Oldham CouncilWorking for a co-operative borough

Oldham Council has quietly rolled out a winter support page that bundles every cold-weather service in one place, from gritting routes to emergency heating grants. For residents who usually hunt across different tabs to check if their child's school is shut or if their bin will be collected, the move should shave minutes off each search and, more importantly, flag help they did not know existed.

The page links directly to the warm-home discount, free school meals, and same-day homelessness help. It also lists which roads are treated first when snow falls and how to report a missed gritting run. In previous winters, callers to the town hall switchboard waited up to 18 minutes for that information; the council hopes the new index will cut those calls by a third.

Housing teams have added a parallel set of links for rent arrears, social-housing bids, and rough-sleeper outreach. Staff say the overlap is deliberate: last year, half of the households that asked for heating help also had rent arrears, but the two systems were not connected. Now, a single click moves residents from the winter page to housing support without re-entering their details.

There is no extra money behind the page; it is simply a reorganisation of existing pages. Critics on the cross-party scrutiny board warn that if benefit processing times stay at 34 days, the warm words will feel hollow. Officers have promised to publish monthly dashboard figures showing how many grants were paid within seven days, starting in March.