From One Local to Another: supporting local government

Brigid Withers is Redvespa's Wellington Client Relationship Manager and an avid supporter of local government, government procurement, and rural riparian waterways.‍

As I write this, we are in the wake of local elections, which I have been following with real interest. I am always surprised when others don’t share this interest - in the last local elections the final percentage of eligible voters who participated stood at 40% - it looks like it might be lower this time round. 

It’s an interesting statistic, given that your local council is the political body likely to have the largest impact on your day-to-day life, including the state of the roads you drive on, the quality and quantity of local public amenities available to you, the rates you pay, how and when your rubbish is collected and probably most importantly at the moment, how water will be made available to you and your family in the future. 

Over the years at Redvespa, we have worked alongside many local councils behind the scenes to support the improvement of the services they provide and how they provide them, so I have a good idea of the hard mahi that goes into some of the seemingly invisible services that make our day to day life that much smoother. 

We have provided business analysis on a multitude of these services, helping councils to understand in detail how they currently work, how they should work, and what to do to bridge that gap. We have supported overhauls of rubbish and recycling programmes, improvements of digital systems that manage property and rates, re-design of operating models to support improved iwi engagement and maori outcomes as well as supporting central government agencies engagement with local councils. 

The key commonality across all this work, is the highly-skilled, deeply-invested, and capable people from local councils we have worked to support. Their passion to bring about positive change for their communities is infectious, and it has become our passion too. 

Redvespa offers a different type of consultancy support to local councils, and it starts with a respect for the deep subject matter expertise that Mayors, councillors, and council staff have of the unique needs of their region and ratepayers. Our aim is to augment that expertise with our own - robust and impartial business analysis to support high quality decision making, without taking that decision making out of local hands. Engaging us is a way of quickly bringing in expert capacity in business change and transformation to boost the capability of your permanent  council team during times of change, while still steering the ship. 

We are a local company ourselves, with offices in Wellington, Auckland, and Christchurch, with our owners residing in Wellington. The choices made now become the legacy of the current council, and with aging infrastructure at a critical point across the country, one that will impact all our futures. Across Redvespa, our staff are engaged members of their local communities, volunteering for many causes, active users of libraries and swimming pools, licence-paying dog owners. In our personal lives, we take pride in our connection to these places. In our work, we love contributing to projects which have a widespread impact. 

At Redvespa we love to see potential unleashed, and we’ve got a track record of helping councils across New Zealand do just that. As new councils bed in and look ahead to supporting the future of their communities, we’re onboard and ready to unleash potential and make an impact.