How the council may be able to help Milton Keynes people and business during the coronavirus outbreak

Milton Keynes Council has prioritised services including waste, highways, child protection, and adult safeguarding services, and is looking at how it can support community organisations.

Council leader Pete Marland told the full council on Wednesday that “plans are being drawn up for us to be proactive in our contact with the very many people we know – like the 2,000 or so children in need in Milton Keynes.

“Adult services for example will be contacting those people we work with to see if any extra support is needed at this difficult time.”

Cllr Marland (Lab, Wolverton) said they are looking very closely at “how we can assist with food poverty”. He added that the council has been in discussion with the MK Food Bank about how we can extend their service.

“We should note that services such as this will face significant disruption to their normal business model and we are working to help understand and overcome that.

“A particular issue for us all will come when schools close on Friday in how we can best support the 12 per cent of children who get free school meals and other families who might be struggling.”

The council is also offering some of its employees in “non essential areas” who could be redeployed, including to MK Hospital.

The council is looking to “safely harness” all the goodwill that Milton Keynes is showing.

“We have offered to deploy MK Council colleagues to help local organisations like Community Action MK to play a role in connecting people who want to help with local groups and clubs.”

The council is working with Community Action MK on an emergency appeal and a way of distributing money to help groups to get involved. It has £50,000 as a first step.

The council is also looking at how it can help businesses, and Cllr Marland will be giving a live stream briefing on Facebook from 2pm tomorrow (Friday, March 20) at https://facebook.com/MKCouncil1/“This will provide details of how the council is responding together with information about the support that is available locally and nationally,” he said. “We will aim to establish a single point of contact for all covid-19 related business enquiries in the next week.”

The meeting also heard that the council wants to help businesses in its supply chain to survive the next few months. This could include making reduced payments to home to school transport firms that may otherwise have no income.

For individuals, too, Cllr Marland said “we will ensure people who get into hardship, if they are our tenants, because of this crisis, will not face eviction”.

“We will do all we can for individuals.”

More details will be available next week, he said.