 Here at West Berkshire Council our staff are ready. Are you?
From today (Friday 24 July), customers in shops, supermarkets, indoor shopping centres, transport hubs, banks and takeaways are required to wear a face covering. This is in addition to the existing rules on face coverings whilst using public transport.
Where food has been purchased at a restaurant without table service or at a take-away outlet you must wear a mask. If a shop or a café has a designated seating area for customers to eat and drink, face coverings can be removed in this area only.
Face coverings are also needed in NHS settings, including hospitals and primary or community care settings, such as GP surgeries. You are also advised to wear them in care homes.
The added protection can give people the confidence in situations where social distancing can be difficult. It's everyone’s personal responsibility to make sure face coverings or masks are worn whilst in these areas.
Read the latest Government guidance on face coverings.
 Care home residents will soon be receiving visits from their families.
In March we closed our care homes to all but essential visitors as part of our response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We're pleased to be able to once again allow visits - which will take place in the care home's garden. Visiting brings comfort both to those who are visited and to those visiting. Some care home residents are living with dementia and have a limited understanding of events, including the Covid-19 pandemic - they may experience distress and confusion, which can be helped by the presence of familiar faces.
There will be new arrangements in place for visits - including a limit of two visitors and an advanced booking system. For more information visit our website.
 Following the initial wave of COVID-19, cases are declining across the country and national lockdown restrictions are gradually lifting. The next phase of the pandemic in England is predicted to be a much more varied pattern with focussed outbreaks requiring local controls to keep cases and harm from COVID-19 to a minimum.
Central Government asked each local authority to develop a Local Outbreak Control Plan by the end of June 2020. As part of this work, a Local Outbreak Engagement Board has been set up. The Board will meet as and when required in response to local outbreaks, but as a minimum, it will meet in public once a month. Due to current restrictions, these meetings will be held remotely via Zoom and will be available to view on the Council’s YouTube channel. The Board meetings will help to ensure that residents and other stakeholders are kept up to date with the current status of COVID outbreaks in West Berkshire and the local response.
The first meeting of the Local Outbreak Engagement Board will take place on 31 July at 10am. Papers can be viewed and downloaded from the Council’s website. The papers will contain information on how you watch the live stream or recording of the meeting.
 The public health and wellbeing team have created a webpage to share more data and give residents and partners a better understanding of the local picture in regards to COVID-19.
A surveillance report has been created which will be updated each week giving an overview of the data around cases in West Berkshire.
 Volunteers from the Newbury RFC have been working hard delivering food parcels to shielding residents from the town and surrounding area.
The food parcels are prepared by Spotlight UK Food Bank. We want to say a huge thank you to everyone who is giving up their time to help deliver this food.
In our latest YouTube video you can hear Steve Jones, General Manager of Newbury RFC and his colleague Jonathan Nelson, talk about how the food delivery operation has been working.
 HMRC are running free webinars over the next two weeks on the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme. The webinar provides business in the hospitality industry an overview of the scheme, including how it works, eligible establishments, registering and making a claim and what happens after a claim has been made.
Businesses can register for a webinar here.
 We have been working hard during the COVID-19 emergency to maintain the quality levels of our waste services including kerbside collections and street cleansing. Our contractors Veolia have been working diligently throughout this period to collect increased volumes of waste including general refuse and recycling from the kerbside. Our household recycling centres were closed temporarily in March 2020 due to government guidance on essential travel but the sites have been reopened successfully since 14 May 2020. To ensure safe operation of our recycling centres, we have introduced a booking system for residents. We have since had over 30,000 visits to our recycling centres and the feedback we continue to receive indicates that the vast majority of residents are happy with the quality of the recycling centre service provision.
During this time, more people have been at home than ever before and many residents have been taking the opportunity to keep their gardens looking beautiful. Our garden waste subscription service has been remarkably resilient and has continued to operate without any disruptions throughout the lockdown period, even as many councils across the country had to temporarily suspend their garden waste collections. We are happy to announce that the garden waste subscription service has now launched for the upcoming 2020/2021 season, which starts from 01 September 2020.
Residents may subscribe at any time until June 2021, but to ensure you receive a continuous service from this September, please renew/subscribe before 14 August online.
 We launched the UK’s first Community Municipal Investment (CMI) on 16 July. The CMI offers our residents and community groups a unique way to invest directly in a greener future for the district.
The launch took place at Greenham Common where a Council owned building has been the first in a series of six solar panel installations around the district including two local schools.
A Community Municipal Investment (CMI) is a bond or loan mechanism issued by a Council directly to the public. It will be provided in partnership with the ethical online crowdfunding platform Abundance Investment, which is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
The move is a key part of the Council’s new Environment Strategy, and since the launch, local people have been putting their money where they feel it matters.
To date, the CMI has attracted over £345,000 of investment*, showing clearly that even in these difficult times, people in West Berkshire are serious about the Environment and moving the district towards carbon neutrality by 2030.
Sign up to find out more or download an offer document.
*Capital at Risk
 A big thanks to everyone who took part in our Name that Bot Survey!
A whopping 46 percent of you voted for Berkley over Berkshire Bot and Ask Gertrude.
Berkley, an Advice Bot was created by the council in partnership with We Build Bots Ltd (WBB) and has been working with the council's Customer Service Team since April to answer questions and signpost customers on the council's website to the latest Covid-19 information. Find out more about Berkley.
We launched this newsletter to keep you informed about developments in relation to Covid-19. The feeback we've received has been really positive so we're launching new bulletins to keep you updated with other news - including general news and topics such as the environment and our waste and recycling topics. We hope you'll sign up for these too - you can adjust your subscription preferences at any time. You can do by clicking 'Manage Preferences' at the bottom of this email.
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