillor Alan Weinberg, Leader of the Council

Foreword

The past year of 2007/08 has seen continued strong performance and achievement by the Council for Redbridge residents. We have worked with our partners such as the Metropolitan Police and Redbridge Primary Care Trust to improve the services that you said were most important in making Redbridge a better place to live – initiatives to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour to make the area safer; improving the street scene and recycling service to make the area cleaner and greener.

We continue to deliver value for money for our residents, maintaining our position as the fourth lowest spending and third lowest Council Tax of our ‘nearest neighbours’ group of London Boroughs. Our financial management, together with Adult Social Care, have been awarded the highest score by external inspectors. Increasing numbers of parents want to send their children to Redbridge schools as we continue to provide excellent outcomes for children and young people. In addition, our Housing Service score improved from the previous year. But it’s what you think that counts – user satisfaction ratings have improved in a number of areas, including leisure and cultural facilities, waste collection services, provision of recycling facilities and housing repairs.

"We are committed to giving individuals and communities a stronger voice in the design and transformation of services"

Focus on the user experience and need is also paramount. We are committed to giving individuals and communities a stronger voice in the design and transformation of services, ensuring that we continue to improve access through innovative projects such as Redbridge i, and also, wherever possible, moving service commissioning to the customer e.g. Direct Payments. In other words delivering a very personalised service, unique to you.

We recognise that there is still more to do. Your involvement is crucial to ensuring that we deliver the right services for the future. Extensive consultation across the Borough during 2007/08 has been used to develop our Sustainable Community Strategy, which sets out our plans to meet the changes and challenges over the next ten years. Partnership working is vital to securing the improvements you want while maximising value for money: the Redbridge Strategic Partnership (RSP) will ensure that the public, private, community and voluntary sectors work together to achieve the tough targets that we have set for the first three years of the strategy.

More recently, Redbridge Conversation has attracted over 5000 people to choose not only the long terms improvements they would like to see in the Borough, but also how those improvements should be funded The outcome will feed into the programme of improvement for the next five years.

Although we are continually making improvements, we are not complacent. Over the next year and beyond our aim is to work towards delivering the priorities outlined in the Sustainable Community Strategy, to involve you in developing our improvement programmes and to continue to deliver value for money to residents, to ensure that Redbridge is a better place to live for all.