 Vote in Christmas window display contests
Online public voting for our first ‘Best Dressed Christmas Window’ competition is now open.
You can select your favourite festive window displays in Twyford village centre, as well as Wokingham and Woodley town centres on our Engage website.
A total of 37 businesses, ranging from a variety of retail shops, pubs to estate agents, have entered the competition. View the displays on the voting page.
Awards will go to the businesses with the most votes in each area. Voting will close on 11 December at 5pm, with results announced on Friday 15 December.
 School and community uses agreed for St Crispin’s
St Crispin’s Leisure Centre will be reinvigorated for education and community use.
Usage of the facility in Wokingham was declining since the Covid-19 pandemic and the opening of Wokingham Leisure Centre at Carnival Hub so it was becoming unviable.
It will now be repurposed to provide much-needed extra school places but will continue to serve residents and community groups too.
Subject to legal agreement, the centre will be transferred through a lease arrangement to the Circle Trust, which runs St Crispin’s School, to help it add 55 more places in Year 7 next year and beyond.
It will partly convert the centre into classrooms but has committed to keep community use, including sports like squash, outside school hours. It will work with Places Leisure, which runs our leisure centres.
This follows our consultation which highlighted the importance of keeping community and some sporting use. We’d like to thank everyone who gave their views.
 Greener future with new waste collections
We’re changing rubbish and recycling collections from most households next summer to reduce our environmental impact.
We’ve declared a climate emergency, so these measures will help us do all we can towards becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
The changes should mean we throw away 744 fewer tonnes of rubbish per year, reducing carbon emissions equivalent to about 1,500 households’ annual electricity use.
We currently recycle 54 per cent of domestic waste and the rest is burned for energy or sent to landfill, which is above the national average but we need to improve.
The Government expects us to reach 65 per cent by 2035, as recycling produces fewer emissions than processing rubbish, and could fine us if we fail.
Most English councils have successfully adopted similar collections and they should also save more than £1 million a year, helping us face unprecedented financial pressures.
Find out more and get regular update by signing up to our fortnightly Rubbish and Recyling newsletter.
 Plans submitted for facilities in new communities
New applications for major new facilities in Arborfield and Shinfield have been submitted to us.
We’ve got a summary of the plans in our latest community newsletters for the areas. They also set out how to feedback on the plans. Find out more on:
 Congratulations to our award-winning tenants
Congratulations are due to our tenant volunteers after their input and impact was recognised at this year's Affordable Housing Awards.
Tenant volunteers form an integral part of our Tenant and Landlord Improvement Panel (TLIP) and wrote the Tenant Charter, which placed top in the ‘Excellence in Community-led Decision Making’ category.
The volunteers are all our tenants and are committed to improving the communities they live in, reducing stigma of being a council tenant and being involved at all levels including housing service contract management and staff appointments.
Alongside the tenant volunteers, TLIP includes council staff, councillors and the voluntary sector. Set up in the early 2000s, the partnership ensures tenants are part of decision making and have a voice in the services their landlord provides, ensuring improvements are identified, developed and implemented.
What you might have missed
- A builder from Arborfield has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for trading standards offences. He was prosecuted following an investigation by our Shared Trading Standards Service. The offender dishonestly exploited an extremely vulnerable elderly couple, aged 91 and 89, who paid the defendant in excess of £43,500 for works they had not commissioned
- If you live around Finchampstead, Crowthorne and Wokingham Without – remember SGN begins work on Nine Mile Ride to replace gas pipes this week
- With the colder weather now here, you can check our winter service plan, which sets out how and when we grit the borough’s roads when it’s cold, as well as the 47 salt bins we keep topped up
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Check our jobs board for our latest vacancies
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