Place Partnership: Wigan

Place Partner Mission

Since 2018 Wigan have been part of Greater Manchester’s Place Partnership with Sport England to build healthier, more active communities.

The partnership aims to reduce inactivity and health inequalities. To do this we take a place-based, approach that brings together people, communities, and organisations to create sustainable solutions to inactivity.

Key learnings (2019-24)

Wigan have seen considerable progress since the place partners inception in 2018, with a  particular acceleration from 2021. This was in part due to the Wigan Leisure services (Be Well) coming back under council control leading to greater collaboration within the system. This change in 2021 led to Wigan refocusing their ambitions. A few of Wigan’s key learnings in this time period are listed below.

Heath & wellbeing services

As identified above a key point of change was the Be Well services coming back under council control. This led to previously existing barriers and silos being broken down. Allowing for more collaboration between teams in the council especially between Be Well services and public health.

With Be Well back in house the team was then restructured into Neighbourhood Teams. This restructuring aimed to create a culture and system that was driven by local resident need. Upskilling was provided to over 100 frontline staff encouraging partnership working across sectors and organisations.

Another positive from the new joined up approach and restructured team was how quickly the system could respond to local need. This test and learn approach can be seen with Leigh Youth hub. Within six months of youth engagement the hub opened its doors. With the youth hub providing a space for Holiday Activity Funds programmes, employment skills, and bike libraries as well as a safe space for local young people.

Pivot to Active wellbeing

One key pillar of Wigan’s place partner work has been their Pivot to Wellness approach (link to pivot page). This has helped reinvent and reposition the leisure sector in the borough. This has been achieved through building greater connections between leisure assets and healthcare in the borough. With leisure now taking a more active role in community health building.

One example of the Pivot work in Wigan is through health roadshows. This is where leisure centres have hosted health and wellbeing open days allowing residents to have drop in health appointments. To hear more about the roadshows, and the impact they can have on a community please see the video below (insert pivot video)

The success of these roadshows has led to Wigan securing funding to create permanent 5 permanent pivot rooms at one leisure centre. This will enable to leisure centre to widen its offer and have dedicated health spaces.

Thank you Wigan's place partnership team for providing this video

VCFSE collaboration

Wigan is in a unique position of not having a Local infrastructure organisation (LIO) to support their VCFSE sector. Therefore one focus for the place partner work was to strengthen relationship and connections both with, and between organisations in the VCFSE sector. This has predominantly taken the form of community health building.

This approach has been spearhead by Groundwork, and has aimed to create a blueprint for VCFSE sector to play an active role in improve mental and physical health and wellbeing in Wigan. One area of this work has been relationship and network building, to ensure a more connected VCFSE sector and current offer.  This focus on relationship building has led to a greater understanding of training need within the sector. Which has allowed to team to design an offer to support local organisations become part of the social prescribing pathway. 

GM Moving Podcast

Wigan's place partners work was the focus of the third episode of Series 2 of The GM Moving Podcast, released on Thursday 25 August 2022. 

"For me it's the frustrations that Wigan was in a good place. We had the deal, we'd had all the networks, we had the steering group, everything was there."

Eve is joined at the Manchester Central Library by Chris Essex-Crosby, from Inspiring healthy lifestyles in Wigan, and Nicole McKeating-Jones, the GM Local Pilot Network Lead. Hear how everyone in Wigan is encouraged to play a role to design moving back into everyday life.

Full transcript for the episode can be found here.

Listen to the podcast below, or your usual podcast platform. 

Click here to read about Wigan's deepening plans (2025-28)