Transcript

Transcript

on the Council website in accordance with the webcasting protocols in the Council's Constitution. So if we can get going that would be great. Welcome to this multi-location meeting of the Economy and Culture Scrutiny Committee. Can we make sure your mobile phones are either on silent or switched off? For those of you who are attending remotely, and I've got the Council of Brown Reckless, the Council of Burke and the Councillor Schimman on that list. Obviously, only use your press-to-talk button when you wish to speak, but please wait until I call on you. When the press-to-talk button is read, your microphone is live, and once you've finished speaking, obviously, push the press-to-talk button again to deactivate your microphone, and obviously, you don't use the chat facility. Obviously, people in the room today, can you make sure that your microphone is a consistent read before you start speaking into it, otherwise, it won't be captured on the recording. So I've only got one apology from Councillor Thomson. I don't understand. Zach is doing his studies, so a very good look to our youth rep, Zach. Item number two, Declaration of Interest for members. I advise members they have a responsibility in accordance with part three of the members code of conduct within the Council's constitution to notify at the start of the meeting. In general terms, whether they have an interest in any of the items on today's agenda and the declaration form must be completed for all declared interests. At the start of the item, the interest should be fully declared, specifying whether it's a personal or prejudicial interest, if the latter the member must leave the room, if the former day may stay and speak. Jackie, you are... I did. I'm not sure if this is an interest or not, but my son used the services of, is it, into work, and got a job through that, so I don't know if that's... I'm not sure that's a prejudicial interest, but thanks for noting it. Okay, anyone else? Let's move on to our first proper bit of agenda, item three, which is the GLL contract and monitoring and audit wells as well. So, as I said, it's got two elements to it, contract monitoring, which will take first, and then the audit well stuff afterwards. And obviously, that's the scrutinise, the progress in delivering the legislature center management partnership between the council and GLL, and then to scrutinise progress in addressing the recommendations from audit wells. Because we have confidential items in this as part of Appendix A, that part for will be in our closed session, and obviously all our members will be fully open with what that means. So, to assist our scrutiny, can I welcome online Councillor Birk, who's the cabinet member, Chris Haptilled, who's the OM for Culture and Venues, Sarah Stork, who's the client manager, John Magment, who's the OM for Parks and Harbour Authority, and for GLL, we have Joanne Smith, who's the Legislative Centre Manager, and Jason Curtis, who's the Head of Service and National Membership Manager. Okay. Sorry, I do apologise. Jen, do you want to come in? Also. Thank you. Katrina. Can you hear me? Yes. Can you hear me? Thank you. I just want to create, we haven't got the agenda item of approving the minutes from the last meeting, and I thought that was something we ordinarily did, and why we haven't done that. So, the meeting's for the last, the minutes, sorry, for the last meeting. Yes, normally it's, I thought it was a standard agenda item to approve the minutes from the last meeting. Yeah. And so, I just wonder that's not there. Yeah, the minutes from the last meeting will need to go forward to the meeting made, and not available for the last meeting, partly because some members who we asked to view those minutes haven't responded to it, so they haven't been able to be available for all the members. Thank you for clarifying. Just to be clear that I have looked at the minutes that Andrew had been circulated, and I wanted to say thank you, Tanger, for doing that, and go to the invited head of the meeting, and that's really appreciated, and I don't have any comments on what she's drafted. I'm very happy with how she's written the minutes, so thank you very much. Okay, I mean, they'll come to us formally for the May meeting anyway. Let's start with Councillor BOURKE. Would you like to make a statement? Hello, thank you, Chair. Members will be aware of the challenging circumstances that face the leisure industry, as we continue to face pressures because of the pandemic and ongoing advising each of the costs. While some time years remain, I'm pleased with the trajectory of the Councillor's partnership with GLL, and the results achieved in continuing to provide leisure services and opportunities to communities across Cardiff. The services provided at our facilities are critical to the health of our being against a challenging backdrop we've been able to sustain those across Cardiff. I believe that Jason and Joanne have prepared a presentation that will focus on the performance for 2023/2024 for GLL, including membership, usage and participation data during comparisons from previous periods. We've already lucky that a transformational plan has been developed to support service delivery improvements and financial performance, and this presentation will highlight examples to evidence and set out the financial forecast. I've said that we've been lucky. We haven't been lucky. It's been turned into the hard work of Council officers and GLL to ensure that this has worked, and it's worked well. The second presentation, I believe, will be delivered by Chris and Sarah, updating the committee on the progress made against the recommendations made by what it was, and the leisure services followed will be in October 2022. Once in the committee, the note that one of the recommendations was to explore alternative service delivery options in the event of current road trip staling, and this exercise has been completed independently and the outcomes will be presented. I'm grateful for the committee's continued oversight of the matters that will be detailed in the two reports of the two presentations, so I think I'm handing over to Jason and Joanne in the first instance. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you in advance for your time today. As a reference, my name is Jason Curtis, and I'm the Head of Service for GLL. Next to me is Joanne Smith, who's the partnership manager for GLL in Cardiff. We've got a few slides to take you through today. We'll be happy to take questions either during the presentation or at the end, which are their suits you all based on the time we have. Jo will be starting off shortly by talking us through some of the key work undertaken in the last 12 months. We will be grouping these under our six key value headings, which are a partner of choice, customers and communities at our heart, respecting the planet, tapping health inequalities, more than a job and a better way of doing business. Thank you, Jason. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to start with our partner of choice. On the screen, obviously, you can see some quite a few different pictures of the current partners that we work with, the Israelian selection, and there are more partners, but I'm just going to pick out a couple from the screen. The earth are our apprentice provider, so we currently have five people who have just recently completed an 18-month apprenticeship in lifeguard in swim teaching and group fitness instruction. We also have the NHS, which is a really big partner with us now, and that's continuing to grow. We currently have 1,600 members on an NHS and GP referral membership, and we work in very closely with a number of different areas with end departments from the NHS, such as cancer rehabilitation, force prevention, managed backs, escape pains. These groups come into our facilities on a weekly basis. They previously would have gone into local hospitals for their recovery. They come into the leisure centre, and we then provide pathway classes for them, which they probably would never have had after going into a hospital. They would have done a six-week rehabilitation program and then it would have finished, so it's working really, really well. We've also had the opportunity to train our staff alongside the NHS, so they support delivery of the initial program, and then they follow on the delivery pathway classes, which again, the customers are used to seeing that person. They then naturally then migrate into those new classes. We also work with Trans Aid Company. They have a monthly session at Main D. There's 50-60 people attend that monthly session where they have exclusive use of the facility at Main D. We also work closely with the Welsh Government. They provide many for free swimming initiative and the active leisure scheme, which again forms part of the pathway classes out of the NHS and the GP referral program. Moving on to the next slide. Customers and communities at our heart, so it's not actually on the slide, but talking about social value and the value that being healthy and well-being gives back to the community. For quarter four, which is just from January to March of this year, the social value per person is 90 pounds, and it started at the beginning of last year, so quarter when it started at 80 pounds. Breaking that down into health, there's 37,000 people have improved their physical and mental health, reducing the pressures on the health and social care system. We've also got students, so 2,300 students achieved greater academic success and higher starting salaries just by being active in the community. Then staying on the slide and looking at the different partners that we're working with. The GLR Sports Foundation, we've currently gone through an application process which started in December of last year and closed in February where local athletes are able to apply for support, both monetary and funding training using our facilities. We've got 67 athletes that have won those awards and we've got a ceremony for those in June. We also do a monthly aqua chat, so after our aqua aerobics classes which are really busy and fully attended in all of our facilities, we invite the customers to remain behind afterwards. They have coffee, cakes and a chat is a real social element which is now being spread out across all of our facilities that provide aqua aerobics. The feedback we have from that is really good. We also have had quite a bit of TV coverage. One of our colleagues from Western Ledger Centre was on the one show with the swimmer Ellie Simmons where we were highlighting the costs of utilities and how in some areas of Wales facilities have actually closed. We were lucky we were able to lower temperatures, access funding for pool covers so that we were able to keep our swim pools open but we're continually trying to highlight the difficult situation that we're facing. We were also on sharp end and we've done recently some filming with our escape pain program as being on ITV. We're also looking at recently the five fighters did a firefighter for a day out in Eastern Ledger Centre trying to combat anti-social behaviour so they gave the local children an opportunity to learn what firefighting is and it was great. They all had uniform on, it was really nice to see. And then moving on to our next value so respect in the planet. So as I said our utility costs obviously continue to be an issue for us so we've lowered our pool temperatures, we've lowered our air temperatures, we've got obviously we're coming into force now with the new recycling laws which are coming across Wales at the beginning of this month. We're looking at our CO2 reduction and we've got currently working through with the council have hopefully been getting solar panels on all of the rules of our leisure facilities and we've got some spend to save projects where we've got all our lighting is now LED and all our pools have got pool covers. Tackling health inequalities then so on there we've got a number of different activities that we offer so walking foot where we started off in one facility we've now got that across four of our facilities. It tends to be old people but it's a real mix of both male and female which is great to see and we're doing some inter-centre competitions for them as well which is really nice. And Penn Twin and Western Ledger Centre Host hosted the wheelchair rugby they've hosted that twice recently a couple of weeks ago and back in September of last year. Our senior hub morning which we've started at Lanishin is basically it's a two hour program of opportunities to come in they can do bowling and pickleball which is something new we've introduced badminton they can play games such as scrabble they can play cards they have coffee it's a real social element and our staff get really involved with as well they're quite competitive with playing table tennis and things but that's working really well. And very recently we've been running women's only swimming sessions for quite some time in western and star hub but we've recently introduced a men and boys swim only session which again is going really well. More than a job then so this is working with our colleagues so I've already spoken about the apprenticeship where we've trained five staff up with a variety of qualifications and we host quarterly employee forums where we ask a representative from our facilities to meet with myself and bring to the table anything that they want us to try and help them support if there's issues that they're having trouble obviously getting through their site level we can support with that and any opportunities of any social events that they'd like to do it's just an opportunity for them to meet with myself and highlight anything that they'd like to bring up. Gee allows the company at the end of last year we're awarded the IIP Gold status we're also a living wage employer we hand out employee of the month award to cross all our facilities and we also support that with a gift card so obviously it's a nice thing and nice to do just as a bit of a give back to our staff and we recently hosted our first ever duty manager forum so we've got 20 duty managers across our sites we've got them all together for a four hour workshop and the first one was really finding out how they want to take that forward because you want them to get the best from it and then our next one is now due at the end of July and then moving on to the better way of doing business I'm going to hand back to Jason and you'll go into this in a bit more detail thank you. The tables on the screen are in the paps if you're if you're viewing our tablet just show the membership numbers at the end of March 24 so the top table shows a comparison between March 23 to March 24 so it's been a positive 12 months membership heads have gone forward nearly 16 percent which is nearly 1,300 additional members across the venues which is which is obviously an incredible positive move probably a couple percent higher than the you know the industry trend or certainly the GLL trend across the same 12 months we're still around 90 percent of the 2019 figure but obviously as you can see again from the tables at the on the bottom there you know eastern is stiffantly higher stars you know is moved forward western is higher I think again I've referenced this previously it's clinician and main day the two that have you know the farthest behind where they were 2019 largely due to new facilities new competition but again if you look at the top table you can see they have both gone for significantly in the last 12 months so hopefully we are starting to move that forward win you know win members back win loyalty back and obviously hopefully we can then retain them by the service that we continue to provide next table just gives a little bit of a break down really in terms of those memberships and I think the key that I was trying to show on these was that 50 percent of our membership base of paying a discounted price or a subsidized price which obviously would cover a GP referral corporates, concessions, students, juniors, disability members and cares obviously these sectors of the community are part of our key values as Joe's just gone through and they're probably not that we widely catered for by the by the private student sector so it's a real positive in terms of the numbers that where we're targeting wireless schemes and the price and policies that we have in place. Again just a little bit more of a breakdown in some of the demographics so 50 percent of the members of female we got a real fair spread they've got a middle table there shows a spread of members across the age groups the highest spike is at age 20 to 24 which is 11 percent but again a lot of the key work that we've done via the senior demographic means that we've now got 21 percent of our members are over the age of 60 which again is a real positive move in terms of keeping people active and again it's part of the key strategies that we have moving forward. We've also got a breakdown in the bottom right table there and again I won't go into a great detail but it's a breakdown of customers by customer persona which are based on experience profiling the reason you know and we would use that look at our marketing strategies what the demographic is as an example some of the higher elements there in terms of our demographic would be educated young people that are privately renting another one would be its families with limited resources and limited budgets so again it helps us understand the markets that we're working to and you know the strategies we need and the programming and price and policies that we need to try and continue to get people back into these centers and keep them active. Next slide. Again so this is swim school numbers so this is swimming lesson numbers it's not school swimming it's people that are having swimming lessons with us across the across the centers so again the bottom table shows the position against 2019 so we're still hired and we were in 2019 but we have done slightly backwards over the last 12 months eastern star and western in particular again you know there's other competition and other polls that delivering swimming lessons so it's something that we are focusing on at the moment you know we're putting together own strategies in terms of how we turn that round we're also looking at working closely with council and council partners in terms of trying to target those on low incomes and those on concessionaries that really trying you know if we have got gaps in that swimming school hey we're trying to fill it the people can't afford to pay the full price we do have a concessionary price which is a 25% discount but if that isn't if it isn't working if that isn't getting people into the buildings hey we really target certain groups to kind of get them in and offer a greater discount again by you know client partners and social prescribers so that's the kind of plan with that one moving forward again you know a small amount of breakdown again it's obviously junior lessons so it's no surprise that the spike is the younger age group generally the peak is between the ages of 8 and 12 17% of the current take up is on concessions and again that's an element that we believe can be can be higher and we like to kind of you know to work on that and again that's the plan for the next 12 months is how we can target those groups and try and show they have access to to polls and the lifelong skill obviously learning to swim. Again so these tables just show the usage comparisons from 2019 all the way up to you know last financial year 23 24 positive news again is that we're 7% up on usage you know all centers are up on where they were over the last 12 months and we're also largely you know overall we're back in where we were in 2019 two centers are slightly down clinician mainly sorry western slightly down as well but you know overall we're up and I said the the usage for places like clinician mainly although the membership basis has dropped off a lot the usage is actually almost close to where it was in 2019 so we are still driving through lots of activity lots of non-member activity are still coming through the audience for either schemes that we're running so the usage is obviously you know is a great indicator in terms of how we're doing right and just being reliant on you know full paying members we are there for community you know they don't have to be paying it you know full membership is there as an option for anyone so the usage is a key demographic for us and again it's showing all the right movements that we would like again these are just a couple of tables really just kind of show in some of the the latest software that we have that allows us to analyze usage patterns to allow us to make you know decisions in terms of programming business decisions the table on the left is just a it's an overview of the Cardiff centers and obviously days of the weeks and times the darker the color the you know the more activity happening so again it highlights when we're at busiest when we've got gaps when we can try and you know review the programs if there aren't people coming in why not what do we do differently so again I'm not going to go into all the details of it but it's really trying to show that we understand what we're trying to do we understand where we need to spread the activity usage look at the programming to make sure that you know those times all become you know a darker green color and obviously the table on the right is just showing the most popular you know ten activities over the last three months the most you know the biggest ones they are swim for fitness gym and swim for all and then a lot of exercise classes are within that as well so again we have all the information it's just now trying to use that to tailor the programs again for the next 12 months to continue to get the growth that we've been receiving you know in the previous 12 months. Okay so this slide just shows the the image is a heat map for where our business is coming from across Cardiff I won't embarrass myself I'm trying to say any of the places on the screen I did practice with Joe earlier on but he can get one of them right so I'm gonna I'll stick to the fact that's a map and you know usage across Cardiff so this is a partnership level hence obviously it's called a widespread of weather members coming from but again we can get this up and we can review this by our center level we don't understand where we're having good penetration where we're not it helps us look at where we can target marketing to or certain areas or groups that aren't using the buildings and we can obviously retry and review why you know it's all well and good trying to look at you know customers and where they're coming from but we need to understand why people aren't coming in and obviously non-users are key for us moving forward so that's again that's the basis of what that's trying to show and again something that could be working on over the next 12 months. These are just a few results from the latest annual user survey we did so it was 1500 respondents so it's a reasonable size in terms of data majority respondents were over 45 and used during swimming classes the real movements there from 22 to 23 were a big increase in net promoter score so it's gone up to 28.4 percent net promoter score is basically it's a loyalty of customers to a company it's used kind of you know across many industries and it's basically done by asking a simple question you know how likely you to recommend that company you know to a friend or a family member and you score out of 1 to 10 if you score between 9 and 10 you become a promoter 7 and 8 you're passive and if you score 0-6 you're down as a detractor from that company and that's what gives you your average score anything above 0 is generally it seems being good if you get up to 30 percent it's deemed to be great then obviously over 50 percent would be superb so we're on the way it's never moving number but again it's a key kind of indicator for us in terms of customer satisfaction and obviously highway performing and overall customer experience scored 4.1 out of 5 staff scored the highest for us which is 4.3 out of 5 which is always good yeah we're obviously her own as good as a staff that we employ and obviously you know all the stuff that Joe's reference in terms of living wage employer and I IP gold status is the key key behind that so generally it's a positive indicator and things are moving forward and again we hope that continues into the future okay thank you Joanne and Jason will move swiftly on to the questions and let's start with Peter no questions on the non-combidential section chair thank you okay Rodney yeah thank you chair yeah I think one of your slides was talking about yeah customers and communities that are hard and obviously I think that's something that I think we'd all be concerned about in this room so I'm gonna pick up I know there are concerns particularly about community in pension in the net and obviously for a lot of the last four years a lot of the centre if not all of it has been out of use to the residents in the community the pool is still out of use etc and I know some of that's been a not been about decisions by GLL the council you know decided to lease part of the building to to card a frog bay I think that's ending now or it has ended and under our plans has been known out it to refurbish and to refurbish the pool etc but what I suppose is GLL going to do to sort of perhaps give back something to the community I make the community feel that they're doing something you know back out of this and it's going to put them back at the heart and also can you maybe explain what the ongoing plans are for for the pool arrangements whether GLL will be involved in operating the pool because I know there's talk about some of it going to be at least out for us it's swimming lessons and things so I'm not kind of sure about the arrangements and what the involvement is with GLL because I know in the past that GLL felt that it wasn't cost effective to operate the pool and didn't want to be part of that so it has that changed what is likely to be happening going forward I'll take that in a couple of different parts so in terms of the moving forward obviously we're looking at the relaunch of pen twin dry side fading up from June so it's obviously it's open now for sports pool bookings we've got fitness classes that are taking part within we reopening the health and fitness offer in the next few months we're going to be doing a range of open days introducing people back into badminton pickable so again we're working up a complete reopening package in terms of community usage and we'll be doing our own kind of communication consultation in terms of rebuilding that program with the community's input so again we have that ability to there's no point in putting the program back out if it's not going to be used so again we'll be doing open days again that feedback to make sure we build the program not suitable for the community going forward in terms of the pool design or the pool outcome I suppose from our point of view our position is that we believe we're going to be operating the full suite of products that are available at pen twin I haven't seen a final plan yet so I can't tell you exactly what that would be but our intention is to be the provider we've got no intention of you know any third part is you know running from the building but obviously we haven't got to get the offer right and I'll touch on some of the financials later that we've got to make sure that we've got a sustainable business and a sustainable centre going forward but we believe that we will be operating it and less everyone tells me differently than that's the other basis that we're moving forward on before I bring you back in one day I just got a good question one of the elements of the recommendations from the previous student on pen twin was was a connection with swim whales about what that eventual pool design looks like or I just wanted to kind of understand what what conversations had been had with swim whales about the new the new the latest pool design yeah if I can pick that up yeah there's been a series of meetings with swim whales and looking at new initiatives currently I'm not sure if everyone's aware 50% children don't swim go through schools so you know there's a massive opportunity from a safety water safety project as well so they've been engaged looking at new initiatives in terms of clusters throughout the city to maintain and making more affordable in terms of transport but also set at the heart of pen twin the location and the reuse and reactivation of pen twin as that facility looking forward to that kind of pool dimensions and specification probably you know will be the best specification thank you for that welcome back we did have a bit of a power cut so apologies for that but we have had a look around and we have put money in the meter so I'm going to go straight over to Rodney if that's okay to for his supplementary of the apologies for the interruption Rodney yeah that's okay I think that was in your control yeah not a couple of follow-up questions so firstly I think you were talking about doing some engagement work with the community open days etc I suppose I just make a plea can you do what you can to make sure that we make these as involving as possible of the community I know there's been some concerns raised in the community about the way some of the council consultations have been done because they feel they've only been advertised primarily by social media with a few days notice and it's just been a drop in and although there's been an email address provided people have emailed that and not necessarily got a response so it's just making sure that we get proper feedback and a two-way system and making sure that people you know get responded to so they may put forward views that can't be taken up but can they get a response and you know an explanation I think that'll be helpful in just sort of making sure that it is as genuine as possible so I hope you can take that on board and my other question was I suppose when is it you now expect that you will sort of tie up any operational agreements on how it's going to operate presumably the council's got to make some final decisions regarding the refurbishment and finalize those plans and then you know agree with you what the operational arrangements will be going forward so when do you expect that to be sort of sewn up again so yeah in terms of the the first comment then yeah noted taken on board and yes well you know we'll ensure that's done and if there are any we can reach out to yourself there are any kind of groups community groups that we should visit to you know to invite them in then again we've been more than happy to take contacts directly from yourself and then can reject them direct so please you know feed into us you obviously can come in by it right these guys are giving my contact it'll direct that after a after the session but happy to set to liaison on that directly then to in terms of the arrangements yeah obviously we're we're back open now you know in terms of limit opening we're going to be increasing the you know the access over the next few months and obviously once the plans are provided for the poor then we'll then look at the financials you know behind that and work with the council in terms of having a you know an affordable sustainable model but there is no kind of renegotiation as such you know we will be running it will be reopening it's just around you know a battle to make the whole contract sustainable it's not a it's not a pen twin sustainability problem it's a part of leisure portfolio sustainability issue that we're working through with the transformation plan that I'll you know reference later okay I'm going to move on to Katrina online Katrina you dare can you hear me yep great thanks very much chair and thank you to all the officers and people from GLL who are making a leisure centre's work because they are great assets to card us excuse my sort of I'm sort of led to a question which I just my lack of knowledge on this but could be possible to explain the nature of GLL that's involvement is an is GLL a profit making company is GLL a sexually a service provider that's not for profit I just don't understand that and another question I had was I don't think the international pools in here and is that something that GLL also deals with or is that just not something I'm looking at today that's my first question really thank you in terms of the first question so now GLL is a not-for-profit social enterprise so no we're not a private company there is nowhere there's no dividends paid out there's no shareholders so no you know anything that we do is for the good of the communities hence the key values that you know that we work through we're not but if we were making any you know money within a surplus would be in Cardiff we would then be reinvested into Cardiff I can't reinvest at the moment because we haven't got the surplus coming through but that you know that is the basis that we work to that's the model that we work to know it's very much a not-for-profit social enterprise and then the second part of the question is no the international pools is not part of our portfolio hence obviously we're not reporting that today you're also a co-op though aren't you yes workers co-op so obviously staff can have a non-dividend pay and share and you know be decision making into that company so yes thank you so back to you Katrina thank you very much for that um just one thing as well which is I'd love to see um almost more usage of the of our leisure centers because sometimes when I've gone to them they felt a little bit on the quiet side and sometimes that's been at weekends or relatively peak times and if we get that foot full up that's more people getting the sport and that's um obviously more money coming in which is it would be hopefully when when and just I was actually sad and sort of slightly shocked by um I think um what one person at the table um said that 50 percent of school kids don't swim um if that's what I heard and but that's that actually quite sad in me as a mother and I think it's such an important thing that children get to do that and one question I had is um is there more capacity in the pools particularly during the school day which is a sort of I'm guessing an actual low time and could more be done with local schools to get more children in the pools um you know during term time as part of their P curriculum um that's something I'd like to see and then I just another thing I wanted to highlight was my children have in the past done swimming lessons at one of the leisure centers through GLL and the swimming lessons were very good and the coaches were very good so thank you for that um the one observation I had was that the website could have been clearer I think um I just found trying to work out what to do and to book the lessons a bit more complicated than it needed to be and that would put people off I think I also had another experience where um we just wanted to go swimming when we came and I couldn't find the information on the website about when the leisure when the swimming pool was open and whether or not it was a free swim or restricted in some way so um I just wonder if more work could be done on the websites and if that would actually then drive more people coming in and using the facilities so I hand that over to you. Yeah I'm going to take the question in regards to school swimming so um you're right during the day obviously our pools are quieter and recently um swim whales as Chris alluded to earlier um 50% of school children in Cardiff are not swimming and it's it's actually the worst performing council in Wales which saddened me as I agree with you as a merman as a swim in teaching myself I find it quite hard to understand um there's a number of things that swim whales are coordinating with us um the in Cardiff the way school swimming is delivered is slightly different and we have ourselves GLL as a provider we also have the international pool who provide schools swimming lessons to Cardiff schools we also have Cardiff Met and we have the Earth there's four different swim school providers um via and if you're like for the same business and so we're currently all of those providers are sat around the table we had a meeting about three weeks ago in regards to what we can do we we were all agreed that we want to sign up to get the numbers of children in school swimming up um so swim whales and Cardiff Met are actually leading on that again as Chris alluded to we're going to do some trial clusters um to engage with the schools it doesn't help that the curriculum has changed and it no longer states that children have to learn to swim which is how it used to be stated within the curriculum um however that's still that's the same for all of Wales and obviously Cardiff being the worst performing it is not that's not an excuse or a reason as to why so um all of the providers in Cardiff are now around the table to make sure that we get that number from 50 percent up in regards to school swimming and as you say that would then bring income into our facilities at the quieter times during the day okay Chris thank you chair um can i just mirror that um but also make a real critical point it's about water safety as well as teaching swimming to children because there's a big um disparity in terms of non-people swimming but people living in and around water ways um so there's a lot there's quite a big emphasis on working with our partners and collaborations to do with water safety and emergency services which is all part of the you know the mechanism to try and drive people more to swim pools and the last point quickly if i could chair um picking up from the last the conversation i had just before we lost some power apologies i don't think it was me but the the last point working with swim whales was the size of the pool so the pool of pentway and will be 25 meters variable height from deck to 1.6 in depth um and also about 12 meters wide the variability of the height of the pool deck um will help us access and work and collaborate with with the NHS which will open up also pool water therapy arrangements for that sector of the kind of uh district thanks Chris i i didn't know whether Jason or John you wanted to comment on the Katrina's uh feedback on the website yeah thank you uh yep noted um just a couple of comments i suppose really in terms of the the website it is a it's a large website it has obviously covering all of the uh centers that we operate so it's got thousands and thousands of pages uh behind it we are reviewing the whole website at the moment we've just launched a new uh website for our libraries uh library offering so we we do run libraries across numerous partnerships across across London so once that's been rolled out and we're testing at the moment we will be reviewing the whole website for the you know for the leisure side of the service so i think there are improvements to come but obviously we can you know review access review the usage of it at the moment and see if we can make any things clearer but we are uh are aware is in need of an upgrade but it's you know a big piece of work that we're working through at the moment okay uh i'm going to move on to uh john shiman council john shiman online thank you chair um yes so you say you put uh communities at the heart of what you do and recently uh the change has been made at penal and community center to give over the sports hall to uh saw a structure soft pay structure taking it away from those that use it for classes given that those classes were already oversubscribed often um and now have to use smaller facilities a smaller room in place which people have already fed back to me that this means that they are unable to exercise properly in there or they're going to have to cut class sizes um and that also alternatives being offered at further away gyms and leisure centers which will require calf use to get to because they're not accessible by public transport from the panel and area uh given all this i was wondering what uh equalities impact assessments have been done and what to consultation you've done with the local community to see if this is what they wanted because after all you are public uh provider not um as well as this obviously you've got to make money but first and foremost you are there for the communities to give what they need uh yeah thank you um so in terms of as with any displacement for is any always going to be disappointing you know we don't go into these uh you know centers to you know to upset or disappoint the local communities uh i don't believe they were uh particularly well attended um we you know we were looking and as part of the transformation plan and i think we did our references 12 months ago there will need to be changes to the the product mix there will need to be changes to the services that we offer you know we can't continue to run as we were previously you know it isn't a sustainable model so it does mean decisions have got to be be made uh the area that we're talking around so the two court hall at penielown it was the least used of the kind of spaces that we had that would be suitable for this type of development and whilst i think that we probably received somewhere between 15 and 20 uh you know complaints around the arrangements you know we're expecting thousands of new people to be used in that space so yes it's disappointing for elements of the community but there will be people you know young kids you know parents grandparents that will use the new facilities that are provided so it is a difficult balance and again i i appreciate it isn't suitable for everybody but again we did upgrade everybody's membership so we're giving them increased access to other facilities we've tried to reprogram classes at palan where we can in the spaces we have if we haven't got the space we've moved them to the closest center that you know that we can offer at and we continue to offer you know a full class program across the city in terms of consultation the truth is there wasn't a consultation because it wasn't something that was up for a debate in terms of there was no option one or option two i don't believe in doing disingenuous consultation and pretending that i'm going to be able to do something different we have a plan we have to stick to we have a timeline we have to stick to to try and turn the the business around and whilst i accept it will always be popular it is always honest and what i've done is you know we've made honest decisions around what we believe will take you know penny land and the contract forward in terms of sustainability so again we spoke to as many customers as we can face to face we've had those conversations but i fully accept that we're never going to be popular if you're taking something away from a certain group but we do believe that the the usage will be more this isn't just a commercial you know it's going to make you more money more people will be using the center than there was before different demographics so accept but there will be more people using the building and that's how we've got to that decision you stood there John yeah thank you could you possibly provide the percentage of capacity you say that the classes weren't over subscribed so which goes against what i've been hearing from the users in the community so could it be possible to present it to give us these figures just so that we can see how subscribed they were also to the officers what questioning did you do when this came forward because i've been told previously that an officer i don't know who approved these plans so i just want to know if any scrutiny from the officers was done and any questioning as to whether this was the best option for the local community thank you so yeah in terms of the question for myself then we can provide full breakdowns of numbers you know what we've done and you know the expected usage from the new i think what hasn't been asked is obviously the expected new usage from the soft place so we'll supply that as well in terms of you know what it was being used for and what we believe the future usage will be and we yes we can supply that information and we'll give it out to you know to Chris and that can obviously be dispersed as it needs to be yeah if i can answer the second part the approval in terms of funding GLR present their kind of initiatives and their projects moving forward they base it on what has just been explained in terms of the business profiling as well as the usage figures and community usage so that that decision was based on the funding which is part of the capital funding which has been part of the contract in 2016 so that decision effectively to make the service better make the provision better and improve leisure and the the general center was made by the GLR contract but the approval for funding was made by myself i've got a couple of supplementary there on on on top of john's questions if if that's okay and that's you obviously said there's you didn't want to do the consultation in terms of being honest about what what kind of market research did you do to to kind of um base that decision on to make a permanent um soft play area so we've obviously reviewed numerous uh GLL offers we've got you know we put soft plays in i think we did 13 uh last year in various different you know demographics that we can refer back to in terms of their usage and the income they bring in we've also reviewed the author offer of soft plays in and around Cardiff you know we have looked at an area eastern for a project as well but there actually you know the area was was more well used and actually there were more soft plays in that area than there are in Thailand so it's been a mixture of internal review and looking at the external markets as well okay and and just um in terms of the comms then uh because obviously a lot of residents who use Pelaland uh were kind of informed by their uh their yoga instructor shall we say uh what's your thoughts on on how you communicate that with uh with local people uh yeah and i said so well so you know i will defend most of the stuff that we've done and you know sit here and tell you that i you know i believe it's been done in the right way i think it's fair to accept that i believe actually it was a general manager that we sent down to speak to people but the timelines were incredibly tight um the issue was that we had a window of opportunity to get the work completed uh the the next gap really in terms of you know we have a company doing soft play installs for us across the country and we could either do it you know April for a main completion or we would have been missing probably for an ever you know five six months till we would have the opportunity again so again the decision was made that you know financially and to move the contract forward to get it done at the quickest possible time but i said yeah i'm not going to say that we couldn't have given more notice in hindsight yeah if we had more time i would have done okay thanks yes and a quick question for Chris and and that is because obviously it's been on the in discussions between uh GLO uh and the council and it's been on uh on the transformation transformation plan what's your expectation as an officer in terms of how local members ought to be consulted uh as part of what are you know what the community sees as quite a significant transformation again just a mirror what Jason said um the timing could have been better um there would have been um although the project was discussed amongst uh in particular a council work and it's been on transfer transformational plan for over a year um as an opportunity that opportunity arose um i do take on board um you know also the GLO the contract arrangement in terms of what they're engaged to do as well but i do take on board that this was a particular type two and round um council officers uh and staff worked hard to try and um you know try and make this happen as well um understanding the pressures that were on site but what's your expectation as an officer in terms of making sure local members i.e. councillors are aware of what's happening in advance before it happens my expectation moving forward is local members will be totally engaged in that kind of changing product because it's not happening in this case have you uh no yeah okay let's move on then to uh council Jack Jones thank you and thank you for the presentations everyone um i think Pete's more diplomatic than i um i live around pendulan and there was no consultation and there's not an isolated incident of course um not just for leisure but for other facilities as well certainly as a backbencher you don't get to hear quite often what's going on and that's really disappointing because obviously we're supposed to represent the the community if we can um so said my piece on that one um GLO isn't going anywhere it's not leaving Cardiff is it no okay great that's fantastic to hear um one of the things that came out of the presentation is uh statistics about um the makeup of the people who come to the leisure facilities and it was a standard to see it was 87 percent white and i just wondered what is your plan going ahead for engaging other people um of other characteristics of other age groups etc with that that's the first thing i'd also like to know about the men and boys uh swimming sessions um when are they happening where they happening um are they popular etc can i start with that please thank you okay so yeah the men and boys swimming i think has been running for about three or four weeks at star herb in terms of the actual time and day of the program we'd have to come back to you on that because i'm not sure and in terms of your first question so i suppose the first bit would be that would be 87 of those have actually disclosed so it may not be a full eight of that total membership number i appreciate it doesn't change if that's been incredibly high and i suppose the honest answer is the sessions that we're doing in terms of you know meet the PM meet the managers trying to find like you know the programs reaching out to the council in terms of you know uh community groups that we can try and engage with to try about it what we can do differently to bring in those elements of the communities that we're not like i said i think i referenced earlier on that we're really keen to target you know who isn't using us and looking at the the non-users rather than the users so looking at how we can do that previously we've suggested and we've worked in other areas that are working that we've looked at trying to do some non-user surveys and how we can use council departments to reach out to non-users to find out why aren't you using that so that we can do something differently it's a difficult one to do but that's something that would be interested to investigate more um thank you that might be a good way of doing it i don't know if you've seen the consultation for Shelley Gardens that's quite a good practice it might be worth Chris if you if you can share that through you're probably aware of that consultation of what might be available um in GLL um and then uh finally i'm really pleased to hear that the pool is coming back with Pentwin and um that will be fully operational and um there will be um this up and down uh service as well um when are you expecting it to be operational um especially thinking about in that area in particular people don't necessarily have access to a lot of facilities or no facilities and are not going to be in the summer going to be going very far because money is very very tight so if you could give us an indication please thank you yeah if i can answer that counselor uh julms um we're looking at um so i was involved in that engagement uh with look community over the two days um and we're looking at clearly a couple must a couple of milestones a milestone of uh caribou's moving out by june this year and also the following june looking at the contract for the pool and engagement for the whole of the site including water and the drive side activities to be um available from june 2025 okay Helen thank you chair coming back to the question about the uh how many people actually are swimming who are white and who not uh do we actually know what the ratio is between white people and the employee people in carif because is that 80 percent star 80 percent or is it actually not that out of balance when you realize how many people are of ethnic origins in carif i can overlay that for you i haven't got it you know i've got the information for me but i can overlay that in terms of the populations and we can actually see how far out that would make it that be a better judgement i think it's 21 percent in the from the last census thank you thank you so there's a gap whether you want to call it significant or not it's a significant well it's a gap between main usage and um the actual population within within carif we can overlay that and break that down into into more detail and we can share that with you so we can review that fully thank you thank you and i'm missing it i'm very excited at the idea of having a pool that can be used as a therapy pool i gather it's good for people with arthritis so keep keep the good worker and i was also intrigued to hear that you're going to put a wall that will effectively um looks as if it's maybe moving the cafe a little bit from where it is but it's actually acting as an insulation to keep the water warmer so i think that's a very clever thing and well done thank you the thermal qualities of that area that pools on will be increased significantly making them more sustainable with the solar and the ground force heat pumps also okay jane thank you um i noticed the NHS is a big partner do you expect that partnership to grow and is it a financial partnership too thank you yeah so it grows month on month and we're continuing to have um additional classes that we put on we've recently had some funding from the NHS um there's two different departments there's about um 20 000 pounds worth of funding that's come in that comes in and they use that against um hall higher and coaching and as i said earlier there's people coming into our facilities who would never have gone into a leisure center before and that's the the biggest thing for us is those people are coming in they're finishing their six or 10 or 16 week program with the NHS and then we've got the pathways created already they're staying and the good thing as well is when you're new on an NHS program you can see people with six or eight weeks down the line and you can see the progress and you see people like yourself who you wouldn't think you know i'm going to a gym a lot of people wouldn't even walk through the door but when they see people like themselves exercising it's fantastic i would encourage you to come and have a look it is absolutely fantastic the work that we're doing with the NHS and there's so many different departments that are coming on board with us as well okay thanks for that jane can i just check then uh presumably we do have questions on the confidential part yeah okay so let's um let's move into a closed session so we're required to consider the confidential part in a closed session to discuss information deemed exempt in accordance with paragraph 14 and 21 of schedule 12a of the local government act 1972 so um accordingly i moved that committee resolved to exclude the public and press from the meeting at this point uh members can you confirm your agreement with us yep okay let's um go into closed session okay so uh the second part of this then uh is is that we'll start with a presentation uh from uh sera and uh and chris thank you chair we'll try to be as concise as possible uh chris and field operational manager leisure um working with uh john meekman and um sera stork is a client leisure client officer directly involved as well uh without further ado i'll ask um sera to uh to start the slide and to start the presentation um i remember that um thanks chris a lot of this you right has been actually covered but um just looking at some of the challenges that we we have looked at this evening um just a little bit more detail um the current situation at the moment particular swimming pools is that uh swim whales are actually estimating that a third of all swimming pools within whales could close due to the high energy bills as we've just heard the difficulties just then and um as joe alluded to earlier um it's quite sad to hear that some of the pools have actually now closed in the north of whales um and this is all without additional financial support sport england also estimated that more than a thousand swimming pools had closed since 2010 and again this is due to the rising cost of living the worldwide pandemic and as well as the aging facilities where there's no funds to renovate and spent in counts across the local authorities in response to this though the um the central government has launched a swimming pool support fund and this provided a total of 80 million pounds to local authorities in england so it's available in england unfortunately it's not available in whales it's specifically a package for public leisure facilities with swimming pools to support um the ever increasing utilities costs so looking at the um the leisure review the the whales ordered office recommendations were um carried out we worked with a a an independent consultant the sports consultancy and they looked at the a review in two aspects firstly a review of the leisure provision um looking high level analysis of the overall leisure provision in the city and they provided a view as to whether the supply was sufficient to meet the demands of the the communities secondly the leisure management options appraisal was to provide an assessment of the council's existing leisure contract with GLL and give alternative management models in order to identify a contingency option should the contract not be sustainable so the key findings of that review that was carried out 23 to 24 the the main the main aspects were were really positive the swimming provision on the whole assessment factory across the city the health and fitness provision is more than adequate to meet the demands and this is also included including the private gyms and schools swimming pools overall it was quite pleased and to see that Cardiff does compare favorably across these facilities when you're looking at them in comparison to Swansea Newport and Rexxham so the existing contract review the the consultants also had a look across the whole of the contract and they found that the contract with GLL is robust and also offers flexibility within the contract for continuous improvement for the service and provision for GLL to be able to develop service improvements as we've heard this evening the current performance shows a significant deficit this as well remember was carried out in 23 so things have moved on a little bit since then in a more positive line but it is reasonable to assume that this deficit is and sustainable in the long term however we are working with GLL as you've heard and GLL have put together the transformational plan which will significantly improve the quality of provision and reduce that deficit i'll hand it to Chris now thank you Sarah so the management options appraisal set out again i do want to reinforce the fact that this is started eight months ago and it has been significant improvement and agreement on transformational planning for future years also the four management options were considered as being appropriate for the council's ledger portfolio option a continuation about sourcing and the re-tender contract you heard Jason touch on that a little bit earlier on in in the presentation um difficult situation but um you know it would it would effectively be the option a option b bringing back the service back in house um again another difficult situation in terms of resources um and obviously services available option c create a local authority trade-in company tackle at arms length and option d create a new ledger trust during the appraisal for the options it was there was recognition for the transformational plan that i mentioned earlier as a vehicle for improvement sustainability of the contract at that time and i will repeat it was um eight months ago so we've already discussed some of the um you know some of the improvements or initiatives that are already up and running so the management options appraisal basically identifies and analysis shows that option a would deliver the most favorable um financial positions at the council then the option c and d and finally b option a was identified as being the most financially beneficial the simplest and the quickest to implement offering the greatest level of risk transferred and offer the greatest level of protection the services and future budget constraints the difference between option a and b was estimated at that time at a 600 000 pound per annum should the council's existing contract with ghl fail the most appropriate option uh to follow would be to return to the contract um again we've had conversations and this evening we've heard from jason that much work has been done um in terms of working together um moving forward um and again the whole exercise was the very worst case scenario in terms of the option and the last piece there of that particular slide option a would take around 13 months to start the finish uh to implement um just a small update on that the realistic time is approximately 16 months um you know and would rely on um you know quite close working with with the partner existing partner thank you okay um we're going to questions let me start with a quick question that is as part of that all it whales recommendation recommendation six was that um in terms of options appraisal the council needs to provide members with a full breadth of performance and financial information on the different options presented to them to help members make informed decisions and while we're grateful for the slide back that you you presented today um can you assure us that uh we would have that information and that this is going to come back to us uh in in in the reasonably near future uh because i'm not sure that's slide pack would fulfill that recommendation yes certainly um certainly yeah the details will be forwarded on to you guys in terms of the um greater detail um of the different options that are presented and i'll be doing this is just a um a kind of brief overview now and we are that you will come back to committee with the details that we can scrutinize um yes i can come back to committee at the high level though um some of the figures um uh will be presented but the immediate taste in there was that £600,000 um in terms of the option variance okay thanks i like Chris Peter no questions for me chair for him Rodney uh no questions and uh Katrina no questions thank you excellent john shimmin no questions thank you Jackie questions no just one question um you keep mentioning that it was eight months ago so the 600,000 was um sick eight months ago presumably as well so i took the hint that you might have another figure for us um i just wanted the um you to be aware in terms of this meeting of the timescales involved and they could be you know a better position um or more more variance than a 600,000 pound break and report back on a more up-to-date version and when can you do that please um i'll do that as soon as possible we'll re-engage without consulting to try and get those figures turned around as soon as possible okay hello thank you chair i'd like to reinforce what you mentioned about um our six the options appraisals i did actually think that this meeting would be looking very much at audit Wales progress and their recommendations and there was six in all it would be really good if we could have what progress has been made on the recommendations that audit Wales has made please okay um jane no okay uh thank you very very much uh for that uh oh sorry john chair we can provide you with the full report that the consultants have produced on the options appraisal i think that will provide you with great more details on the slides this evening yeah that would be great thank you john and thank you very very much for being here today and answering our questions uh i thought that was a very good frank exchange so obviously we will um be writing to you as part of the way forward so thank you very much for being there today oh kadrina sorry it's all right it's a it's a nice one um something that um myself and other counsellors have been doing it's been raising a queer awareness of the boys for bins campaign and that's uh it's as simple as basically having bins in men's toilets so that men who have got health conditions such as prostate issues have got somewhere they can dispose of um the sanitary pads and things like that um and i've just had a been forwarded an email back from julie sangani counsellor sangani where she said um you know i think she's effectively saying the counsellors would like to get behind that um one way of doing that is highlighting its various partners including in her email gll so if i could take the chance now to highlight that with gll um and if they were able i thought you more information come back to me but to perhaps be able to help support that boys for bins campaign um or or how that may work that was all so thank you thanks for that kadrina um thank you very much for being here um will obviously do the uh changeover now uh right and uh have a good rest of the evening so thank you sorry chair are we having a comfort break just five minute one or yeah let's have a quick uh five-minute comfort break while we do the changeover if that's right but um come back come back quickly before which is the employment services short scrutiny um appendix a sets out the uh the scope of the scrutiny and obviously we're going to have a look at the uh the background and the landscape for the employment services in Cardiff and see how they uh how the three main areas contribute towards the meeting corporate plan and the race equality task force recommendations so the areas are employment services the Cardiff commitment and the corporate apprenticeship and trainee program and obviously information on that is available on appendix B let's start with um oh sorry I do apologize um we're going to start with a uh a presentation from the key pool uh but let's uh let's first of all welcome uh counselor Pete Bradbury cabinet member for tackling poverty uh and supporting uh young people uh Harry Benon who's the ON for advice uh Kelly Osman who's the uh an into the into work manager uh Tracy Thomas who's the chief officer for HR uh and Kenpool who's the head of uh economic development uh and um Vicky Poo who have already mentioned is the acting card commitment partnership manager uh do you want to make a quick statement Peter quick quick statement yeah well yeah thank you for that this is always a pleasure to come back to the economy and culture scrutiny committee committee I served on and appeared it from I mean the GLL item took me back to to nostalgic days but yeah it's um this is a really important and service area that we that you're looking at here and a successful service area one that is helping so many people right across Cardiff and you've just mentioned um the rate of quality task force Pete um 48% of the people we help come up come from the BAME community in the seven arc so we're going out and definitely meeting our commitments that have been made from that task force the important thing is here is there are challenges in the area but then challenges around funding so nearly every part part of funding in this area is grant funding even from the DWP Welsh government or shared prosperity fund and obviously that is a challenge those grants are being heavily um restricted in Welsh government's case and in and in the SPS case we need I think we need to know post-general election what the SPF looks like if and because it's because as I go through to keep performance indicator now in this area you'll see we get massive value for many so in terms of corporate plan the number of council post-filled through placements of on Cardiff works yeah the target was 2008 ended we hit we had three thousand and two people the number of interventions supported people into work through the employment gateway the target was 55 000 we got we over doubled that with 105 757 people that's only achievable through SPF funding so that that's a that's a that's why that's really critical for this number of clients who have received Taylor support for the employment gateway and who secured work as a result of the support received the target was 1200 we we had 3142 people the percentage of those supported through targeting interventions ceased engagement with no verified positive destination the target was 10 percent it's now 11 we hit 11.6 percent and the number of employers which have been assisted by the council's employment service the target was 300 we hit 352 so what the key thing I would like this committee to take away from this on this is actually this is an area that's doing a lot of work helping a lot of people many in lots in the seven arc of the city but also you know we got services i think we depend on you know up in we've got services up in the northern parts of the city we're church things like that as well so it is really hitting people who we need and help and over all ages we've got we've that we've had an increase in people we supported for instance it went over 50 as well and and we and we're also working cross and direct to it with the card of commitment youth service team and other teams to ensure that we're flag when we're unable to sign post people in to help we're able to do so at an early stage so there are i believe a couple of presentations but i think we we i'm heavily flanked by some of the elite of the elite of card and council officers here who are here to make sure i don't say anything okay it's in any trouble what's left but i think it'd be important that for the committee rather than us always talk at you that we take questions and we look at and we we look at how the scope of what you've trying to do in a short scrutiny so thank you chair thank you uh thank you Councillor property uh the key finally thank you everybody and thank you um for inviting me this evening so i'm here today to present um the uh the card of commitment initiative which sits across the economic development and education uh directorate and essentially we work in partnership not only across a number of different directorates within card of council but across the public private and third sector to develop those pre-employment and work ready opportunities for schools and young people across card if linked to our growth sectors as that's where we know the opportunity are as we want to develop the knowledge the skills and awareness in our children and young people so when they are at the school even age they're able to make a successful transition into employment education um or training but ultimately eventually secure jobs within uh the the city that contributes to the economic growth um off-card if so our our vision is working together to be a city that inspires its children and young people towards a better future and our mission working in partnership to raise ambitions develop opportunities deliver skills to support pupils particularly those from disadvantaged background to fulfill their potential and contribute to the economic growth of the city and just a note back in 2001 when we when the education directorate was inspected by estan we were highlighted um for best practice in terms of innovation and effective practice in connecting schools um and and business so to support um and deliver on the vision of the card of commitment we have sort of five key priority areas um which we can sort of i'm sure you've received the the presentations as well but just to touch on them we have sort of partner support which is all about developing and strengthening our network of partners engaged with card of commitment and being able to support them with training so they can effectively deliver um opportunities and revision for schools and young people across the city our experiences of work program looks at establishing more business partnerships with schools across the city reflective of employers linked to our our growth sectors to develop those provision and opportunities to broaden and to stand in and to raise ambitions across across card if our learning pathways program this is all about empowering young people to make those informed decisions regarding the next steps by providing that local and visibility visibility of opportunities in across the city so our social value priority this is linked to um how we work more in in line with our procurement team within card of council and work more with contractors across across the city to access those social value commitments and make sure that they they benefit in the needs of our schools and young people in Cardiff and then last but certainly not least is our children and young people the needs at most so it's working with our most vulnerable young people across the city young people with additional learning needs our looked after and care experienced young people young people working with our youth justice services is making sure that they have access to the same opportunities we are working with our partners to deliver but we know that we need to deliver this in a more targeted way to make sure that they are accessing them so just to give you sort of a bit of a card of commitment in context we have over 400 partners across the public private and third sector working and engaged with card of commitment to today to deliver on those provision opportunities just this academic year alone we've engaged with over 15,000 children uh young people through our so the curriculum projects our open your eyes week initiatives our business forum activities and sector cluster projects we've launched a website called what's next Cardiff which creates that centralized location where post 16 young people can go to to find out what are the job opportunities apprenticeship opportunities volunteering etc creating more visibility and since that has been launched in in May 2023 we've had over 25,000 website views we've reintroduced work experience across a number of six forms and to date this academic year alone we've raised more than 446 work experience placements which is supporting our what's next award which i'll update on we're working a lot around the sort of supported employment pathways for our care experienced and young people's additional learner needs and we're working in partnership with cardsman vale cart card mill university health board internally our cards of council schools catering department and the vbc studios to develop supported employment pathways for young people with additional learner needs and our and children looked after we're currently delivering a debate mate program which looks at tackling social mobility through the use of debating across eight secondary schools across our southern ark and this again is developing those employability skills in our young people in our southern ark communities which we're hearing from employers all the time that they want to develop these key employability skills to make sure that our children young people are work ready and then again we're delving a lot more into our sort of social value and we're currently working with 25 percent of the contractors available through social value to support the delivery of social value commitments and making sure that they delivered in communities and children young people who need it most and with the cards of commitment is very much a tailored approach to the work that we do it's not a one-size-the-fits-all we very much respond to the needs of children young people in schools across the city but most importantly as well needs of our economy and this is just a few examples of how we're working in partnership to in response to the challenging barriers in line with the cards of commitment and priorities so one of our priorities the children young people that need it most we're doing a lot more work with our sort of private sector and public sector partners to develop flexible supported employment pathways for our children looked after and care experienced young people and so card if it's one of the three local authorities across Wales to pilot a virtual school and a virtual head teacher to support children looked after in Cardiff and there are over currently over a thousand children and young people who are looked after by cards of council with this number that are continuing to grow we're working with key employers such as John Lewis who have a national building happier future scheme which is aimed at children looked after and we're working with them to ensure that we're working in partnership with our cards of youth services and other key stakeholders to be able to deliver on these pre-employment and supported employment pathways for children looked after in the city and this is just to give you sort of an understanding in terms of the the process that we go through in terms of developing these schemes and making sure that we have the key stakeholders in place to support the delivery of those supported employment pathways for children looked after across Cardiff and then these are just some of the outcomes of some of those pre-employment supported employment pathways in terms of developing the confidence in our children looked after but most importantly developing the opportunity to enter the workforce as well and to build those key employability skills and we are taking what we are learning from these initiatives and developing similar initiatives with employers such as Cardiff and Valle University Health Board who we're currently working with at the moment we've identified children looked after in eastern high school in the east of the city and again we're taking our learning from these programs with John Lewis and applying them to other key employers in the city to make sure that we're developing the provision and opportunities for children looked after as well as those young people additional learner needs and again it's about sharing best practice and encouraging other partners that work with cards of commitment to think about developing these provisioned opportunities for children looked after and care experienced in Cardiff. Again through our learning pathways priority we're collaborating with industry partners to develop robust talent pipelines that seamlessly transition pupils from statutory school even age into jobs and opportunities so we're currently supporting a semiconductor skills boot camp again which is a growth sector not just for Cardiff but the capital region and working with key stakeholders to develop and look at that talent pipeline into our growth sectors and we're able to do this by working in partnership with key employers with education providers and to the public and private sector. Our another priority to the social value we're doing a lot more activity across our private sector to make sure that we're utilizing corporate social responsibility to respond to the needs of schools so this is just an example of how we're working with admiral insurance a key employer in Cardiff whose employees have access to 15 hours of volunteering a year we're working with our schools to understand what is the volunteer in needs and we're matching that volunteer in need with volunteers in the private sector currently going through DBS processes to make sure that that's all in place and when that is we'll be piloting the admiral reading scheme supporting the need for volunteer readers but again accessing sort of resource from our private sector by utilizing corporate social responsibility and then just to support our learning pathways program in response to a six form survey so a lot of the activity that we develop is responding to needs and in response to our six form survey that we sent out two years ago we've redeveloped and reintroduced meaningful work experience placement by introducing the what's next award which supports the delivery of work experience currently across three six forms in Cardiff again we're looking at how we can embed in bed work experience in order to then sort of reintroduce it to other six forms but we're currently working with the private sector to develop those work experience placements working internally with our health and safety teams in Cardiff Council and to also work with our private sector to use work experience as a form of talent pipeline as well exposing young people to the world of work but most importantly our key employers and our key growth sectors in the city okay brilliant thank you for that Vicki we're going to take questions in between if that's all right Ken I see you spring to action December check I'll just explain the presentation that followed was the presentation we would do when our steam group gets together quarterly state and group private sector public sector third sector plus council officials plus organizations who are intimately involved in the delivery of Cardiff commitment I would give them a snapshot of the economy just a flavor of where the economy is going growth growth parts and trends so so really that's just part of a of a standard delivery that we would we would make to engage our partners and keep them posted on developments in the economy so they can respond to those developments brilliant thank you Ken and thank thank thank you Vicki that was a really excellent presentation I'm going to go straight to Pete please please don't quickens it up we we can answer questions on any elements of this yes if it helps it's just a quick one and complimentary one of that you noted on the KPIs that you'd absolutely smashed it and looking at them you have I'm particularly talking about the I was hoping to bring out the number of interventions which supported people into receiving work advice through the employment gateway the KPI as you said was five hundred sorry fifty five thousand you got a hundred five thousand I think my question was on the rationale for the next year's KPI which increases by five thousand to sixty thousand obviously I don't believe in infinite growth I don't believe suddenly you should set the target right at the maximum but I was just going to ask if you could explain a bit of the rationale about increasing it by five thousand for the subsequent year given the amazing performance beforehand yeah I think look it was a brilliant performance by the team and we have a conversation every year when it comes to the club a plan of whether the target needs to be stretching is it whether it's not stretching enough or whether it should be stretched forever keeping here is we got so much uncertainty about shared prosperity friend which helps spend a lot of this activity and be irresponsible for us to like stretched our target out if we're not able to have the number of people on the ground that we've got at the moment so the funding at the moment is helping us employ a lot of the people that we're giving the advice that are making sure we can get that intervention the other thing is it has been a quite a quite stretching year with the economy in terms of like economic messages coming across the living crisis and the fact that people are looking for to go into work and they're looking for that advice so I think that we've had a we have an we have I asked exactly the same question you do Pete but I actually think it's a responsible thing to do and because no doubt if it does go down to say 80,000 I'm going to come here rather than rather than from 105,000 it will be I'll get chastised by scrutiny but I think we've already been putting the caveats that we have very SPF and grant-funded heavy in this area in fact my entire council portfolio in the main is very grant-funded and we're not scared we're able to attract grants we're able to get in there and make sure that government and both Welsh and UK government are are pending these key areas but you know when you've got a three-year grant cycle I can't come here and say we're going to hit 105,000 until we know we've got some sense of an offending I'm sure that I'm sure the officers would agree with me on that wonderful thank you very much that's the perfect answer and exactly what I was looking for thank you let's let's break up this three-way Pete conversation and bring in John, John Schimman online no questions but it looks like you're doing a fantastic job thank you okay Katrina oh Katrina I think you're on mute thank you chair and thank you for that presentation and all the hard work that's gone in behind the scenes to make that happen and to bring that about and a lot of work goes into producing something like this so thank you and I'm actually just going to ask you an open wide question which is if you what's on your wish list where would you where would what more could be done where would you like to go is there more that could be done from the private sector are there other things you know other other um you know what will be the aspiration in terms of to now take this further thanks and if he's talking about the car's commitment specifically or are we talking about the whole service let's take us car yeah good okay well for us because it is a tailored approach to sort of the the the work that we do it's very much in responding to the needs of of our schools and young people and businesses across the city what we're doing with the we've had such a positive response from the private sector it's just looking at very innovative ways to access more opportunities from them which is why we're exploring corporate social responsibility and seeing how we can sort of support businesses to think about utilizing corporate social responsibility more to support the needs of children uh young people across the city um and I I think in terms of supporting our schools well we have what 98 primary schools in Cardiff 18 19 secondary schools the ambition would be to be able to be in a position where we could support all of all of our schools and children and young people across the city but we need to make sure what we're delivering at the moment it's it's being delivered in the right way it's having that impact and until we know what we're doing is working then we can look to expand the work that we're doing across the city brilliant thank you for that Katrina thanks no more questions please go on thank you thanks Jackie just to clarify we're doing the whole park right the whole service no no we're just doing the talent commitment a bit because we've got other bits coming up um thank you for the presentations I think you're doing a very challenging but very good job there's always more to do and that's our job to to push you a bit so that's why I'm asking the questions that I'm going to be asking what about those who are not in personal education so for example homeschooled or hard to reach harder to reach children and they may not be in six form but they may be in other settings but they also obviously we also want them to have opportunities they may also be intersectionality approach from communities that aren't always at an advantage We are working a lot with our youth support services who may be working with those educated and then at school and those hardest to reach we're working with them to support them with with provision and opportunities which is why we have our priority children and young people the need it most because we know that we do need a more targeted approach for our harder to reach young people and that's something that we will continue to do with in partnership the cards of commitments is all about working in partnership and it's something that we do to be able to access those hardest to reach as well this is where we're working across direct threats and across cabinet portfolio is really important a lot of the children you'd be talking about Jackie some of them may well be known to children services some of them may well be known to other services that we deal with that we deal with in terms of um I'm just thinking of um for instance in James Ward with some of the some of the the the travel of the community and things like that well we will go in there and we'll work going there we'll do we'll offer as much advice and opportunity for them kids as we possibly can so it's communicating the key thing with this is council by records not working in silos and economic development working well with with education for youth and with um social services in particularly children services for some of those kids who fall through the cracks and some of those kids are I've seen it in my own ward where they where a lot of those kids have left fall out of school are going to their local hub and are being educated there and I know that we have we've been referring and those those those younger people into this into the kind of commitment and into other services across the council so it's this where communication I think is key and I think this is a good example of a other other other project the council has taken on board that is communicating across direct threats and not working on their own they're communicating across direct threats if I can just add a few points there there for my chair um in terms of card of commitment the great its greatest strength it touches all parts of our community um Vicki talked about opening your eyes so we can most primary schools in card if have access to their eyes being opened through various businesses going in and talking to them and so we go from primary school to sixth form to looked after children to pupils in in in normal standard education the greatest strength of this it exposes the talent we have in in our communities to businesses and what businesses have been have been introduced to is the fact that there may well be some difficult cohorts that we have but there's talent within within that cohort and using the skills of the private sector you've written the skills of the public sector were able to combine them and bring those children back into an employment pathway that hopefully is going to give them a a positive positive future and that's I think one of the key strengths of this initiative okay thank you um I had a second question um that that covers some of it um the concerns that what we can do more it's it's outreach and and that's the key issue for me here um the other um aspect that I had is about the seed or motion that we passed in the council in March 2023 and that's about disaggregated um data as well as making a focus on girls in particular um whether that's intersectional girls you know whatever but also making sure that girls have the same opportunities and the same pathways or different ones you know that they're not left off and it's not just about football pitches and bloody basketball you know hoops and stuff but it's also specific to girls and women thank you message received Jackie as someone who does live a football pitch myself but no any time emotion is passed at council which we yeah well I mean we we passed the last month so we're a no glass year it is it is March 23 for you yeah we it will it is we are looking at it in fact some of the kids you're you're talking about we're falling through the cracks our girls we're seeing increasingly more girls who are falling out of education and training and then and we are giving them the support that we need to do but yeah happy to happy to take on board any that that criticism and I'm sure I've been the way forward and you know the constructive dialogue that'll be I'm sure will be in the way way forward that the committee and the letter that they write okay Jane oh sorry um we're working very closely with our child friend city's team um as well to support them and and their initiatives that they're delivering on but in terms of the work that the way specifically doing that is a a big focus on a number of schools that have approached us to ask to support with supporting girls that think about taking up more STEM subjects for example and it was just only last year for International Women's Day and sort of supporting activity following on from that we did a big event with Microsoft in Tramshed Tech and worked with a number of schools across Cardiff who had sort of shared with us their concerns about the the lack of girls taking up STEM related subjects or taking up computer science or feeling intimidated because they may be the the only female in their computer science class or they just don't know the opportunities that are there at them at they for them so in partnership with with Microsoft and other key employers in Cardiff we delivered an International Women's Day event invited these that the young females to Tramshed Tech and introduced them to female role models that are working across the tech industry as well and it was really inspiring for some of our pupils particularly from sort of Willows High School as for the first time ever they actually got to speak to well they they quoted they didn't know they the girl was Asian herself and she spoke to an Asian female role model from Microsoft and for the first time she actually realized that Asian women do work in tech and for her that was sort of a key moment and a key opportunity to realize well actually if she's speaking to these role models who she can relate to that's something that she can aspire to be as well so we are working with key employers around initiatives focused on on females and in keeping the ass certainly okay thank you thank you and just to go back to the CEDA motion to council one of the one of the points on the CEDA motion to council was that the quality impact assessments would come to scrutiny apologies if it has and I haven't found it in here but on checking I was told it would be attached via SharePoint and again apologies if I if it has and I haven't found it thank you no it's uh it's it's not part of the package that was given to us today but at the moment I think I understand Gary's working on the mechanisms for doing for doing so so we should expect it uh in in in the May uh the May committee if that's okay right um say I've got a quick question around the employability skills that you've because because effectively card commitment works has a kind of interface between schools and employers as one of the aspects of of what you do around employability and I'm just wondering what whether you were looking to kind of interface with Welsh back or the new curriculum to embed those kind of employability skills so we have a card if commitment curriculum team as well that we work with to deliver on that okay all right brilliant thank you for that if we've got no further questions then let's move on to uh Ken for all right so we brought it together for the I'm very sorry there we are the context of it was we brought it together for the card commitment steering group the account the economy at eight's point in time which was February March for for example to show you the type of material we do try to keep our business community plus our public sector partners and organizations abre- abreast on so absolutely fine Ken uh I understand the context of what we said before we started going to questions then so uh we'll go straight into the next presentation if that's okay then uh and that's into fully into work service and we'll pick up questions uh for that context as part of that that's okay so and I'm in the sun you're going to take us through the hailey yeah that's the end of it on the back um so just to give you a very quick overview of the into a good vice service so that currently sits in housing and communities and it forms part of the wider advice service and that includes the money advice team the housing advice and homelessness advice and most recent addition is the personal advisor service which has recently come over from children's services which supports care experiencing people when they reach 18 plastic and a transition into adulthood and so the inter-work advice service provides residents a Cardiff with a complete employment and skills package and so I either support in those who are out of work who want to get into work or those who are in work but need to upskill in order to secure higher paid or more sustainable work so the service was relaunched in 2018 and when lots of new funding streams kind of joined together which included Welsh government and then the European social fund and and that was at that point that we were able to kind of broaden the support that we provided so originally we used to provide very light tip support but when that funding came in we could deliver like real intensive mentoring support for the first time so helping those who are really quite far away from the job market and since then additional teams have been added to the service and so that includes an employee liaison function and adult learning and then Cardiff Works which has allowed the team to be able to provide a beginning to end journey for somebody's employment journey and coming forward six years and the team has lost actually quite a number of funding streams obviously the end of European social fund but it's also gained the share prosperity fund which is what Councillor Babry mentioned earlier so we've managed to grow the service there's about 180 members of staff and because of the new funding we've been able to support anybody living in Cardiff whereas previously we were and the funding was quite prescriptive about who we could and couldn't work with and so now it doesn't matter how old somebody is whether they are in employment or they are out of employment or their level of qualification we can support so the service is made up of five mainstream so the gateway so that's our front door and the purpose behind a gateway was we were able to hide all the wiring when it comes to funding so somebody comes in and we're able to assess straight off whether they needed like to support so our gateway delivers job clubs across the city in 50 different locations from community hubs to non-cancel building schools supported accommodation settings food banks and they also host lots of awareness raising sessions in community so we know that we are very popular in some areas and that we need to go into areas that we aren't so good with engaging Callie is going to talk a little bit about our mentoring projects but mentoring is split into two adult and youth and that focuses on really intensive support so there's no fine restriction to working with people we can spend as much time with people getting them job ready so this is for people who have perhaps experiencing additional barriers to employment so for example perhaps people who are in work and suffering from in-work poverty our care leave a young people and people from BME backgrounds there's also funding attached to these projects too that helps remove those final barriers to employment so if somebody needs funding to scale into an employment sector that heavily recruited in the city it can help with travel costs child care costs and tools for work we also match our mentors up in these projects who have real life experience of perhaps some of the barriers that our customers face and for example we have a couple of mentors who have faced homelessness themselves and work on the homelessness project or people who are living in hostels and we've also got a couple of members of staff who have gone through the youth justice system as well and they're supporting some of our young people who are who have gone through that or who go into that too and we're also quite proud that we've got 33 different spoken languages and the team that's really helped us to engage with certain communities and we do tend to borrow and steal staff from across the other teams the advice services and I think there's about 40 other different languages as well and then our learning pathways and so that includes our adult learning team the new multiply team which supports with numerous courses embeds numeracy into our training courses and then our community digital team as well which helps people who perhaps suffering from digital deprivation and then moving on to our employer pathway so we we do all the support for people who are looking for work so we offer support for those employers who are recruiting as well as Ken and Vicki has said so we match almost a bit like a dating website those skilled work ready people with the employment with our employees who are recruiting to and matching them together in that employer pathway as well and we also have the onsite construction academy which is a new model of identifying people who want to get into the construction sector or get back into working training them up and giving them onsite work experience and then at the end of that is guaranteed job opportunities that they can apply for that we will support to apply for as well and we also have in that employer pathway a volunteering team so we know that not everybody coming through the doors is ready for work and actually whether they need a bit of a confidence boost whether they need some work history on their CV but or who are perhaps suffering from health conditions or health issues that we've got recaiter for everybody as well moving people closer to employment we also have a social value officer that again has been working with economic development procurement kind of connectment just make sure that we are securing those job training volunteering opportunities for the people that we are supporting too and then Cardiff Works finally is joined the team so that is supporting council teams with a short-term temporary recruitment and the team matches work ready candidates to council roles as well obviously we know the council is one of the biggest employees in the city and we've done a lot of work recently making sure that Cardiff Works opportunities are accessible for everybody and so we've done we've gone out into the communities and raised awareness of the roles that are available through the local authority too and a couple of years ago we were kind of averaging about a seven percent and kind of split for people accessing the opportunities from BME backgrounds so after a lot of work we've gotten that up to 35 percent still much more work to do and a real new initiative that we've just set up through Cardiff Works is the Cardiff Works for you initiative and that's a subsidized placement scheme so the income that is generated through Cardiff Works we are reinvesting it back in to the local authority and that is for people who perhaps may have been overlooked previously for roles so maybe somebody young people who've just come out of school or college who've perhaps gotten a work history maybe older people who've never worked or looking to get into the council and we pay for three months placement for council teams so we work really closely with a number of council teams that are very supportive to us and they all say we're willing to kind of give somebody a go and we will pick at the cost for the first couple of months with a commitment from that team then that they will extend that or commit to training them up to increase somebody's employability to go on to secure further work and then lastly we have a trainee program so not sure if you remember quite some time ago now there was a DWP scheme called The Future Jobs Fund where getting young people who were 16 to 24 who perhaps never worked we really wanted to replicate that and unfortunately we're not able to pay completely for people's salaries but when we secure new funding we make sure that there is an amount in there that we can create new trainee posts and this is open to any age not just young people where somebody comes in and we support them they have a temporary contract with us and then we'll work with them they have a workplace mentor and training and we'll support them to secure another job either in that team or further in the council so I think over we've got about 20 odd trainee posts and 15 now with our seniors and our managers within inter-work came from that trainee scheme and so that that's kind of the the whole wraparound service so we're not just offering elements of the employment skills um so as Haley mentioned the services we provide do support any individual living in the Cardiff area um our mentoring programs do try and tackle those hardest to reach as well though across the city so just going to take you through a few of the key kind of demographics that we do support including younger people older people BME refugees and some individuals and the support that we provide for learning disabilities they're not the only cohorts that we do support but again it's just again these are some of the journeys that we do take with the individuals across the city um and they also feed into the COPPA plan and other um other commitments that we are responsible for our main the main elements of reviewing our service is the engagement of individuals that we're supporting the job outcomes and the training outcomes that we're supporting people with but we also understand that the journey that individuals do take is tailored and dependent on their needs and their background so let's Haley kind of touched upon um the the majority of ESF funded was quite restrictive um we have had the opportunity to tailor support now to what the needs are across the local area so within our youth team for example we are supporting individuals who have engaged with the youth justice system or probation system we have a dedicated support service in butown in the southern arc of the city we do do a lot of work with our homeless at risk of homelessness people without a thrall miles project have dedicated mentors delivering services from uh look uh from the community and also support a looked after care experience young people we do have a mentoring scheme and also our bright start placement scheme that supports individuals who have had experience looked after care access a work placement opportunity for a six month period and received support to move into employment afterwards through our support workers okay um so all our services that deliver from a wide range of locations um with our young people we understand and appreciate engaging within a council building can be challenging so services are delivered from communities they are delivered from all across the city uh we do uh deliver services um cafes as long as they're safely risk-assested to ensure that there is that comfortability for a young person to engage homeless um hostels and anywhere that we can think of of engaging young people so just in detail there's also outcomes that we achieved throughout 2023/2024 for the young for young people aged 16 to 24 years we supported um supported over 1400 young people on our employment projects over 400 young people supported into employment uh overnight 150 people were supported with their training needs and supported to access training and over 500 young people undertook volunteering or work experience after an intervention from in to work advice service as well um as our uh as Haley kind of touched upon we have been working we have been trying to do undertake some work to improve the offer of Cardiff Works as well uh this past year 29 percent of people who moved into employment with Cardiff Works were aged between 16 to 24 as well um so go on okay um so alongside the young people that we support okay uh they're over 50 we have really improved and try to develop a service that meets the needs of individuals who are over 50 the support that we provide to young people which is beneficial to the support is engaging and tactful to the support that we can provide there but with over 50s we have tried to improve the support that we can provide developing a accredited training focused on a different style of confidence build and a lot of though again general generalizing it to an extent but a lot of over 50 people that we do engage with and support with the first kind of line that they do say to our mentors is no one's going to employ me and it's that it's trying to change that mindset a little bit around um the skills and the experience and the diversity that of the workforce that we do want to try and create across the local city as well people are working longer as well cost of living has highlighted that as well so there was that need to try and improve that area of support that we can provide um and as Councillor Bradbury touched upon earlier we have diversified where we are delivering our services from primarily our services are delivered from the southern arc but we do understand and appreciate that the need that it's trying to improve and tailor again services from the north of Cardiff as well for example we will try and deliver more digital support services um from the north of the city and try and remove that digital deprivation something really highlighted throughout the pandemic and when social isolation to try and provide support the social isolation as well um some of the figures around over 50 people that we supported were over 700 people have engaged our mentoring projects over 200 people over 50 have been supported into employment over 800 people have been support with the training needs and over 900 people have received support from our digital support team um Vicki sorry do mind just move thank you um and then the support that we're providing with our for individuals from a BME background of refugees feeding into the race equality task force uh we are trying to um sorry um we do have dedicated support and dedicated mental supporting individuals from different resettlement schemes including the Ukrainian resettlement scheme Afghan refugees Syrian refugees and wider they're not limited anybody who does who can live and work in the UK and receive support from public services is able to engage a lot of the services that we do deliver to refugees is delivered from welcome centers but the aim of that support that we are trying to provide is to try and ensure individuals are engaging with mainstream services so we may be out in the community but the aim that we're what we're trying to do is ensure that services can be accessed from local hubs local community buildings so there is a wider package of support that we're providing not just focused on employment trying to provide support to citizens in the local area as well uh we do a lot we do feed a lot of uh we do feed some statin to the race equality task force as well primary focusing on the support that we do provide to individuals from a BME background uh some of the support and work that we do provide we do have a specific butane youth development project support 16 to 24 year olds it is based primarily in butane but the reach of that has grown since it was initially launched uh it was initially made up of two mentors that has now expanded to five mentors they do again they are reaching over to grange down riverside and other awards and districts that will support can be expanded not to say that we haven't already got provision aids just to ensure that there is a replicable replicable support available as well we have dedicated adult mentors who provide support to individuals from a BME background we have a community inclusion include community engagement offices engaging with local communities to ensure that our services our Cardiff works opportunities are promoted and that was support available and the support available from into work including the funding to app skill and provide and remove barriers to employment is a shared with local communities as well as council rubbery touched upon 48 percent of individuals who are engaging with the inter-work inter-work advice services a whole are from a BME background we supported over 600 people into employment from a BME background over 300 people with volunteering placements as well and 53 percent of Cardiff works applicants have been from a BME background throughout 23 24 and we've also supported over 250 refugees with their employment and training needs as well and then finally just such an appropriate support that we provide to people with learning disabilities we do have dedicated supported employment projects for individuals who have a learning disability difficulty or autism this is funded by DWP and builds on the five steps five stages of employment model with a primary focus and something that we're constantly reviewing with our our funding body DWP is the support that we're providing to local employees about creating opportunities for individuals with learning disabilities difficulties and autism this is one of the major models of this delivery profile is to ensure that it's a sustainable opportunity and employment opportunities are tailored to meet the needs of individuals rather than the employment opportunity remaining as it is to and a one-size-fits-all approach there are challenges but there are some employees that are receptive to the support that we're providing and mentors on our local support employment project provide support ongoing and continuous with an individual as well it's not just at points of entry of employment it is ongoing support as we can provide as Vicki touched upon we are working alongside colleagues in education UHB University Hospital Wales and UHB and LandoC and BBC to deliver our projects research and we have dedicated mentors out in these across these sites providing our in-work support to individuals whilst they're undertaking their placements and resolving queries as required and then there are some indicators for some of the support that we provide to individuals where with disabilities over 300 individuals have received employment support 38 individuals have received employment support 40 individuals with their individuals with their training needs and overate individuals with their digital supporting the numbers are slightly lower there is a bit of work that we do need to undertake to try and improve and enhance and engage individuals that could benefit from our support and have disabilities yeah and I think it's just fair to in addition to the presentation because it has been raised about the CDOR motion that we passed last year in March a cabinet report was brought back in May which was brought by my colleague Councillor FORN and Pendix 5 and I can't because I thought it's only fair because it was raised I wasn't expecting a question on it today but I have now looked looked at up right there are commitments through the goal line by line and appendix 5 of that cabinet report of each of the of of the motion including the support that's given community hubs and libraries and what we're doing about that and where you can find that in the strategy that was passed in May because we passed the strategy in May 2023 after the motion in March because it called in order to bring a cabinet report which we did in May which then which was not just a spacadif and a veil related to every individual point that our motion stated and there's a there's a specific dependence on it so that is perhaps been I'm just saying I was putting on the record because I want to make sure that it is on the record it has been ingrained as part of in part of what we're doing particularly in hubs and and and um community centers and particularly around safe spaces and stuff like that because um it's but it's not in my it's balls and the Councillor FORN's portfolio rather than mine but that is a five-year strategy and I really I think I'm sure there's a whole scrutiny that can be done on the implementation of that specific strategy um as in addition to what we're doing today but I think you know I didn't want to make people think that we that that has gone to the way so that it hasn't we have we have tried to ingrain it throughout the services that we provide in particularly these ones okay Haley back to the yep and just the last slide and just to kind of outline our emerging needs and issues obviously and funded to be mentioned an awful lot and we've got one year left of SPF funding and that um short-term funding is really quite difficult to plan um our delivery um we'd like to increase support for those with disabilities as Khaled said I'm actually um having that commitment from employees the employees that we do with have are great and we know that the pressures on on um the economy are really great at the minute but it'd be great to get some more commitment to support that group of people strengthening relationships within local communities as Khaled said and we'd love to be able to get into additional areas and kind of resource allowing and and while we are trying our best to kind of identify those areas it'd be great to have that support or um conversations with community representatives as well and being able to provide and signpost people for pre pre-employment support so pre-employment is our business it's what we do to support people into work but actually some of the people that we are seeing is an increase on people who really require that well being a mental health support before they get to us and that provision really is very thin on the ground at the moment and then developing further opportunities for um our uh customers so that's through Cardiff Works for you so this is a bit of a pitch and for bright start placements and then supporting obviously the the council's apprenticeship scheme as well thank you thank you Hayley and Khaled let's um let's start with Peter thank you very much sir I have two questions um if that's okay um my first question is on the people with disabilities um obviously you have a an overlap between young people people who fund themselves homeless and people who are disabled in one way or another um they're currently following a recent council meeting where I asked this question 298 young people in temporary accommodation in Cardiff can you speak a little bit about what engagement work and I appreciate some of this is is with another cabinet members portfolio but can you speak a bit about um that sort of work that's been done across portfolios there yeah I mean I think you've hit on a really important point not just for young people but people generally in within other to the temporary accommodation service basically when Cali says we go into 50 locations and herbs part of that is going into these temporary into areas where they where their young people or any people really were temporary temporarily housed or homeless you know to provide to offer them advice services instead signpost them to vital services so that goes on as a matter of course Pete um you know there's so many examples that I'm sure the officers could get if but that is something that we does we've embedded as part of the advice service and into work service approach that we try you know we try and go into places where people are rather to rather than wait for them to come to us so I don't know if any officers want to give a specific practical example but that happens a lot and yeah so Cali tell me if I'm wrong but we go into lots of supported accommodation settings we run and we bring a couple of our teams together and so I think the examples I can think of we've done cooking on a budget so helping them to move towards independence a cooking on a budget with air fryers so that was a good example that the young people love that and we've done one recently where we've embedded that numeracy train in and kind of snuck it in and hit it and we worked with a partner who I can't think of the name where we they came in supported how to build their own furniture and from a popular brand and they got there credited and they took away their oh we're back we should be back Furniture from a popular brand so that was part of Carlos just reminded me of a commitment from social value they've come in and they've provided all of the furniture and they can use them their temporary accommodation settings so yeah definitely we're putting more and more courses provision into I was supported accommodation settings because again we know the pressures actually and the numbers of people coming through that kind of homeless service as well the housing advice and homeless services sit within the wider advice and so that's it marries it something to kind of say when people come into us into any of the advice services it's not just one service they require and actually it's it's employment mixed with many advice or mixed with housing advice so it all works really really well together wonderful thank you for that that was a fantastic answer just one more question if I can beg forgiveness of the chair Youth mentoring team talking about care levers that's good can I just ask you this a project that predates the Welsh government's basic income or does this rise with it can you talk a little bit more about that it says recently started in one of the documents we've got so I just like to ask a little bit more information about that it does it does predate it it does but we're we're adapting to that um to that to that pilot that was pretty placed by Welsh government cool thank you very much thank you Peter uh you saw him John Shannon yes unfortunately for something maybe thank you for that it says again doing great work and this is more not less a question more uh sort of project you um talks about the work you do both with young people and also the not young people uh with additional learning needs and you touched on autism um is just the I just like to do uh the quest that you you know obviously we've got limited budget but um widen scope to other recognized universities um which would fall in line with the motion passed at council last September and also you know help those with them these uh recognize no universities do the whole process but also with employers understanding you're in a great position to help the employers understand um how they can help those with new adversity into um work and there are many of the third sector partners out there who could help and advise and even if it's just as a sign posting from you guys but so yeah totally agree with our council and it's the then I think we do 50/30 officers they were just giving an example um but yeah we we as pretty successful neurodiversity conference that was held um just a few months ago and the motion has passed last year last year this is something that is consistently on the radar of the council and um we I was at an event last week with DWP wherever representatives from the council and we did we're talking about this area issue with employers so we are trying to do a kind of message across okay thanks john uh let's move to catch you now are you there let's uh let's go to Jackie uh we'll come back to Katrina thank you um a great presentation thank you very much same thing I mean you're doing great work but again part of our job is just just to push you a little bit more I'm talking to you come to the officers yeah we push you every day of the week there's no there's no problems but I will push back actually about the cedar motion that is about mainstreaming and it's about having a lens that does look at gender because um women and girls have been at a disadvantage especially intersectional women and we have to keep them at the forefront because otherwise they'll be behind especially when it comes to good solid employment when it comes to older women in particular who haven't got the pensions credits that they need and they will be in poverty and when you're doing work for over fifties in particular this is really a very good stream of work to do because we know we all have to work a bit longer looking around the room of those of us who are a little bit older possibly you know and that's really fundamental because who's going to pay for the pensions for younger people etc you know the thing so commanding you with that I just have two neurodiversity was mentioned so I was very happy to that came up on page 31 of our pack it's a capia so the pseudo thing is in the corporate plan by the way it's not just the so that's why I've mentioned it so yeah so on page 31 we've got a kpi which is new percentage of inter-work clients who identify as being from a black Asian and minority ethnic background monitor kpi no target set I just wanted to ask about that is it because it's new or is it just because you haven't done it yet thanks it's a it is a new target but it's come from the basic qualities task force so basically we're sort of raised that the corporate plan and it was raised at a corporate plan meeting and as I said we're not we're not concerned about about not being a target in place we I think the important thing is is that the target is done in collaboration with that task force then it's not just something that we pick from the air and I think that so we like I said one of the key things I was quite impressed by with from the presentation 48% of people who come in and have received services have been for the BAMA community and that is because we have going into those communities and so so I think I think well if we can't put a stretch in targeting there we will and but we'll do that in consultation with the basic quality task force totally agree with your points on no diversity and the point you raised about the c don't motion and and that it's a corporate plan commitment and that we and I think post this we will go we will go we'll go away and we'll look at I've got the weird in the motion in front of me and officers or well I think officers will have a look at the weird in that motion the recommendations that were made in the in the report and make sure we'll come back at Jackie and Jackie and make sure that we we are getting you the information and release that but what I can say to you is that we are awful lot of people who go into our heads particularly in the seven hours for advice and help we were exactly a demographic you were talking about but in that older demographic over 50 demographic our women and I think you make a valid point about how we collect that data and we put it in and we'll and we'll see what we can do and I would advise the community to put that in the way forward so we follow that up it is about disaggregated statistics so that we can model and I presume the KPI wouldn't none of them are off the top of your head but I'm sure so um can I just say this one last thing and that is my son used your services and he got into a job and I wanted to thank you for that he does have privilege he's he's white young man so but thank you Jane I don't have a question thank you okay brilliant I've yeah I'll come back to her after I've just got a couple of questions if that's okay and and because the ethnic minority stat in terms of helping people through the gateway is impressive amongst the field impressive things that that you do but I but but I notice as part of I'm not sure whether it's the apprenticeship stuff the significance increase in ethnic minority employees that coincides with the anonymized applications and it would be helpful to understand that those employers work with other than ourselves whether we could get them to adopt those kind of procedures as well because quite clearly there's something going on there and the fact that we've had a significant increase could be down to that could be other factors but you know it looks like it's pretty clearly linked okay no no that's okay yeah definitely and so obviously HR the kind of recruitment process has been anonymous for a while and we have struggled in Cardiff Works it's the system that we use it's an external system so that happened back last summer we also introduced a standard CV template as well obviously before they were submitted and choose your own design so yeah absolutely and like you say we hope that's not the case but it has we have seen a huge kind of increase from then and so that that is what we're taking away from it so it's a positive very sad positive unfortunately but you know that it is something that we want really want to push when we speak to employers we will kind of see if we can push that forward with them what's all I was going to say is we do take our good practices yeah employee liaison team do try and promote and adopt good practices to employees across the city we are they have a HEST as well though but that doesn't mean that we are trying to support the people that we are trying to support and engage with our service as well okay and one very last quick question and that is obviously in the past we've talked about the work around major regen projects and helping local labour accessed employment as part of the Atlantic War stuff I'm assuming we're doing we're going to there be a similar package for the sports village absolutely yes so we will look to use a model that that's been successful on site construction academy but yes so we are working with procurement and economic development and we're working with the developer too and looking at what their social value commitment and basically being able to supply the people to meet their social value commitment and the inter work service sorry that I was just going to mention because I've highlighted this no I've highlighted this I was hoping Rodney would be here to hear you listen to this because I think it goes to show that the work that Ken's team in economic development do we can write in and major projects team does it like they do work with inter work service team and it's like one of the key points we've got as a target here is into inter work services continue to work with major developments to ensure the Atlantic World Development supports local individuals including providing clear information on expected social value outcome and there is a social value officer that is working with major projects to ensure that it's happening and that was a key commitment once again from the recent quality task but also and it is being extended to other major projects in the area so I think that's a key point when we're making political statements about major projects not having a benefit to the city I was just going to add that we are working with colleagues across different departments to actually shape what the social value office offer as well as well as some leading those conversations rather than having contractors lead those conversations on our behalf to provide support and value but that is a cross partnerships and services with kind of commitment to economic development and trying to have a one not one size fits all approach but a one localised size fits all approach. Brilliant thank you. Katrina you're still there. You're on mute Katrina. Yeah thank you chair thank you. I'd like to say well done to council in team for all the good work on this. A question I had was it was noted that a lot of the over 50s coming in for support are often women and so that leads me to ask the question is that often because they may have had child care or caring responsibilities which have kept them open employment and know that children have flown the nest they're now evaluating and looking at what they might do and if that is the case in reasonably significant numbers it's sort of thing that can be done to reach out and perhaps need to know skill sets that those women may have. So for example if they have been bringing up children I think an employment that can often get overlooked as a valuable skill set that brings value to certain certain situations. Like I said that being particularly valuable in schools and in nurseries and places like that and whether or not there's anything to try and rather not being almost as these people come with new skills but instead say actually these are real valuable skills and can we channel that into good employment opportunities? So be grateful for thoughts on that. Well I'm not going to speculate as to why that is happening in this forum because it's a difficult issue and we all have views on it I certainly do on wide women seeking support and but I agree with a lot of what Catriona has said evident that point about the importance of getting people back into the workplace and providing support and skill and recognizing what skills are available to ensure that they get suitable employment. Again the office is it's a very broad question the officers may have specific examples but the policy directive is anybody who comes into our Herbs who are looking for inter-work support that we try and get them that support and ultimately employment so but I call it in Haley and on the ground call it in particular is on the ground that is working in our Herbs and may well want to give a specific example for me to be experienced of its time in Land of North and Edie Hebb. So yeah again we do try and highlight the different skill sets that you do develop through your life as well these are some of the conversations that we are having with individuals that every single day if you are looking if you are raising a family the skill sets that you develop within that life and within those years can be transferred to different employment opportunities as well we are we do provide support for different avenues of employment as well so if an individual does wish to train within child can we do provide that support our services very much client-led we do have an individual that participate and potentially shape the area that the ones are going to but we are there to try and lead those conversations as well but ensuring that we are trying to create sustainable employment opportunities where an individual sees themselves growing and finding job satisfaction as well I've had I've worked for the service for about 14 years when we were delivering services across job clubs the number of non-parent single parents out of work parents that we have supported who I've said I've lost the last 10 years of my life without them because I haven't been working it is phenomenal similar to the over 50s example that I haven't got no one's going to employ someone over the age of 50 the conversations that we are having is trying to change that mindset and boost that confidence for any person who is engaging up with our service but that is a particular example for all the women who may be looking for access employment opportunities. Brilliant thank you pleasure. Chair if I can just add one statistic the positive news within economies over the last year the levels of economic activity have improved and 16,000 people have moved out of inactivity into employment I haven't got the breakdown of how many females that that would include but certainly it seems that opportunities out in the labour market are drawing more people from inactivity into the activity status as well. Thank you Ken. Okay we don't have a presentation for the corporate apprenticeships and training scheme but you have got the information for that as part of your your packs so I'm just going to go straight from that to opening up to questions and if while you're looking at Peter I will start if that's okay by asking Tracy the work on the corporate apprenticeship and trainees how do they link into the kind of the into work services and how are they promoted as a part of that? Okay so when we advertise the posts we let the internet service know about them as well so that people can be placed through for our corporate scheme only people who live or study in Cardiff can apply for them so they're like ring fence to the city and so that helps with the employment opportunities across the city but we link them with the into work service and there's a close liaison between the scheme manager and the into work service. Okay brilliant and my second question is in terms of that do we kind of understand what do we monitor what the dropout rates are and what the conversion rate into kind of full-time sustainable employment and things like exit interviews so yeah so we monitor people who come in through a training apprenticeship scheme and progress through the organization we have that data exit interviews are done voluntary in the organization you can't mandate exit interviews otherwise it's a very one-sided conversation so yeah we will gather that information where we can but people don't have to provide us with that information and I can't remember the first part of the question of what the conversion and the dropout rates were. Right and we're very lucky our dropout rate is very low one of the reasons for that is we are a real living wage employer and that includes our trainees and apprentices as well so you know as a young person it's quite difficult to get young people to get excited about you know a pension that they might have in in 50 years time or the rate we're going probably 60 or 70 years time for those people so what they want is money in their pocket so actually being a real living wage employer puts us in a really good process also we talked to them very much about career paths as well so it's not a you know 15 month apprenticeship and then you've got nothing we work with them during that apprenticeship to try and find them other alternative works we work with Cardiff works there's a way of transferring them into other parts of the organisation so it is seen as a career path and we're very lucky as Haley mentioned in a previous answer with the largest employer in Cardiff and a very we have 700 services so we not do offer people career pathways but we offer them variety as well so thank you thank you very much Peter no questions from me chair okay Jane no questions from me either Jackie sorry it's two quick ones actually honestly one is one of the people doesn't ask that yeah well yeah disaggregated information obviously disaggregated statistics about you know the different categories and what's the second can't remember the second one well let's start with that one now try to remember what my second question was so this is what we're talking about disaggregated we have information we could because our apprentices in trainees are our employees we have all the information we need so we can break down that information in lots of different ways so for example we will look at our apprentices and trainees and look at you know all the equality and EDI data that goes with those as well and compare them we know for example that compared to the whole of the organisation our number of apprentices and trainees is higher from a ethnically diverse background and one of the reasons for that is to do with you know the whole process we have so one of the one of the areas that the team I might say team I'm talking to people are responsible for is not just about the apprentices of trainees but the schools engagement community engagement so we prioritise that around southern arc so if we've got two schools running a school's career event on the same day one in the north of Cardiff when in the southern arc we will go to the southern arc one so we are you know we're trying to we're trying to get the message out there as much as possible around the counsellors and employer it's really difficult with those young people you know if you ask young people what they what we do they tell they tell us first that we collect waste that's the first thing that young people tell us we do then they might go on to some of the other things what they miss out is a lot of the professional services and the back office services so one of our roles is to go out there and talk to young people around you know what it is the counsellors and livers and what the the professions are within it thank you I think you might need a tick tock account or something well why not why not do it yeah how did can do it I'm not saying you can't okay okay but this is a across the piece a question about working with unions as employers and I wondered if you could add them into your portfolio of those who work you work with possibly thank you yeah as we have a really good relationship with obviously our trade unions will be worked with and and why didn't that be whilst you see as well but yeah as an employer as well and I have to say one of the things that we work closely with is around you know the good work that we do in the council is taken and and used by them as well so we're seeing as an examiner in lots of things as well and yeah I'll make a semi political point without making a you know other political point but I mean the real living wage is an example of good social partnership with employer administration and the trade union movement and a lot of work goes on behind the scenes with offices and on also politicians to ensure that the trade unions agenda where there's agreement with the administration's agenda is enacted within the corporate plan and within the delivery of the council and as you've seen it's bearing fruit with with apprenticeships because we're attracting more apprenticeships because we're paying better than they would then say other sectors of employment private sector or other public sector parties so that but all the noise you get sometimes around issues with the trade union movement actually relations have in my 12 years of being a council have been mainly positive with the both with the with both the and the senior management team of the council and also the cabinet to the council and also the political leadership of the council usually very good and they're valuable partners and they they make good suggestions and we try where possible to implement as many of their yeah exactly like Jackie exactly right okay uh Katrina uh thank you chair um certainly in desperate actually it's a very well made point by um by um council councilor Jones about TikTok and in terms of getting information out there is there um a website where somebody looking for one of these rules can actually just go onto the website and search cut what what's available at the current time and go through them and click on and get some information about them is it is it laid out in that simple way where they can just go through or do they have to go through a different route to find out um so a variety of different ways um so obviously all our jobs are um advertised on our council jobs website you can use search facilities in there and obviously apprenticeship and trainees one of those search facilities we also liaise with a number of other organizations such as careers whales we work the kind of commitment um so we use all our networks to get that information out to the right people right young people um how to stress it's not just young people as well because there's many apprenticeships that are open to all age groups and therefore it is around you know helping people back we're skilling people as well um but yeah we use as many networks as we can in order to get that information out to to the right groups okay thanks for that Katrina let's try John for our last question if you have one here thank you chair yeah um first of all I should say there is an issue around using TikTok there's a massive security issue it is known to be Chinese spyware so a lot of public organizations don't use it for that reason but anyway that's not so um my point is around new university again and obviously I'm not going to ask you what you're doing to support those with new diversity traits into um the apprenticeships because it's very individual basis but just to take forward the um the points previously made about about it and how um you know to support those in future into the apprenticeships thanks yeah so as an employer we take neurodiversity experience seriously um we have a number of groups so um might be aware that we currently have our neurodiverse steering group that's made up of employees um that have neurodiverse conditions and they provide a lot of information so one of the things we do within HR across for all our policies and processes we talk to our employee networks to say well you know what's your feedback we're looking at our application process to make sure people have got the right support one of the things we also do is as part of our application process it does say on our website that if you want help with your application then we actually provide you into work service and so that actually someone can sit down with a mentor so you might have somebody who knows what they want to say but it's not very good actually writing it down for all sorts of reasons um so what they can do is go to the into work service and they could actually sit there with somebody from the into work service tell them what they want on the application form and somebody will actually physically write it for them um so yeah as you know as long as it's truthful and somebody's not writing something that's not truthful it's absolutely fine so we provide you know a lot of support and say I'm I'm constantly in that feedback loop without employing networks as to how we can improve okay thanks like john and thank you very much oh did you want to follow us just one more point to everybody um doing obviously great work to help people um council Bradbury mentioned the university event last month which was fantastic one thing came out of that was that a lot of new university people don't realize that they are new universe so it's just like to bear in mind to help bring those people in without them in knowing that they need to help so at their point i'm allowed to claim my interest i've got a lot of the moral case of oppressive compulsive disorder so i mean and i didn't know i had that until i was diagnosed following grief counseling father my father's death so it's an example of um of how of how how how we're learning much more about this area and councilor shivers point is well made and we'll and we will and we will try and reflect on that and the motion that was passed and and put it and we are trying to adapt policies as an administration to reflect the reflect the the new the new founded lightning that we enlighten that enlightenment event and it that has been seen in this area so so well picked but good point well made councilor and um we'll reflect on that following on this scrutiny meeting okay uh no further questions so uh let's let's let's wrap this up uh thank you very very much for uh coming here despite uh being somewhat delayed um as as an ex DWP uh partnership manager uh i've got to say the work that you've you've talked about tonight is incredibly impressive so thank you very very much for for that uh and we will obviously uh feedback are and force us on the way forward so thank you it's very good scrutiny committee and me and thank you have a good evening just in time for the arsenal Chelsea kickoff okay um we will move very quickly while uh our guests are leaving um to correspondence update okay just going on to the correspondence update then um so the last time you had a correspondence update was january um so you can see in the uh the the report uh as part of papers that has been an awful lot of correspondence received and sent and responses received back since then uh most of the responses have been received there's two full responses to the weighted one is from last month the busking strategy so they're still within time to get a response to that and the other full response that's required is for um the confidential letter following scrutiny of the Atlantic Wharf proposals in January so i suggest chair i just seek a response to that and then the public letter that went out for the Atlantic Wharf um you did receive a response to the recommendation you made but you haven't received a response to the requests for information uh some of that is is because things that you requested are going to take longer than a couple of months to provide um but i will chase up for the bits that could be provided um that's it chair brilliant okay uh there are no urgent items so let's uh crack on with the way forward okay so um obviously with GLL there was some confidential information in that so what i'm suggesting i do is go through the public information for GLL the public information for the employment scrutiny and then we go into post session is is that okay okay um so with GLL there were two parts to it you were looking at the leisure management contract and you were also looking at the audit whales recommendations and progress in implementing those so if i start with the leisure management contract um the presentation you received showed a positive trajectory in terms of meeting contract requirements in terms of service provision the reach specific schemes for specific demographics and um you could still see the impact of the pandemic 90 percent membership rates um etc there was also a recognition uh that they need to target groups and ensure access and that they're looking to boost membership via social prescribing working with partners um looking at different demographic groupings so they're recognizing they need to do more um not least to try and help it be a sustainable uh service in the future but also because of the whole remit about why they're a social enterprise and looking to actually provide health and well-being services uh so they're looking at usage patterns so that they can tackle downtime and they're recognizing that it's key that they understand non-users and how they can actually turn them into clients so you ask um specific questions around pen-twin leisure center they clarified they're relaunching uh what they call the dry side this journey this June and uh GLL offered to hear from local councillors about how best to engage with the community to shape the programme so I guess that's something to welcome in our letter um and they also talked about um the pool being readied by June 2025 that they have had meetings with swim whales um as recommended by the committee um and that GLL were intending to operate the pool which would also include some therapy um uh services as well so is that okay for pen-twin yeah in terms of this uh swimming for school-age pupils uh you heard that um Cardiff is the worst performing local authority in Wales they've put together a new plan with swim whales and the various providers across Cardiff to address that and not only will that be around uh swimming lessons but it will also be around tackling water safety um so welcome welcome that you ask questions around the website and they clarified they are actually in the process of reviewing the whole website to upgrade it and make it more user-friendly there were questions around Pennyland and uh members requested information around the capacity for classes the percentage capacity for classes and also GLL said well we'd marry that with information about expected food usage so they've offered to provide that information um you clarified that moving forward local councillors should expect to be totally engaged in consultation processes so where things are changing across Cardiff local councillors should be in part that process so um can I highlight that in the literature yeah definitely yeah you asked around what market research had been carried out before soft play um were you happy with the response there did you want more details yeah it was it was fairly obvious that they had done that but that research was based on their ability to deliver across quite a number of sites so yeah uh you saw clarification about which officer was involved in the process regarding Pennyland and I believe Chris said that he did the sort of approval but obviously it's in line with the contract so it forms part of that whole contract capital program process and they basically accepted they should have got communication better for Pennyland uh but they did highlight they were up against a very tight timeline because they're trying to move things forward as quickly as possible um so with those comments you okay for the Pennyland yeah yeah uh you asked for details about the men and boys um sessions they offer so we can request those um and GLL offer to provide a breakdown um of clients in members and usage for looking at the 2021 census categories for ethnicities so you can get that information so that was it on the leisure management contract and then I've got the part B stuff sorry what have I missed yeah so part B was the leisure management options appraisal and well that's what they focused on it was around the audit Wales recommendations and progress with that um they have said that they will provide the full report um to to yourselves so just make sure that I request that and we also um requested an update against all the audit Wales recommendations not just uh recommendation five and recommendation six which they focused on in the meeting so with those two bits and bearing in mind the confidential covers obviously the financial information and transformation but with with in the public domain are you content with that yeah okay so moving on to employment services then uh so this is the start of it's it's a massive topic and I think you hopefully you got a full flavor of the work by three areas um you know card of commitment into work and the corporate apprenticeship training program um as Councillor Bradbury said at the start he sees this as a success it's showing a strong cross-directorate and partnership working and I think you have plenty of examples throughout the presentations to evidence that but what's key is is future funding and having some clarity around around that and obviously they highlighted several times about the shared prosperity funding they also highlighted about Welsh government funding and that being being more restricted as public funding generally is so specifically for card of commitment you had a really good overview about the work they do for pre-employment and getting young people ready for work um and that they're doing that across Cardiff but obviously with a focus on those that need it most um that they're linking the work to growth sectors and key for them uh sort of one of their ways of seeing if they're successful is our pupils transitioning to employment educational and all training so the opposite of that is needs numbers and you know it's that um they said the you know you asked well if you had a wish list what would you really want and they were saying we'd like to be able to reach out and cover all schools using the lessons from the work they've done to date because they can't cover all schools um also brought up about uh cedar and cancer grabbery uh confirmed they're looking at this um and he referenced the report to the may cabinet appendix five of that so obviously I'll I'll have a look at that but cedar came up several times and he he did say um about getting the data and and so I'll um I'll look at that when I drop the letter as well so was there anything else you wanted to say for Cardiff commitment I know you were impressed with what you've heard so pleased with that yeah the inter-work services again they now can provide support across Cardiff and uh for everyone in Cardiff because of the changes to the way funding is is provided so they they talked you through the range of of work that they do from light touch to full support for those out of work to those in work looking to work skill lots of examples of the work they do with employers the different learning pathways they offer the mentoring um the work through Cardiff works the trainee posts they offer etc and they took you through the different younger people older people uh bane and people with disabilities so um they gave examples of all the work they do that they highlighted that for them again the issue is the funding only one year left of shared prosperity and no clarity making it difficult to plan but they also highlighted uh that they would welcome more commitments from employers around providing support support and placements for people with disabilities um and um that they want to strengthen relationships and local communities as well and that because they're finding that quite a lot of their clients need other support such as well being a mental health support and having those services around so they were sort of highlighting the various issues they face day day to day you ask questions then around the KPI targets and whether they were stretching enough and they they said they think they are given the uncertainty both with funding and in the economic landscape will you contend with that yeah um they said that the target for a black and ethnic minority clients will be set in collaboration with a race quality task force they clarify but they go to homeless individuals and they work with them um in their in supported housing etc they clarified around neurodiversity the compost of third sector um and they recognize there is work that they could do to help employers understand um neurodiversity and um the offer and and what people with uh who have neurodiverse conditions uh can bring you know the value they add um and it's sort of aligned with that as well they're raised with employers around if you anonymize the recruitment process that could have a big benefit and they clarified major projects and social value does include ISV and will include other major projects going forward so it's not just the Atlantic Wolf which is the one referenced in the corporate plan but there will be the others as they come on stream as well so that was it for inter-work anything you wanted to ask yeah cat's fishermen so it's just um the point that it's uh universal traits well and conditions yes thank you very much no i thought the um i thought every level they answered every question extremely well as well as having a really good story to tell moving on then to the corporate apprenticeships and trainees uh you asked how they promote those and they said they advertise them um and they also promote a via inter-work and their ring fenced card of residence uh you asked about monitoring progression and they said yes they can they do that they have a low dropout rate um and they can provide disaggregated data um because as an employer uh they said they work with people at one of the reasons they have a low dropout rate it's obviously the real living wage but the other is the fact they do a lot of work with uh with them about the various career paths that are available within the council but they also work with inter-work you suggested working with trade unions as well um to offer apprenticeships and they said they do work with them um and again um in terms of neurodiversity um they said they're taking it very seriously and they will reflect on it further following this meeting so um was there anything else you want to capture it on corporate mentorship so the out output from tonight's meeting is is you've got um in your papers you had contextual information about card of economy um is there anything else you'd like in terms of information that you think would be useful for this short scrutiny in terms of that contextual information or would you feel like yeah well they they pretty much had us completely covered in there okay it feels like i'm not sure what uh whoever you feel that uh but every question we feel completely go back so so when you were talking about this in your work programming the idea was that it would be a two parts scrutiny yeah um context setting today and then doing deep dives do you still feel there's a need for deep dives or i genuinely don't think don't think there is a need because that was just incredibly impressive put your mic on sorry i still don't feel that um women and girls were covered um in in the statistics you know it just wasn't there was it so that that's could i make a suggestion then that the letter that goes from tonight's scrutiny we were request that disaggregated data and then i'll obviously circulate that round and then if there are concerns we program it that in for a deep dive but that won't be for May's committee that would be a future committee would that work yeah it obviously it's not just about disaggregated data it's about putting in place the plans to address the different issues for the different types of people we have in the city and those who come into the city to work as well i think that there's quite a lot there as well so absolutely great the way they answer questions and the information that they provided in comparison especially to the thing before but um you know i just feel because it's such a large cohort and we've got an incoming problem with over 50 50s women okay shall we have a look at that data first though and then and then make a decision from there if you want me that's probably will that be wise do we want to go into um yeah before we do um just to let remind members then that the next committee meeting will be the 14th of May Tuesday the 14th of May and that's a 430 start and then we'll just go into uh we're going to closed session now if that's right