Leader of the Council Councillor Peter Smith Lord Smith of Leigh

Town Hall, Library Street, Wigan, WN1 1YN Tel: 01942 827001 Email: [email protected] www.wigan.gov.uk

Date: 15th July 2014

UNISDR, Palais des Nations, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland.

Dear Sirs,

On behalf of Wigan Metropolitan Borough, it is my pleasure to submit this application to become a participating member of the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) campaign; ‘Making Cities Resilient: My City is Getting Ready’.

Wigan is located at the heart of the north-west of . It covers an area of 200 square miles with contrasting vibrant urban centres and beautiful rural areas. With a multicultural population of 320,000 people living in the Borough, along with a thriving business community, it is both a home and place of work that people can be proud of.

We are committed to becoming a strong advocate for the resilient cities campaign, driving forward work locally to ensure Wigan is resilient. For example, our corporate strategy has three core priorities:

Confident Places - An attractive, accessible and lively borough, with a prosperous economy as the location of choice for investment Confident People - Improving life opportunities and independence, making sure people feel safe and supported in their communities; helping people to stay healthy longer Confident Council - Focusing resources towards early intervention and prevention to achieve more for less

These ambitions are all underpinned by work to ensure that Wigan is a sustainable, resilient place; one in which people can live and invest with confidence.

Our Local Plan Core Strategy looks forward to 2026. It sets out Wigan’s strategic goals for the regeneration of our communities, addressing the social, environmental and economic

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challenges the Borough faces. Our vision is about connecting people to opportunities. This involves connecting people to jobs, to education and training, to decent and affordable housing, to leisure and recreation, to our town and local centres, to neighbouring places, to our extensive greenspaces, to better health care, to life chances, and to each other.

Our plan aims to:

• Create a thriving and prosperous Borough which capitalises on its strategic location including motorway networks, the West Coast mainline and proximity to the and city regions and their assets. • Develop a countryside in the centre of the Borough, Greenheart, through enhancing and linking existing public open spaces. • Ensure that our towns are vital and vibrant town centres. • Improve the supply of accessible and quality job and education opportunities. • Improve the supply of good quality housing across the borough to ensure a balanced housing market offer and choice, and improve access to affordable housing. • Ensure new development provides a catalyst to uplift communities traditionally suffering from social, economic and environmental deprivation. • Improve the ease and attractiveness of travelling within the Borough and outside of it to neighbouring places. • Improve the quality of our built and natural environment to help change the image and perception of the Borough. • Help people respond to the challenges of climate change.

Completing the Making Cities Resilient self-assessment tool to explore Wigan’s resilience against the ten essential guidelines, has enabled us to identify a wide range of case studies demonstrating Wigan’s commitment to developing and maintaining resilient and sustainable communities. For example, our Decentralised Energy Study has informed and justified our carbon reduction framework, helping us to identify opportunities to increase our generation of renewable and low carbon energy to 150 megawatts by 2026.

Our future is closely connected to Greater Manchester’s strategic ambitions. The Greater Manchester Strategy sets out a clear and ambitious growth agenda for the Region. This will ensure that, together with the other nine Boroughs in Greater Manchester, we create the conditions for growth by repositioning Greater Manchester within changing global markets as a place in which to invest, do business, live and visit.

Wigan, as one of the ten local authorities within the Greater Manchester region, is fully committed to working within wider partnerships and to collaboration throughout the region. Working in partnerships enables us to build on our existing strengths and to lead further improvements in areas such as planning and development; climate change adaptation; emergency preparedness and emergency response. These will secure the long term social and economic wellbeing of Greater Manchester. The Greater Manchester Resilience Forum and Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA) are just some examples of Wigan’s involvement in partnerships across a wide range of resilience agendas.

We view it as our responsibility to share knowledge, skills and experience wherever possible. This is one reason why we are excited about working with the other 9 authorities

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within AGMA and with cities across the globe to share our understanding and experience of resilience within the Making Cities Resilient campaign. We also look forward to learning from others.

Thank you for considering our application.

Yours faithfully,

Peter R.C.Smith Leader of the Council