Changelog

Wigan Council's main contact page carries no phone number at all — it is a list of links to online forms, and the service numbers sit on pages it does not link to. Report It & Who to Call now carries them: council tax on 01942 489001, benefits and Council Tax Reduction on 01942 489002, welfare support and the Crisis and Resilience Fund on 01942 705221, and the council's WhatsApp channel on 01942 404977, answered weekdays from 9am to 4pm. The contact centre number is unchanged on 01942 404364.

Wigan Council lists its council tax discounts on one page, and its 25% discount on another, described as being for people who live alone. Those two pages together are the answer for a lot of households, and joining them up is fiddly — being disregarded is not the same as getting a discount, and the discount follows from how many adults are left counted. The new page does that sum. You say how many adults live in your home and whether any of them is a student, an apprentice, a carer, severely mentally impaired or one of the other groups the council does not count, and it tells you what that means — including the case a lot of people miss, where two adults become one because one of them is not counted, and a quarter comes off the bill. Children under 18 never count at all. It also says when a home is charged more, because that is the honest other half. An empty, unfurnished home in Wigan is charged double after a year and four times over after ten, and a second home has been charged double since April 2025. Nothing you pick is saved or sent anywhere, and the page does not decide anything — the council does. Every relief links to the council's own form.

Report It & Who to Call listed 01942 489004 for the council contact centre; the council's own page gives 01942 404364. Its council tax and bins links, and the bins link on the bin page, had all gone to 404s and now point at the right pages.

From 31 March 2026 councils across England have had to collect food waste every week, and the coverage of it left Wigan residents with a fair question. Wigan Borough Council is one of thirty authorities named in the regulations as holding a transitional arrangement, running to 1 April 2040, so the duty does not apply here yet — food waste stays in the fortnightly green bin. The bin page now says this, with the source.

Pick how long you're staying and where you're headed, and it ranks the town-centre car parks by what they actually cost. Every council car park is free all day on Saturday and Sunday; the Grand Arcade, which APCOA runs, charges every day. On a weekday the same eight hours costs £3.00 at Trencherfield Mill, Sovereign Road or Haig Street and £10.00 at Water Street, Mona Street or Harrogate Street.

Search any café, chippy, takeaway, pub, shop, school kitchen or care home in Wigan and see its official rating and the date it was inspected, read straight from the Food Standards Agency's register. The page also shows how the borough as a whole looks: 1,250 of the 2,328 rated places hold a 5, and takeaways sit well below that at 27%.

See where the Bee Network buses through Wigan are right now — how far away each one is and which way it's heading, straight from the buses' own feed. Covers the main routes to Leigh, Bolton, Standish and the Infirmary, Kitt Green, St Helens and Horwich. No app, no sign-in.

A colored-pencil drawing of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Wigan Pier — the brick warehouses and the old iron coal-tippler beside the towpath, with a mill chimney on the skyline.

Wigan is live. Five tools to start, built from what the town actually looks up and complains about: - **What's My Council Tax?** — pick your band for this year's bill, split between Wigan Council and the Greater Manchester precepts, with the Haigh and Shevington parish precepts. - **Which Bin This Week?** — the four bins, what goes in each, and how the two-week and three-week cycles work, with a live check for bank-holiday weeks. For your exact day, it sends you to the council's address checker. - **Report It & Who to Call** — potholes, fly-tipping, street lights, the council, the hospitals and the buses, with the right link or number for each. - **Community Picks** — the best pie, chippy, Sunday lunch, matchday pint and walks, answered by the people who live here. Sign in to add yours. - **Flood Watch** — live Environment Agency warnings and the River Douglas level, in plain words. More to come — a parking-cost compare and a matchday board are next on the list.