Bridgend County Borough Council (BCBC) commissioned KKP to review its current performance and develop a new sustainable strategic plan to drive its key wellbeing objective to create healthy and happy people and resilient communities in the borough.
This 2024 process built both on KKP’s lengthy track record of work in Bridgend and the wide range of contemporary work delivered for Welsh local authorities (including Cardiff, Neath & Port Talbot and Merthyr Tydfil) plus Sport Wales and the Welsh Government. Drawing upon this, we evaluated healthy living and wellbeing services in the County Borough to evaluate how their potential contribution to the delivery of key wellbeing outcomes could be optimised.
KKP’s prior work with BCBC has encompassed a range of health, wellbeing, sport and physical activity related assignments including participation baseline evaluation, impact assessments and facility improvement work. This meant that we commenced the assignment with an excellent understanding of the local work undertaken in respect of asset development, partnership approaches to leisure facilities operation, the Council’s commitment to wider access to school sports venues and the community development approach taken to the drive to increase participation levels among under-represented groups – in particular in the most deprived and isolated areas of the Authority.
The focus of the Healthy Living and Wellbeing Improvement Strategy is cohesion within and between Council departments alongside upping the scale and quality of partnership work with other agencies. The start point was the 2020 Wales Audit Office evaluation and the Council’s Corporate and Active Bridgend plans, all of which signal the opportunity to improve population level impacts via better internal and external agency collaboration and connectivity when planning, developing and delivering services.
The outcome, alongside improved operational effectiveness is a long term plan for Bridgend’s (current and future) assets and infrastructure and an evaluation of the capital and revenue implications thereof – reflecting the strategic aspiration to develop community hubs with co-located services.
To achieve this, KKP reviewed and interrogated existing strategies, programmes and workstreams with a specific emphasis on assessing the potential to improve connectivity and better join up Council and partner approaches to supporting healthy and resilient communities.
Key to the quality of our report was the in-depth evaluation of the degree to which outcomes in the Council’s strong community development emphasis based policies and plans are being (or can be) implemented and the areas in which cross-departmental operational coherence will optimise this. In the context of assets, service elements and options covered included:
- The full repairing lease based healthy living partnership agreement with GLL/Halo which operates eight leisure centres and swimming pools and runs until 2027 and the wellbeing/population level outcomes this has produced.
- The capital investment made (and still needed) in the Borough’s assets and how they in current or amended form will help deliver the Council’s leisure service/wellbeing requirements for the next 15+ years.
- Where and how (e.g., library, leisure and employment) service co-location has worked/can work in leisure buildings and how the achievement of net zero targets can be enhanced.
- What to do about joint use indoor and artificial turf pitch sports/leisure facilities on school sites including those which BCBC already operates and/or has already invested in with which more might be done and sites/locations in which investment might be merited to deliver added value for the community. This included review of programming, pricing, sustainability, lifecycle-based renewal/replacement and potential linkages with/options to benefit from the Welsh Government Community Focused Schools programme.
- The likely effectiveness/sustainability of (and risks associated with) implementing asset transfers in respect of, for example, playing fields, pavilions and playgrounds and the readiness and demonstrated ability/success of community councils and sports groups taking on responsibility for these amenities.
- What BCBC should do about the leases, licenses and ownership of its estate of community centres – and how this might affect issues such as grant-dependency, financial and operational sustainability and propensity to focus on more vulnerable individuals and groups plus related third sector investment from the Welsh government and health partners.
All the above was assessed with a view to determining how best they the Council can tackle the financial challenges it faces, orchestrate its actions so as to optimise positive impact on healthier and resilient communities and to consider whether the synergies between community asset transfer, healthy living partnership and community focused schools can help ensure that overall community infrastructure is fit for purpose, of suitable scale and quality and sustainable in the medium to long term.