Transcript

Hello, everybody. I am Councillor Clare, Clare Potter, and I chair the Skills Economy and Growth Scrutiny Commission. I'd like to welcome you all to the meeting, to all our guests present in our meeting room, and to everyone watching online. This meeting is being recorded and live streamed now. Please, can you all keep your microphones on mute throughout the meeting? This will prevent audio feedback. If you're still getting feedback, please turn off nearby devices. If you'd like to speak, please raise your hand to get my attention. State your name and affiliation before you make a comment. The chat function must not be used to have conversations with other participants or to provide personal information. Please only use the chat function to alert me that you wish to speak, to raise points of order, or to report tech problems. This is a formal meeting of Hackney Council. Please note the press may be in attendance. The rights of the press and public to record and film the meeting will apply. So, item one. Have we had any apologies for absence, Tracy? No. Just to note, Councillor Martins is attending online. If we can just do a quick introduction throughout the room. If we start with members first, on my back row. Through the responsibility of Sternhof run. Try to find small positions. High, Councillor Sadek, Councillor there, and where we embed our information. Aye, Councillor Sadek, Councillor of Kings Park and the Vice Chair, we have SAG. Councillor Davis, Stoke Newton Ward. select Root, Victoria Ward. Councillor Pinkerton, Hello underneath Ward. Councillor tune of Wood. Councillor Robert's County, Member of the Commission. Would you like to introduce yourselves? Hi, I'm Tina Dempsey. I'm the Assistant Director of HR and OD. Hi, I'm Dijon Harvey, Assistant Director of Employment Skills and Adult Learning. And if we go to the back row. Hi, my name is Rotimi Agilori. I'm the Assistant Director for Procurement and Energy Services. And I'd also like to welcome to the meeting, Councillor Harold Williams. Would you just like to say a couple of words, Councillor Williams? Councillor Williams, Cabinet Member for Employment, HR and Equalities. Thank you, Councillor. We also have Suzanne. I was scanning the room for you and I got... Suzanne, please. Hi, everybody. Suzanne Johnson, Director of Regeneration Economy and Housing Development. Thank you. Welcome all. Ah, oh, sorry. Anish, I'm the Head of Empowerment Engagement and Partnerships. Thank you. Welcome, Anish. Item two, urgent items. There aren't any. And the order of business is as laid out. Item three, declarations of interest. Do members have any interest to declare? Thank you, members. OK, onto the substantive item, which is jobs and skills and outcomes in Hackney. Job outcomes and skills are crucial for London and local economies. Having good job outcomes and skills are crucial, vital in reducing in-work poverty and creating positive opportunities, improving life chances for our residents and their families. The Commission is aware that different sectors like finance, technology, creative interests, to name but two, require specific skills and need a local workforce that is readily available too. Identifying good quality jobs, the right skills and having relevant training programmes is vital to making sure that we enable our residents to adapt to changes in the economy. This meeting is to explore the job outcomes and successes in Hackney from the work by employment skills and adult learning, ensuring that residents have the skills and jobs needed now and in the future. And to consider the Council's use of its apprenticeship levy, skill development programme for its workforce, as well as pathways for residents into employment in the Council. The discussion will cover the following areas. Employment and training outcomes, jobs and skills for Londoners and adult skills, fund outcomes, apprenticeship programmes and social value. The presentation to support this discussion is the updated presentation in the supplementary agenda on pages 9 to 35 in the agenda. So without further ado, we welcome everybody. I'd like to hand over to Councillor Carol Williams, the Cabinet Member for Employment, Human Resources and Equalities, who will set out for the discussion tonight. Thank you, Councillor Williams. Thank you, Chair. A quick overview rather than details of the presentation that will be made tonight. As you've said, skills are crucial for economic growth and the government is focused on boosting skills, increasing productivity and bringing together central and local government businesses, training providers and unions to meet the skills need for the next generation to kickstart economic growth. And so what you'll hear this evening is a bit of what the Council has delivered. In Hackney, we've developed our own successful employment pathways programme, enabling the delivery of the Corporate Apprenticeship Scheme, supported internships and traineeship opportunities for our residents. I'm not going to dwell on the Corporate Apprenticeship Scheme. You've heard about that a number of occasions in these meetings, but I do just want to point out a couple of things for the Commission. The number of apprenticeships starts have increased across London. The numbers started to fall during the pandemic. They've since began to increase again. However, while stark figures in London have surpassed the pre-pandemic levels, we're yet to reach pre-pandemic figures here in Hackney. The Corporate Programme delivers new starts as well as supporting existing staff through high-level opportunities, creating a much-needed talent pipeline in those areas where there's either a diversity gap or where there are demands and challenges for recruitment. With upcoming government changes to the way that skills levy is spent, there'll be an ever-increasing need for a strategic approach to ensuring both young people have access to the jobs that they need to kickstart their careers, whilst also balancing the need to give existing staff upskilling opportunities so that they can remain competitive in a fast-changing labour market. And then I just kind of want to spend a bit of time focusing on partnership delivery. We can't chair, deliver everything ourselves, can't deliver apprenticeships, jobs and training by ourselves. The council has to work in partnership to be able to deliver more and maximise outcome for our residents. And that's why we work in partnership with the Hackney, across the Hackney apprenticeship network, why we deliver serviceable value gains through the council supply chain, and why we have partnership arrangements such as leading inclusive futures with technology. It's a partnership between Eastlington Tower, Hamlets, Camden and Hackney. And then there's also Injust Health and Work programme for residents living with health conditions or disabilities or who have been unemployed for a long time. And there's the recently launched Life Sciences Coalition as well. So there's a lot that's already been done across the piece in partnership. And you'll get some insight into that via the LIFT programme when the presentation is made. The council supply chain already delivers jobs, apprenticeship opportunities and training from regeneration projects in Section 106, but there's capacity to deliver even more. Injust has run a number of job fairs in Hackney aimed at residents with disabilities, migrants, older workers, and they've worked with the Hareda community to deliver tailored work and employment support programmes for young people in that community. Then there are the jobs in the health and life sciences sector and growth sector in London as well as across the UK. In 2024, the sector showed a growth of nearly 6% per year with a turnover of nearly 280 billion and 34 billion of investments. By 2032, London will have an additional life science lab and office space. And these developments will accommodate 80,000 jobs. And by 2030, London's economy will have contributed an additional 13, nearly just over 13 billion to UK research and development spending. Last week, the LIFT programme brought boroughs hosted an Ignite Your Imagination. It was an all-day STEM event bringing together children from 300 schools, sorry, 300 children from six schools, with scientists working in medicine, 3D printing climate scientists and giving them hands-on opportunities. Prackney has made a commitment to connecting residents with opportunities in the life science sector, developing skills pathway, increasing employability and strengthening recruitment practices to promote equality and actively connect diverse local talent with opportunities across the sector. The week before last, I had the opportunity to attend the London Health Accelerator for Social Enterprise pitch, try saying that, to hear from enterprise leaders about innovative solutions that their organisations are focusing on to improve health outcomes for local residents. And the labour market and how partners work is due to go through even more changes, giving us the levers that we will require as a council to deliver even more employment and skills outcomes for our residents. Connect to work. We'll see changes in the way that disabled people, residents with health needs and additional barriers to employment receive support. The London Growth Plan is about to be published chair as well. And we'll see all sorts in there that identifies key drivers across the employment and skills landscape, including housing, health, energy and environment. And then there's our own economic development plan. Again, that is also in development. And that will need to deliver benefits from residents through economic growth. It will need to tackle poverty and inequality. And the plan will also need to acknowledge the imperative of climate emergency. And so I started off by saying we can't deliver economic development alone. And we do need to work alongside business partners as key stakeholders to help our residents get the skills that they need to get access to good, quality, secure jobs. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Williams. Thank you, Councillor Williams. I just want to welcome as well online, we have got Councillor Robert Chapman, who is the Cabinet Member for Finance, Insourcing and Customer Service. So he's here specifically because we wanted to look at the kind of links between procurement and education and skills. So I don't think you're going to come in at this point, are you, Councillor Chapman, but you may answer questions. No, no, but I'm going to recognise all the links which exist at the moment and need developing. OK, thank you. OK, without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Dijon for the main presentation. Thank you, Chair. So, yeah, I'm going to, with Tina, we're going to go through the jobs and skills and also apprenticeship outcomes in Hackney linked to the request from SEG. So I'm going to start, the presentation is going to run through initially Hackney Works for the job outcomes, because predominantly job outcomes are delivered through Hackney Works. When I talk about Hackney Works, I'm talking mainly about the majority of the employment learning service. that Hackney Works encompasses our employment, delivery, employer engagement and our apprenticeship function. So if we go, if you could just skip through to slide three, please. We're just going to talk through employment and training outcomes initially. So to give some background to Hackney Works, this shows the case of breakdown, but just to give some context about what Hackney Works does. Hackney Works is a service that was established in 2012. In 2017 slash 18, we pivoted the service to on board residents who are also in work. So we have established and adopted a no wrong door service, which means we don't just see people that need our service specifically for support with writing CVs, etc. But we work with individuals who need to change careers, while working in jobs where they're underpaid or where their employment status or equalities are not fit for purpose. So we look to support everybody who could and should be in good work across the borough and the council. So you can just see here some brief numbers on the top right hand corner. You can see a chart there that talks about the total number of residents that are on our caseloads. So you'll see a trend here. The vast majority of the clients that we work with are from black and global majority backgrounds, which you can see on the chart there, 717 are from that group. And then we've got a breakdown which shows under 25, over 50 of those that are women. It's important to articulate these numbers because this is what, at least in some part, dictates how we strategically set out doing what we're doing with Hackney Works, where we engage residents, how we engage them, and the types of funding and provisions that we deploy for our residents. It's done in an iterative way, taken on board labour market demographics, trends, and also what we're finding out hyper-locally to do with deprivation in the borough. So different parts of the borough will operate differently depending on the deprivation trends there. So the next slide, please. You'll see the Hackney Works initial assessments. So initial assessments are effectively what a resident, the first portfolio that a resident gets when they come to the Employment and Skilled and Adult Learning service. So this will also be where we don't just ask residents about employment, but this is where they establish what they need around education and employment, and direct them to where we feel they are best suited and could be outside of the service. As Councillor Williams has articulated, working in partnership is just a key tenet of what it is that we do. The LIFT partnership, which I'll go into in more detail in a few slides, also benefit from this initial assessment. So you can see the numbers here, just in terms of the trends. So between November and December last year, 933 residents had an initial assessment. You'll also see on the graph, and sorry, it's slightly small. The trend across the year tends to be the same year on year, and this is indicated by labour market. It's indicated by just social factors and socio-economic factors. You can see it's slightly lower in December because it tends to be a case of recruitment into jobs in December, happens from August through into October, and then starts to tail off, but you can see that there. You'll also see what we've got here is data around the number of IID assessments conducted by HUB. So we have three HUBs in the borough in Hoxton, Homerton, and Woodbury Down. Homerton actually is Hackney Central, so the reason that number is higher is because of the population numbers in the centre of Hackney are higher. Also the deprivation figures around the east and centre of Hackney are higher, so we naturally see more initial assessments in that area. We're also more resourced in that way. Using the other hubs, we operate a satellite model. But this isn't to suggest that we only operate from those three locations. We also operate from libraries, community centres, and again, working in partnership. Stuff like the Good Growth Hub on the Olympic Park, on an ad hoc and sessional basis, we'll operate from there, and we'll operate from various different sites, depending on what our services and needs is, depending also on what employer engagement data we're getting around the jobs available and where they are. So we were in a partnership with the London Legacy Development Corporation. They have a project called the Shared Agreement Model, and that is to maximise the opportunities on the Olympic Park for residents of the London Legacy Development Corporation and surrounding boroughs. And the primary reason for that is just working in partnership and also having on-site, in-situ members of staff. So we have seconded a member of staff out of other boroughs to make sure that our residents can benefit from development, such as East Bank and, you know, the growth sectors that are happening there. Next slide, please. So this next slide articulates the referral pathways into Hackney Works, which I feel is an important indication. You can see there that half of our referrals come from DWP. It's imperative that we have a good relationship working with DWP, because they are, for the most part, the first base that residents will see and also where residents are directed to. They are the government's agency around work and skills. So residents will be referred to various agencies, such as Indius. That's because William is highlighted, but it's important for us to see that this trend maintains that a large portion of our residents are coming from DWP, because they'll be referred into DWP from many different areas. We can see self-referrals and then word of mouth. Again, word of mouth and self-referrals are important. It articulates the success that we have. You know, our service is funded predominantly through Section 106. We don't use a large amount of funding to do much commons and engagement around our service. So we rely at the moment heavily on word of mouth and self-referrals, which also indicates that we optimize the reputation of our service. So we place that quite highly of bespoke nature of what it is that we do. So I should have said at the beginning, but a key tenet of our work is having a bespoke way of operating with each of our clients or residents. So it's not a case of being no wrong door. You get a one size fits all of our residents. Our advisors, our job brokerage teams, employer engagement, they operate in a way which is very much based on what our residents are telling us that they need to either upskill or to access employment opportunities. We're a positive disruptor of industries in terms of we work with organizations in the borough to look at the way they recruit and understand, for example, an organization that might have a graduate scheme that only recruits graduates from a university from outside of London. We'll work with organizations in that way to ensure that they are understanding the local context and are accessing local labour as opposed to just advertising roles and only screening individuals as and where they're coming from. That approach is one that doesn't really take into consideration the unique factors of the borough which place people in deprivation. Next slide, please. And this slide articulates the job starts. So you can see them in the top right hand corner, the number 230 job start between January and December of last year. We've also got the adversity breakdowns there for you. And as I said before, you'll see a trend throughout the black and grown majority job starts initial assessments in case the numbers are going to be higher. are going to be higher. You've got women next on the list of the hundred and eight. And then you've got over 50 that 32 that in itself is a level of success. We've had a marked area of focus on work with over 50s. And that comes down to engagement by job fairs. We have increased the number of job fairs and engaging activities that we've done specifically with over the over 50s. And we've done that by liaising with them to understand what are the type of interventions that they do want. Where would they like the interventions to take place and how should they operate? Sorry. And then you can see again the trend that I spoke about before in terms of initial assessment at the different sites. The number of jobs and the outputs consistent with Homerton being the centre of the borough and deprivation being there. Another key metric to point out is the number of London living wage opportunities at 90%. Of course, we want this to be 100%. We don't have complete ownership over that. These figures are not just roles that we have control over or that we're bringing to residents. These figures include jobs that residents are planning for themselves and they come to us for support in the plan for those roles. So I'm quite proud that that figure stands at 90% because we know there are many, many jobs that are not paying London living wage. But to have 230 jobs coming through Hackney Works in a year and 90% of them being at London living wage means that we are, you know, we're moving in the right direction in terms of supporting our residents to be able to keep up with the increasing cost of living. Next slide, please. The next slide breaks down the jobs by sector. So the top three sectors are public services and admin, property and construction, hospitality and events management. So public services and administration being a top one with 65 out of that 230 that you saw on the slide before. That really alludes to local authorities. So this is looking at people that are moving into jobs at London Borough of Hackney predominantly, but also other councils. One of the reasons why this is one of the highest sectors by Jobstart, it's an intentional focus for us on supporting residents to gain the skills for adult learning, but also just through the way our, you know, our now matrix accredited employment service operates. And the reason we've done that is that we've been hearing for years through kind of evaluation and surveying with our residents that jobs at councils is, if not the, one of the number one desires of our residents. Our advisors will tell you, our team leaders will tell you that probably every other resident that comes into a centre, if it's not every resident, will ask about jobs at Hacking Council and will ask about jobs at a council. So it's always been something that they aspire to. Years ago, we wouldn't have been proud to talk about the number of people that are going to jobs in public services because it was deridery, if I'm going to be honest with you. The numbers were single digit figures and now we're at a figure in a year with 65 people going into local authority jobs. We've done that by understanding the pathways into local authority jobs better. Our own pathways here, working with our apprenticeship team in the service and also with HR and OD to understand how we can overcome those barriers to support more and more people into apprenticeships and jobs at the council. And we only actually see that being able to increase and we're looking at strategies in terms of how we can increase that, working with the new joint venture and also the new apprenticeship regulations and guidelines and reforms that have come into place, which should enable us to provide more access to entry level apprenticeships for residents of the borough. So this is just a yearly comparison, just to show that we are tracking in a right direction. There is an upward trend in the number of job starts and initial assessments. Last year, initial assessments were at 817. Sorry, not last year, 2023. In 24, they were 933, so an increase of 12.5%. And job starts with an increase of 7.5% from 23 to 24. These reforms have come about, again, like I said, we've worked with the engagement team at the council to understand how we can better serve our residents. So the way that we do run our service is informed by our residents. But there are other factors that are outside of stuff that we've done intentionally. As you can see that I've listed here in terms of cost of living, more significant impact on residents. So more residents are likely to be coming to us. We have increased the effectiveness of our relationship and partnership with DWP in light of skills devolution that was impending and is now in place. And that had an impact, an increased impact of people, you know, being affected by cost of living, being able to be referred into our service. We run joint engagement events with DWP and Jobcentre Plus to ensure that there's almost a seamless handover between them and us for our residents to be able to access support. And then you've got stuff like the suffering of the labour market and just residents struggling with a change in the benefit system. Many of our advisors work with Head Help or the Money Help and Advice Service to support residents in terms of accessing benefits and making sure they're maximising the benefits that they have available to them. And in doing that, we managed to find out and establish where jobs and income increases are what essentially is keeping them in a benefit trap and look to work with them to that end. Next slide, please. This slide is just here to give you an indication of one of the partnership programmes, the predominant partnership programmes that we'll work with. So the LIST programme, which is leading and increases the future through technology, as will be articulated, is a partnership between Acne, Townhundert, Islington and Camden. And the premise behind this, it started and was funded by Gron a number of years ago. I don't remember off the top of my head, apologies. But the premise behind this was that we found, as we probably all know, there was a lack of representation in knowledge economy roles or roles in diversity, tech and the good environment was stark. Something needed to be done, the opportunity to use a grant to establish a programme was taken and was developed and has been running for a number of years and has now been extended for a further two years from this point. And, you know, as the programme, the hallmarks of the programme are looking at diversity, so it's not just about working with employers in these sectors to look at what jobs are available, but it's about creating work placement programmes, about creating job carbon programmes, and it's about having honest conversations with organisations about the practices that they have been following for years, which has compounded, essentially, a lack of diversity in their workforce. And we're proud to see that this is having an impact with some of the most flagship organisations across the part of the boroughs in changing the way they're working. And there are many case studies that have come out of the LIFT programme, of where, you know, one example is where a whole workplace programme, which was their own flagship workplace programme, have been markedly improved by working on the LIFT programme, where they've now been able to actually say they are recruiting people locally with disabilities from diverse backgrounds and it is having a marked increase on the level of engagement they are now having with their local areas, and also people are now encouraged to apply for positions with these organisations. And I mean, that underpins everything that we do. This is not just about us doing the work to increase X, Y, Z, the number of people going into opportunities, but it's about raising the aspirations as well. The LIFT programme is the hallmark of that, and it's about teaching residents of the borough that there are places for them in organisations like Amazon in the borough, like Google, like Habas in our neighbouring boroughs. I'm just going to jump into the adult skills figures now. So, and again, Tricks, thank you. So jobs and skills for Londoners, so just to outline first and foremost why we, as a service and as a council, initially felt that it was necessary to apply for this funding. It is top-up funding. We have devolved skills funding, adult skills funding, so it wasn't something that was incumbent upon us to apply for, but we did realise that this funding would allow us to elevate the skills provision from level two to level three as a minimum. So just, you know, for those who don't know, the devolved skills funding only funds up to level two. Job and skills for Londoners allowed us to increase that and start delivering level three, but also to have a directed level of skills provisions in growth sectors, digital health, social care hospitality and green. We were aware at the time that we were embarking on work to look at how we can maximise the opportunities for residents in the green economy. And we saw this as a key component of our ability to do that, to be able to fund specifically green skills courses. And we have been doing that. You can see a number of courses there. So we've procured and delivered several local providers of being commissioned to deliver this. And again, that's another premise of what it is that we aim to do is empowering and building capacity of local commission providers to deliver skills in the borough. So that it isn't just coming from large organisations like ourselves or our partner colleges in the borough, but that community based provisions are also able to tap into supply chain at the borough to deliver skills to residents of the borough. Good job outcomes, 39 job outcomes across sectors. And that is just from working with job and skills. Sorry, job and skills for Londoners funding. And as you can see, we've exceeded our target for health and social care in terms of our target being 15 job outcomes and 16 were achieved there. We have another year left of job and skills for Londoners funding and we intend to continue commissioning local external service provisions and maintain the level that we're doing here. The number of green skills courses have increased substantially. In the last year, we've increased the number of courses available, number of learners and courses available in green by 67% from last year to this year. And we couldn't do that without job and skills for Londoners because our adult skills funding does not, at the time, didn't include green skills specifically and was ring fenced for level two, from entry level three to level two delivery. And skills and training, this is on our main adult skills funding delivery. So I just thought I'd put a slide in here to articulate, just the next slide again, please, just to articulate here the number of unique learners. So that's 2,293 unique learners in one year accessing our adult learning function, which also equals 3,813 enrolments. So it's just essentially the number of enrolments is always going to be higher than the unique learners for which reasons, because we don't double count specifically, but learners can enrol on any number of courses within reason, essentially. So, you know, we continue to deliver these accredited courses. Our courses are delivered with peripatetic learning, training, should I say. So that's to go back to what I declared at the top in terms of we have our centres, our three centres across the borough, but we feel it's important to work in collaboration with children centres, community centres and libraries. And we deliver from, I believe at the moment, 37 different locations in the borough to just ensure that we've got that reach and that residents aren't having to, you know, where unnecessary travel to us to learn and that they can learn almost on their doorstep where possible. We try and aim where possible to run specific courses in specific parts of the borough for demographies where we know there's deprivation, a lack of access to skills and learning. And we'll continue to do that working across the council, working with services like libraries and culture to access venues. And now I'm going to jump into the apprenticeship programme. So I'll do a couple of slides and then I'll hand over to Tina. So we were asked about number of apprenticeships, you can see, and Councillor Williams alluded to it. We haven't, you know, we haven't reached the number of apprenticeships that we had pre-pandemic. And you can see that 2021, our apprenticeship numbers are at 56, 2018, 2019 was the highest number, and that was before pandemic numbers started to take off at 58. We are now on an upward trend than we have been since 22, 23. There are still going to be a number of factors around which stop us from reaching those figures. We're reaching those figures of 58, 56 new apprenticeship starts. At the time, services had more budget available to them to be able to recruit more apprentices. They had more headcounting services. So we're proud of the fact that we're an upward trend. There's a strategic focus on working with specific services around our service redesigns and teaching them and getting them to understand the importance of apprenticeships to that. So you can see that at the moment, 24, 25 are at a figure of 34. We should reach a figure of at least 37 by the end of this month. And by the end of the financial year, we should see a number of 40. And as you can see, since the highest number previous to 23, 24 was 28 in 2021, 22. So as I said, we are an upward trend and we're continually looking at strategies that we need to adopt. We do feel that the reforms in apprenticeships will allow us to have a permanent strategic approach and look at increasing the numbers, especially given the reduction of the minimum term for apprenticeships and also the potential removal of functional skills prerequisites for apprenticeships. That can definitely be a determining factor, which means that people from certain socioeconomic backgrounds are not going to be able to access entry-level apprenticeships in particular. Next slide, please. And this is just an information slide to articulate the Hackney Apprenticeship Network. So Hackney Apprenticeship Network sits within our Empowering Engagement Team. It was established in 2018 as part of the manifesto with the basic premise, not the basic, but the premise was to adopt and to roll out the effectiveness of our own apprenticeship programme, which at the time, and still is, but was definitely the flagship apprenticeship programme for local authorities at the time. It was standing at 128 apprentices and a minimum of 114. So we aim to roll this out into the wider borough to be able to use the apprenticeship levy at the council to support businesses in the borough, particularly small and medium enterprises, to be able to recruit, create and recruit into apprentices in their businesses and to use apprenticeships as a means for business growth, business survival, but also in terms of their own workforce development. So you can see some numbers in there in terms of the number of employers that we have in our apprenticeship network. It's exceeded 200 employers at the moment. We do a lot of work with schools and the Hackney World maintain schools, and this actually allows us to support schools in teaching, in training, teaching assistance, which is a key area and a key entry point into education for many of our residents of the borough. I'll hand over to Tina now. Thank you, Dejan. So, next slide. So this slide just represents, out of the four different strands of apprenticeships, the area that sits under HR and OD is the CDQ programme. So the career development qualification programme. At present, we've just got a breakdown of apprenticeships across on this slide, across the council, but at present we have 50 apprenticeships within the CDQ programme at the present time. Next slide, please, Trish. So if we look here, we've got a plan to achieve 100 apprenticeships in place. The apprenticeships in place, as Dejan just mentioned, and that's the 10 in parking enforcement. There's an ICT restructuring, which supports our plans in terms of our digital agenda and transformation. And five vacancies offered there. There's the early years educator. It remains difficult to recruit and retain, sorry, with the two Rs. However, this is about where we need to also be thinking about how we can grow our own and think about the CDQ programme as well as that. We've got some vacancies that have been offered, one offered, one withdrawn, as you can see on the data there. So that just gives you a split across our directorates as the number just shown. In terms of the CDQ programme, we've got a renewed focus here, but we really need to think about our upskilling of our staff. When we talk about and you see more wider around the hard to recruit to areas of the council. So where can we look to grow our own? Where are we looking at succession planning? So really what I'm starting to do is build that strategy around what we need to do in terms of upskilling our staff. So at the moment, there's also still that myth about apprenticeships. If you're a member of staff and we're doing some work and working with Dujon on the team on how we engage with our staff groups, how we engage with our line managers because of capacity. Sometimes there is a disparity in the fact that we need 20% learning, which is probably a day a week for a full time worker. Off the job training, what does that look like? But it's more about as well aligning the apprenticeships to what's the skills we need of our workforce. So we're doing, as it states on the slide, we've got the critical skills project, which really also focuses on those functional skills. And with some of the changes with the reforms around apprenticeships, that's going to help support us as an organisation there. So there's also about the eligibility of our apprenticeships and what we can offer. So we do have fixed term contract staff here. If their apprenticeship is going to be longer than their fixed term contracts. So that's the conversations we need to have also with employees who are here and working with us on visas. So there's the eligibility piece that we really need to expand. But the main thing is what is our strategy? What are our skills? So we're doing skills audits using the programme and really identifying that we have the right people with the right skills at the right time in terms of how the council is moving forward with its workforce. Because there is some, some people are looking at apprenticeships as a total change of career. But can we accommodate that as an organisation? Is that a pathway we can look at? So there's lots of questions around that that we're looking at as we build that strategy for our workforce, falling out of the people on OD plan. This slide just gives you an indication of the apprenticeship levy pleasures of the year since 2019-20 to now. We are well ahead this year of the apprenticeship levy pleasures. I mean, there's an obvious reason for that is around the salaries going up at the council. So year-on-year salaries do increase. So our apprenticeship levy number, a levy amount is going to increase. So the amount we then pledge is also going to be higher. But given the difficulties in keeping the apprenticeship programme at over 100 apprentices and the number of new higher apprenticeship numbers going down, as seen as I've articulated, there's a bit of focus on the council's CDQ programme and using our own apprenticeship levy to upskill our staff, which is really, you know, a kind of key principle which supports our ability to give people access into the council. Because if we don't do this, we could potentially create a bottleneck where individuals who have accessed the council aren't moving up through the pay rank essentially and aren't getting the necessary skills. So we use our CDQ programme to very much do that. And that is why we have the apprenticeship levy pledges where they are. I mean, the aim is to spend as much of our levy as possible without giving it back to the treasury to make sure that we can mobilise it for our staff and for our residents. One of the areas that we also are looking at this year as part of our strategy is in terms of our contracts with our training providers. How can we get more effective use out of those contracts? And also when we look at the levy spend across the qualification levels, as you can see on the slide, it says a minimum between three and 27,000. It's not always the highest level of apprenticeship that is the most expensive. So that's one of the things that we are actually looking at. So it's hard to actually, we want to strike that balance between people coming into their first roles as well as developing the skills and the careers. But it's really important, I think, that we really interrogate those contracts and make sure we've got the right providers rather than going out to a whole number. How can we look at that moving forward? In terms, next slide please, Jay. Yep, so just pulling out some of these challenges and opportunities that you see on this slide. I mean, I've started to just mention previously, but when we look at what's our opportunities, as we're transforming our workforce and looking at the roles that we have, how do we redesign those roles when we know what the skills are that are required for that? How can we build apprenticeships that can help us actually spend more of the levy and ask for that qualification within those roles as well? And what's the type? So I suppose I'm picking on planning and areas of the business like that at this time when we look at those hard to recruit to areas. And so I think that's going to be one of the real focuses for us in terms of taking some opportunities moving forward and including that study through apprenticeships as we move forward. So there's a number of options that we can do. And also, is there any posts that we can ring fence with that growing your own idea that we can ring fence where we can have newly hired apprenticeships come in? So this is all part of what we're exploring as officers at the moment as we move forward. And then in terms of the skills development and pathways, everything that we've been saying in terms of the skills shortages, how we want line managers to work with us in now and in the future so that we can make sure that we're really maximising our levy spend where we can't just make those spends through partnerships and through the newly qualifieds. So it's about being as effective as possible as we can be. And just the last section now is on social value outcomes, specifically asked for. This slide is really narrative to talk about what and how, essentially. What is social value in terms of the amount of goods and services procured for the council suppliers and the supply chain? It looks at jobs, apprenticeships, training opportunities. We have changed our focus to some extent in terms of operationally, creating and developing a more robust way of reporting and operating with contract managers and also with developers and departments across the council. So developing a reporting framework that captures outcomes from the above work streams, as you can see on fire jobs, apprenticeships, training opportunities, and initiatives working with schools and charitable organisations. How do we do this is really about looking kind of beyond the numbers specifically and also working with organisations to understand how they're going to engage with anchor institutions in the borough and also about education institutions, so school engagement, how they're interacting with community initiatives and volunteering. And, you know, often they want to talk about charitable donations. They do, in cases, work with us to understand how those charitable donations can be made in a way that is impactful based on our local knowledge, as opposed to what we've tried to combat is organisations having a blanket regional or national approach to the way they deliver social value. In the borough, that might not be taken into consideration factors that are unique to Hackney residents and the wider community. Next slide, please. So here, hopefully, you find this useful. This little table matrix outlines the number of outcomes. So the kind of big figure on the right, at over 1,400 opportunities, have been achieved in total between 2021 and 2024. And this is a combination of opportunities linked to Section 106 and universal unilateral undertakings and also procurement. So this is essentially the total supply chain, developers working with the council around buildings, housing region and area regeneration development. So you can see there for Section 106, you've got 99 apprenticeship starts, 98 projected starts in 25, 281 job starts and 76 projected starts in 2025. If you look at those figures, I'm talking about figures from 21 to 24, the 281 job starts from 21 to 24. But based on the new approach and the way that we're working, the figure of 76 projected starts in 2025 should bring around a marked upward trend and an increase in the number of jobs. And we're continually working with the way the employer engagement and partnership team works closely across departments at the council has meant that we've managed to work to increase just a number of opportunities at the council for residents, but also then working with our supply chain and the way that procurement works in doing warm handovers with contract managers. It means that we have essentially a way to work with those contract managers to closely monitor the way that our suppliers are aiming to achieve what they set out in their contracts around employment, skills and adult learning, and just making sure that our local residents are getting access to opportunities via the contract. And where CalFill is spending its money on procuring and partnering, we want to make sure that the jobs and skills attached to that are delivered to our local residents. So you can see, I'm not going to go through all of the numbers because there's a lot there and we've been speaking for some time, but hopefully you've all seen it in the slide decks. And then we've just got a couple of case studies. So it's either specific case study, Highways and Liking Apprenticeship case study, and I will read out what's on the slide. And then the last slide here is just an award that Hackney Works won, working with Matrix. So Matrix is currently the council's temporary recruitment supply chain partner, and as part of the kind of social value commitments that they had there, we established a working relationship with them, which has meant that they work with us to deliver employability workshops, support residents to be able to access employment, and won an award for the PPMA last year, essentially for best partnership and collaboration. So it's just, again, it articulates another reason why partnerships are important and what we're doing to mobilise them, that the internal partnership between us and HR and OD is one that is not easy to benchmark because it doesn't really happen elsewhere. But also having this as a way to work with Matrix, you know, they're an agency, there are hundreds of agencies trying to make the final individual through. This relationship allows us to make sure that local residents are not essentially being siloed out of opportunities on their doorstep, because we act as an agency, but as an agency who works with residents to upskill them before and whilst they're applying for jobs, so that they can get into temporary recruitment. And actually one of the hallmarks of that work stream is that we're proud of the number of individuals who renew their contracts beyond three months, because obviously what we don't want is residents applying for the job by a temporary means with an aim to go permanent, but not being able to do that. And prior to our work with Matrix, and prior to the job recruits taking this tailored approach, like I said before, the numbers are in single digit percentages of people that were actually from application to successful securing of a job in the council. And that is the end of the presentation today. Thank you, Dijon and Tina. There's an awful lot there to unpack. So, before I come over to members, I just thought I'd ask a general question. There's obviously a lot of really good work, and it's been really good to see the development of this service over the time that I've been a councillor. But I was just having a little look at the white paper, Get Britain Working, and obviously it talked about a place-based approach and a commitment to working with local government. I know you've alluded to changes coming down the line in terms of apprenticeships, et cetera. I don't know, have you got any more detail about the kind of opportunities that you think are being alluded to in the government's white paper and what that might mean, you know, for the service you're able to provide? Or is that too vague at this moment in time? To some extent, but there is an element of the white paper that has directly influenced devolution. So the skills devolution means that, you know, the Connecting Work Programme is something that's been developed out of that devolution. So the opportunity for essentially boroughs working with sub-regional partnership to decide whether or not we're going to continue to commission. So in line with previous working through the Work and Health Programme, but devolution will allow us to develop directly. So as a borough, we are going to be doing direct delivery of the Connecting Work Programme, which means that we will be receiving funding and resources to be able to work specifically with residents who are economically inactive and with health and other significant barriers to employment to access opportunities. That is broken down into also working with residents who are in work to sustain employability. So residents who are in work, who have health issues while in work that may be threatening their ability to sustain work. that will be essentially a new facet of our service to be able to work with residents. It will also enable us to work and have some target approaches to how we work with residents with refugee and migrant status, residents with significant disabilities that are not covered by our current delivery and also other residents around drug and alcohol dependency. So essentially it will mobilise us to be able to potentially scale up elements of what we have been doing. You know the service, we operate quite a broad service but previously we were not able to continue funding much of our service because previously without devolution we were operating on year to year funding. The skills devolution means that the funding is longer term from five to six years which means we can strategically plan and have an implementation process in place that works across and integrates us with the private sector, with the VCS sector as well to be able to put those things in place. Yes, you want to answer again? That's right. So yeah, you touched on the growth and skills levy and the changes to the apprenticeships and that is key. We did touch on it throughout the presentation but we haven't really, it's only just been announced in terms of confirmed and formalised but we've been having discussions about the ways in which a short form apprenticeship for example, eight months and in particular, Anish alerted me earlier today is that there's a new standard in meter reading apprenticeship standard in meter reading which again, an eight month apprenticeship in meter reading is a really good sign. It means that that is an apprenticeship that would be accessible to a lot more residents and you know, an eight month apprenticeship there would mean that individuals without functional skills as a prerequisite can still get onto our programme. That has been for some time a barrier for many residents. We've had people apply for our apprenticeship programme and they've not been eligible to get onto the apprenticeship and didn't have functional skills prior to the programme. Even if our screening process has shown effectively that they have all of the necessary experience and competencies to do the job, the apprenticeship standards previously dictate that you have to have your functional skills to get onto the programme. So this is potentially quite significant in working with residents who at the moment are further from the labour market and want to get onto for example level two apprenticeship and they can do their functional skills whilst they're on their apprenticeship. So it could be quite significant in increasing the number of people but also wouldn't any access to people at the moment who it's too big a gap to fill to bridge essentially. And that could even mean that we work better with care leavers. And that's another thing that's come out of the white paper. The US Trailblazer in terms of how we work with care leavers, how we develop a programme which bridges the gap for care leavers from leaving care to getting into meaningful employment. Thank you for that. Yeah, I just want to flag the inflexibility of the current apprenticeship levy as well. And so the changes will make it much more flexible. I think it will deliver more outcomes for businesses as well. It will allow them to use their levy in the way that they would like to use it and deliver more non-apprenticeship training opportunities as well. There's been a lot of criticism over the duration of the apprenticeship programme and the levy and many organisations calling for more flexibility and changes to that. And we are now seeing that that that's going to be coming through. It hasn't happened yet, but with Skills England we will start to realise some of those changes. Thank you. OK, members. So I've got Councillor Smith and Councillor Davies. We'll take those three. Councillor Smith. Yeah, thank you very much, Chair. And I think all this work is amazing what you're doing. I think the achievements are really fantastic. I've been taking notes all the way through, Chair, and I've got a few questions that might relate to different parties over on this side. Is it OK just to rattle through a few of them? I'll be very quick. Are there a yes, no answers? Yeah, of course. OK, so the first one is what are we doing to help over 50s? And do we have demographics within that range, that age group? And do we have any more nuanced stats on the type of personal development skills gained by a lot of these people doing the training? For example, self-confidence, self-esteem, digital literacy, essential life skills, language skills, numeracy, personal agency and independence, mental health, those kind of things. And what percentage of job stats are local employment versus wider London employment? It's the other question. A few more, please. And have we thought about doing an evaluation around how AI may affect the local job market? On apprenticeships, so it supports employers to create and manage and celebrate apprenticeships. Is it part of the Responsible Business Charter? Do we go out and sell that to businesses under the Responsible Business Charter? A few more. And how is the apprenticeship levy budget established? And do we have access to the City of London jobs, of which there are 615,000 and an economic output annually of 97 billion? It's on the doorstep. So I just want to know what we're doing about that. Thank you, Chair. There's quite a lot there. So I think we'll pause there. And who would like to attempt? I mean, you may not have all the stats for some of those questions available. So I'll start, Chair. Just in terms of your answer to how is the apprenticeship levy budget established, it's 1% of the pay bill, some of our salaries budget, which changes and fluctuates on a monthly basis. Yes, sorry. I'll just make a note of all of the questions there, Council. Thanks for the engagement, though. So what are we doing to help Over 50? So essentially we are engaging with Over 50. That's the first thing that we've done in terms of to understand what it is that they want from us to help. I mean, before last year, we hadn't run a consultation with them, a proper consultation with them, since 2019, which we ran in order to design the opportunity hub that is in the Hamilton area. So we've engaged them, done a number of breakfast mornings and sessions with them, job fairs with them and doing those in places where they're already frequenting. So the 50s clubs, for example, doing job fairs there. In terms of the kind of intersectionality, I know you asked about, you know, is there groups within that Over 50s? It's predominantly women at this stage and also women who are seeking to access jobs either to be more social or quite predominantly to increase their digital skills. And that's something which is interlaced with our Digital Bodies Program. So that's one of the things that we find from our Digital Bodies Program in terms of running that program to support older residents, any residents, but it's predominantly targeted older residents to be able to increase the digital literacy so that one, they can feel comfortable returning to a labour market which for the most part kind of ostracises people that, you know, essentially didn't grow up with a digital age. But aside from that, it's about those engagement sessions. So, you know, doing running job clubs and breakfast clubs but also delivering our, kind of, IAG and employment services in areas where they're able to get access to them. So we have our Hackney work delivery now also operates from the Hackney Service Centre and we took that decision because of the fact that we wanted to have a presence in the building where most residents either come voluntarily or have to come to access various services. so we get referrals from the lots of customer services and we'll get referrals from services across the council that will have access to over 50s for many reasons, whether it's social isolation, isolation, isolation, essentially, and other factors. Let me go through the questions. Do we have nuanced stats on softer skills is what I've put here in the over 50s that you were talking about. So we don't, I don't know if we have stats on nuanced stats for over 50s at this stage I might have to take that one away and come back. If we don't have them it's definitely something which we will look to build. I mean, we've done an evaluation of the Hackney work service which has given us, we know how many over 50s we're working with, we know where they are, we know who they are and actually through working with the comms and engagement team and working with UCL we established an insight project and as part of that we've got an engaged group of residents essentially as a focus group so we can go back to them and also we can run stats from ONS etc. and work with policy to get those figures which we, you know, we've run that Hackney worth evaluation and at the moment Anish's team are running a series of workshops across services to understand how we can optimise our service and one of the things they're going to be doing is looking at the groups we're working with and how can we optimise that delivery. I think you asked what percentage of the stats are local employment is national regional employment and so we haven't broken them down in terms of, you know, when we look at those stats we're talking about just employment in general. One of the things that we actually started to move away from about a year or so ago was being hyperly focused on jobs just locally just because there's a risk there if we're just focused on jobs just locally for residents we're essentially compounding our own problem. There are, you know, Hackney's part of a wider ecosystem in London there are many jobs everywhere so we focus on jobs predominantly in the borough, neighbouring boroughs but essentially we work with residents to put them into jobs any and everywhere and, you know, since the pandemic hybrid working, etc. you know, there's a predominant element of our case now is working with people to actually support them into jobs which don't actually have a base so they can work from home because that is again one of the barriers that many residents are facing parents, for example, having access to working from home jobs and jobs that don't have a physical base it's actually one of the ways in which we can support more residents to be able to survive the cost of living and to increase their aspirations and opportunities to get into employment. We've got to the question you had a question about AI so we're not doing much on AI at the moment we're working with a couple of organisations to explore this and explore how AI is affecting the employment and skills support industry and what we are doing or not doing and what we should be doing in that sphere but it's not something that you know we don't have the special people in the house so we're having to liaise with essentially the wider market work with central London forward etc. to be able to embark on that and are apprenticeships included in the responsible business charter? I don't know the answer to that question I'm not sure whether yes Susan give me a nod so that's a yes that they are included in the responsible business charter and everybody has covered that already do we have access to City of London jobs? so we do we definitely have access to City of London jobs you know via CLF we have access to the City of London anyway the LIFT programme in particular is one way in which would definitely have increased and are increased on our access to City of London jobs and Councillor Williams spoke about the Life Sciences Coalition and that talks about City of London and beyond that expand us beyond even CLF into regions in South London and other boroughs with and with London as well across London essentially it's the whole of London and many boroughs have a larger footprint of organisations in life sciences and financial services sector businesses and we're getting access to all of them the shared equipment model that I spoke about that's on the Olympic Park that in itself is going to allow us to get access to the jobs only Olympic Park in the financial quarter and we're seeing that already we're seeing those relationships are being brought in to us so that we can start to have you know increased numbers of our residents getting access to those types of jobs and I'll go back to it again the main thing for us really is about retaining and increasing the level of aspirations so our services are centred around supporting residents to upskill so they've got the aspirations to be able to apply for those jobs one of the big issues in the past has been that residents have been reticent to apply for jobs in the state of London or in financial sectors because they haven't felt their belonging there so the service one of the hallmarks of what we do as a service is about working for residents around their confidence and you know seeing that journey for them and feeling that they can apply for those roles and getting them socialised with going into businesses doing tours and bringing businesses to them to talk about the types of jobs on their doorstep just coming in on AI because AI is incredibly important and yeah there will be a massive impact on the labour market and Dijon's right in terms of how we work to ensure residents have the skills to use AI in a change in labour market but also the other side of the same coin is that AI is increasingly being used to apply for jobs to get help with developing their CV job applications and interview support as well as well so I think we need to look at AI in the round I we've I have had I chair one of the subgroups of CLF so we have developed our work programme for the coming year I cannot remember if we've got AI on there but we have enough room in our work programme to make additions to that work programme so I'll take that back and speak to officers about whether we can put something on the agenda so where Hackney doesn't have the necessary skills to do some of that policy work and development then we can draw on central London forward to do it I wonder before I bring in Councillor Deck I wonder at this point if you could just explain CLF we have got some new councillors to this committee just so they understand how it works which boroughs are involved and you know just some examples of the kind of work CLF do CLF do CLF is central London forward it's a sub-regional partnership 12 London boroughs Hackney Towerhamnets Camden Islington Lambuth that's all I remember Wandsworth Southwark Lewisham City of London Westminster Kensington and Chelsea Haringey Haringey Yes Haringey as a new borough so I mean in short their role is to work kind of with us and for us as boroughs the work programme looks at policy areas so lobbying government understanding policies around you know region employment skills adult learning but one of the big things that they do is bringing us together so that essentially we're not working in silo in terms of combating the problems for our residents but we're doing it together they support us around funding bids actually one of the main functions of them is essentially acting as the accountable body for devolved funding so whether it be from DWP or the GLA Central London Forward acts as the accountable body and they will be for the devolved skills funding that is coming to London they are the accountable body so we are accountable to them but they are accountable to us at the same time which makes it quite a healthy relationship in that regard but yes in short that's what Central London Forward does Thank you for that that's great okay Councillor Sudeik Thanks Jeff a bit like Councillor Smith I wrote down lots of questions but I'm going to try and keep them focused on three different lines of inquiry the first one is about the duration of the jobs that you mentioned Dujon so for all the jobs that are created that is and that we're helping people into so for all of the different programmes that you mentioned and I'm thinking in particular jobs that come through Hackney Works LIFT and social value commitments I'm interested in how long those employment journeys are lasting in the PowerPoint there were references to job outcomes and job starts but I'm just wondering whether we monitor whether we know how long those jobs last for once the person has started and whether the council keeps track of that and on top of that do we do anything to sort of incentivise longevity whether with the employer or the employee or support the employee or support the employee in ensuring that that relationship can last as long as possible or as long as they'd like it to and so that's one the second one was on the apprenticeship levy where you transfer the pledge to a to a company to a business outside the council i just wonder how far you target that around those employers who are most likely to what extent does that to those decisions align with our social value objectives so how far are you targeting that to employers who are most likely to employ over 50s as councillor Smith said or young people in parts of the borough that struggle to access employment through other means so how yeah how does that work and then the last point is on procurement so and we heard we heard a bit about this in the in the presentation but i'm interested perhaps with an emphasis on regeneration and development and the major project opportunities where the council's procuring you know at times very significant economic activity how far we are leveraging those opportunities and seeing that through to the end of the project so if we could have a sense of how far well how many such commitments are made generally and within regeneration development if that's possible appreciate you might not be able to be specific at this point but then how far we are succeeding as a council in seeing those opportunities through until the end of the process and then relatedly again how does that link in with the great work that ESAL is doing through happy work through employer engagement to align those opportunities to the people that most need them and then last point very simple fabricatory question just on the stats for procurement and jobs in that table that you gave us it says 742 job starts between 21 and 24 and 9 projected job starts in 2025 that's the 9 seems very out of proportion with the significant figure for the previous 3 years so I just wondered if that could be clarified thank you questions there so we'll just answer your questions I think so I think Rotimi may want to come in as well at some point so who would like to go first Rotimi you wanted to talk about procurement first I'm happy to cover the aspect of procurement so I think so basically what we the way we work with the employment skills team is that as and when there is opportunities within our contracts we work together as a team to try and tease out what opportunities there are in terms of jobs apprentices training and all of that so what then tend to happen is that we will bring in the employment skills team to help us not just in terms of looking at the specification just to make sure that we set it right and also in terms of looking at how we set the questions to be for bidders to respond to so for example setting the question in such a way that we maximize the social value benefit we're going to get from the suppliers so that's another way we get the employment skills team to support us with that and then when the bids come back from the market they are also involved in evaluating the tenders to look at what each supplier is promising in terms of jobs and apprenticeships training and skills development and we then you know one of the things we've also put in place within the procurement templates and processes is that within the in the committees where procurement decisions are made we allow for members to challenge what officers are putting forward in terms of opportunities for employment skills and as part of that process once we have social value outcomes promised by bidders we then put that into the contract now that's where the role of procurement officers tend to tail off so we now rely on Dujun's team to help us working with contract managers to follow through what has been promised now it's a very difficult one because I think you have a situation whereby suppliers will promise quite a lot of things but then the council then need to be ready to match those opportunities with those with candidates residents to take up the opportunities that suppliers are promising so and I believe that Dujun's team they do quite a lot of good work in that area in terms of seeing that through and I think maybe Dujun might be able to talk through how the process is seen through because basically in terms of our role in procurement that's where we kind of back off a little bit to allow Dujun's team to then take it off from there to support the contract managers contract managers in terms of making those outcomes become you know what is actually delivered over time so I don't know whether you wanted to pick it up on there Yeah, thanks Rathimi Yeah, so on that specific point our Dujun Brokerage Employment Engagement and HattieWorks team are set up to support residents and training residents effectively to be able to access those opportunities so we look we forward plan based on the pipelines that we have available to us so based on the tender processes and a projected number so that nine number is what we know at this moment in time number is likely to grow but it's stipulated by the the number of contracts that are coming in or being intended for and also the size of them so the number of jobs is stipulated by the contract value so that's why that nine is such a disparate figure compared to the 742 but it's like this is real-time information essentially relevant probably in the last two weeks so that number could even it probably is higher now effectively it grows all the time the way we go about the dovetail between us and procurement does allow us to have this relationship then with a contract manager and then working directly with the organisation but also looking ahead at that forward pipeline we then almost almost like a figure of change we know what opportunities are likely to be coming on board and we shape what we're doing in the service to be able to provide that number of residents available to an organisation so we want to map what we don't want in a situation where an organisation has promised we don't get to that amount of jobs because there's not enough residents applying for me that's a nightmare scenario where just not enough people have applied for a role the other scenario is where enough people have applied for a role but there's not a lot of people who have been successful so we are quite robust in making sure that anyone who even applied and goes forward for roles that are secured anywhere but especially for our social value are able to get the job so our job brokerage team operates in a way you know we facilitate people getting access to opportunities but we do it in a way in which we make them aware that they will be ready for a job when they apply for a job so we're not a service that operates you know in a way that is just about numbers and saying we want to put forward X amount of people towards a job we will put forward the residents based on the skills that they've got and have obtained from our service or previously and then the training we're not you know in the business of just hearing about the numbers or stop hearing about being impactful and making sure that people can sustain in their jobs and actually there are probably many cases where our team are turning people away from at this point applying for a job and re-centering them for a job where they can sustain because they ascertain the risk factors around an individual going into a job without any real awareness and we've had it before on apprenticeships we've had it with individuals that we had to do extensive training with just to understand what that job looks like out in the cold this time of year because we did it once waves of young people at that time going into the role and then dropping off the role so the success and you know the example you saw in the apprenticeships with Marlborough that's where that came from essentially liaising directly with that organisation with us to be able to bring in information sessions so that when people are applying they have a really robust understanding of what the jobs are that are attached to that job role and that's the reason why they apply for the job so our success our success levels are higher for those reasons effectively your other questions let me have a look here so apprenticeship levy how far do we target levy transfer so the Hackney Apprenticeship Network when it was set up and the way it still operates now it's you know we don't blindly transfer a levy to organisations to be able to start apprenticeships we work with these organisations to understand what you know what they're going to use the apprenticeship levy for what the apprenticeship standards that they're going to use we work with them to design that we actually work with them to identify the training providers so we you know as part of the Hackney Apprenticeship Network we have training providers which are preferred training providers who we know are good training providers who treat residents effectively who you know unfortunately the landscape does have some in some organisations that are in the in this for you know financial gain and profitability which means they're just trying to get x amount of people through an end point assessment so as part of our network we link businesses and the right training providers but what we also do is make sure that businesses are able to sustain their employees in the business so it's one thing to you know want the levy to start an apprenticeship but not be able to understand the longevity and how that person stays in the role but also how you're going to develop them and how at the end of the apprenticeship are you going to have a role for them or is it the type of apprenticeship where we know that there's also a wider industry that individuals can go into and that they then come back into our service or that our service continues to work with the organisation to do that we're definitely looking at developing our apprenticeship network further and you know we may get to a point where we look at developing a proper a type mark for it so that organisations that work with us they get a type mark and it will be just like the you know the responsible business charter which will say as a business as part of the apprenticeship network you need to do x y z things before essentially we're going to transfer our levy to you to either upskill your own staff or hire an apprenticeship apprentice into the business I approve of that duration of jobs just to clarify your question on this one so you're asking about the staff that we've that we've provided what is the duration of are we providing stats based on all of the jobs like x month like minimum 3 months minimum 6 months you're asking yeah I guess because it says job starts in so many places there's a risk that the statistic is based on someone starting a job and not people who've been in a job say 2 years so I'm asking how you measure that and is the council aware of longevity and does it do anything to support longevity of employment so and it's correct me if I'm wrong here but 3 months traditionally would be the minimum by which we would target anyone sustainability and it's a bit of a kind of welfare to work traditional sense that 3 months in terms of you've got 12 weeks 26 weeks sustainment levels and that is what we operate to and actually with the skills and the connect to work program coming on board there are specific timeframes which you have to report on and it would be a minimum of 13 weeks so that tends to be what we look at a minimum of 3 months and we look at that within these staff apprenticeships are also included with apprenticeships again we won't report on stats for a job start for an apprentice but we'll remove those stats if they don't stay on an apprenticeship for a minimum of 12 months because we won't count it as an apprenticeship unless they've completed the minimum time frame that we acknowledge that there is an apprenticeship and that's different to how other places do things in some cases they'll just count as a start in some cases they count someone obtaining NVQ level 2 as an apprenticeship start we don't do that because again sustainability and that's a good aspiration and getting into jobs where they can earn really good money effectively and essentially grow in the roles . I think I've asked your question Councillor Tzedek I think those all questions thank you Have your questions been answered Councillor Tzedek I just noticed you have got a new framework for monitoring the duration and you know in terms of you know in terms of keeping supplies accountable is that in operation now or is that in creation yeah that that's in operation now just to clarify we want we wanted to job outcomes so non-apprenticeships essentially for at least three months but probably six months because they which you have the advisors who have their relationship with the person so we proactively contact them for three months but normally they still contact us if they have any problems for about six months with apprenticeships through procurement and section 106 because we're monitoring them throughout the whole length of the contract sorry their development we we essentially monitor them throughout their apprenticeships if that makes sense um and if it's a case that it's an apprentice that we transferred the levy for our dad sits our digital apprenticeship system will alert us if that apprentice apprentice drops off essentially so again we're essentially monitoring them for their duration of the apprenticeship you'd be quite keen in the future to see figures on those particular apprentices um whether they stay in that particular profession whether they get a job after the apprenticeship is finished so actually directly in relation to those procurement contracts if that could be considered um i think that would be used useful um councillors deck are all your questions answered now yeah with one possible exception which was just if we can get a sense of how often contractual commitments made in it on um unemployment that are made during the the procurement process and not being met and if so why yeah and i mean that that's been quite a point that chancellor williams is making when we're talking about completions as well there's a caveat here which is not you know some many of the reasons why apprentices don't complete are positive reasons so essentially they move out into employment whilst they're on their apprenticeship um or they they themselves decided they don't want to do an apprenticeship anymore and they step out of it so i think in future um chair we can bring that some some more detailed stats which show you know one we can see how many people have completed how long they've complete for and also even the reasons behind whether they've they've left their apprenticeship at the end of their apprenticeship what where they've gone on to because we do track um that information we do track where your destinations of our apprenticeship computers and also in some cases those members of the public who go into jobs via a service particularly those those members of the public could go into jobs at the council via the temporary recruitment we definitely track those so we understand what job they've gone into if they have left especially if they've left before three months but if they don't renew their contract after three months we understand why for example if it's just a service it was just a three-month temporary role there's no opportunity or if someone wasn't renewed for a lack of skills um for example because we use that information to then work with that service area but also to then implement um appeal stream which we literally did with our we launched a digital skills um work stream for residents a couple of years ago around temporary recruitment to the council because we found that one of the predominant reasons why people weren't sustaining in their role of the council was that they weren't able to use the google system that you know that we had just adopted um and because they these roles were people coming in and running so we rolled out um a digital work stream which meant people entering roles by the temporary recruitment stream could access skills directly how to operate the google google system and actually now it's still operating now and it's being delivered to existing members of staff managers etc but it's that useful but it also meant that in particular we targeted um women new entrants or women with young children who wouldn't have had time outside of work to be able to upskill themselves on the google system and then essentially have a negative effect on everybody to sustaining work um thank you for that um i realize we're getting on to the second or third questioner so we'll have to be a bit tighter um but you you know there has been some really good questions asked so just in order so you know we've got council davis and council august canley it's council martins and council narcross and council pinkerton so we are going to have to be a bit more precise after allowing a bit of scope so councillor davis please yeah uh thank you for the presentation answering so many questions i i do have more than one but i'll try to be very short um my first one was on hatney works um mostly around the kind of like referrals piece um what are we doing to promote how he works in more of like an education setting can you hear me sorry uh in an education setting so like six forms are we promoting at all at that kind of like age level um and the other thing which perhaps we're doing but i just don't know is how does this connect i know 50 is through dwp um how is it connecting with like universal credit applicants and going through the job center is there like a kind of really simple flow that they can come through to hackney works because i know i get feedback from young people that that job center experience is is very not tailored like how do you work sounds like it is um so that'd be good to understand the other part is on apprenticeships um i guess on the 200 active apprenticeships in the das system to avoid delivery expiry could you talk a bit more about that is it predominantly like time and staff capacity at the council that prevents us from getting much closer to that or is it like to find the placements basically or is it more of like a funding related issue um to do with the levy uh i'll leave it there because i know other people have questions thanks thank you chair thank you um my question is about following on from the earlier question hackney works um work with the local businesses we have quite a large number of local independent businesses in the borough and we already engage them um through our different services for example commercial waste collection is is a service widely used by many um businesses in the borough again collection of business rates is another one we contact every single businesses business in the borough how much do we communicate with those small businesses about hackney works i mean do they know that they can contact us and they can utilize these services do they know that they can contact us for any opportunities they may have any vacancies they may have have you done any work on that regard and if not do you think it's worth exploring that and creating that network if you like because we are already contacting and we are already in touch with those businesses thank you who would like to take those questions yeah predominantly um i'll go for the happy works referrals i'm just going to double check i've got an understanding about what we're doing in sixth form than that age level we've had referrals how we work with them so we work we've had education um and every year we we actually run a work experience program at the council um to enable schools in the borough to be able to refer people to us to do work experience at the council and council departments and that's kind of an output of the work that we do have education we're part of the careers collaborative with them so we ensure that our opportunities go in the careers collaborative which goes out um for many schools across the borough there is we work also through clf um and and the gla and there's reading partnership run an engagement group that works with schools and this is very much about understanding what schools want from employers businesses and services like us about engaging with them um and their pupils so we operate with that there's a list that's available to us and we can respond to that essentially and work with our employer partners to say there's x amount of schools in the borough that need engagement essentially around x industry and we facilitate that relationship so they can go into the schools um and highlight to schools essentially what type of jobs are available to them now and in the future and as part of that um there's an agreement and a commitment from those organizations to then talk about how it works in some cases we do that with them the job brokerage and employer engagement team and working like i said the shared equipment model is operating on the olympic park those you know the premise of those things are about getting people into jobs but wrapped around that is additional um elements and those elements are stuff like again going into schools sending opportunities to schools using our website opportunity schools and working with teachers directly as well to be able to promote our opportunities there's work to be done in terms of actually what we do with regards to outcomes um and we're actually at the moment um embarking on a work stream around a development of our own website and as part of that development of website there's a consultation piece that will be done we've had an education to understand how we can better reach into those schools we have recently been in a partnership with an external organization who specializes um in engaging with young people from the ages of 13 to 30 i believe it but predominantly 30 to 24 for what we're doing with them using digital devices so their specialism is about social media um and you know until i engaged with them i didn't know that there were 40 plus versions of social media available what it was the one that i'm using clearly i've aged out um but the you know the usp is basically designing engagements in a way that young people understand and can target and our own comms team in-house do so as well so when we've got specific types of opportunities we can target parts of the borough based on deprivation based on what we know about where the jobs are going to be based on age based you know any demographic we can target using social media targeting so we do that um when when and where available and resource dependent as well we have to pick and choose um because we don't necessarily have resources to do it for every absolutely every opportunity um but where there are multiple opportunities uh say for example one company's hiring multiple opportunities or we're looking at something for example what we're doing with the green economy this is longer term these are future jobs so engaging younger people now on future jobs to get them to start understanding the type of skills that they may need and the types of prayers that they need to choose as part of options days these are things that we're doing uh using comms teams and also where where possible unnecessary external organizations like the one i mentioned using the social media apps and your other question so links with dwp and how that works danish do you mind if i hand over to you for this one please yeah we have a long established link for the health work and pension specifically to job centers in hackney right next to us and we have a strategic partnership with them in terms of we have a memorandum of understanding with them which is going to be really fresh this year um how we work together in terms of referrals i think which was your um personal question was number one we're sometimes we're based out of hillman street and mere street job centers so we have specific days that we might go in a certain month and also we do job job fairs and specifically that over 50s or younger cohorts or other um in need cohorts but barring that we have a essentially a referral email we have an online platform where job center advisors can sign register their claimants to and we'll pick it up on the other side so um we probably receive every every day we receive a referral from the job center and because of the good working relationships we we receive um referrals from specialist job center claimant um advisors if that makes sense so the over 50 advisor will send a referral over and they would already know what kind of information they really need from them to actually make a meaningful impact quite quickly so instead of having two initial assessments we're only having one initial assessment and that information is conveyed over during the referral stage um we also um have a a youth club that we work out of um which is located in hoxton in new city college though we have sometime represented from the job center from new city college and from hackney works there so essentially a one-stop shop for everyone that's age 16 to 24. and then there was a hackney um then there was a question wasn't there in relation to independent businesses and the existing networks being used i think obviously missed something out by the fact you've raised your hand um it was a question about apprenticeships as well oh yeah there was a question about that that system i think you asked from you but how how was it how do we resource essentially like the paying of the so yeah so um uh the apprenticeship apprenticeship program manager in the team monitors the digital the that system and digital apprenticeship system to look at the levels and where we're at so it does require resource it's not completely automated um they have to monitor it they have to update certain information on the system so it does require some resource and it is resource within esau but also then for the um continuous development qualifications that results then sits in hr and od so between the two service areas we work together essentially in lockstep to monitor that and also to understand where we are at kind of our levy transfer and how much levy expiry we're going to have that then informs in some cases you know strategically can't entirely inform but in some cases it will inform what we need to do in terms of responding to every expiry if we see that there's too much levy expiry we'll then be able to work with hr and od and understand you know how many people at the council are taking up apprenticeships and how many services at the council are utilizing the apprenticeship levy to upskill their staff and if you know if that if the numbers look low we can directly look at doing something with working with different council departments and likewise with the hackney apprenticeship network and work with the external organization the next question is about um local businesses and hackney works interaction um obviously in hackney i think there's there's roughly around 21 000 businesses and 80 percent of them are local to micro businesses so really smaller solo businesses pre-pandemic we worked really closely with a small grants team um and we had really good inroads really good collaboration with small businesses they were looking to recruit they would use our services we're a free recruitment agency but also they understood about hiring locally and local people contribute more to local businesses than they know the area they understand the area also from a business point of view they were really keen to engage with us not only because we're a free recruitment service but then give something back to the community now fast forward that with now the post pandemic we do work with a small grants team and other teams within the council but just as a backdrop business confidence essentially we've seen like relationship wise besides the ons kind of data and stuff that business conference is really low at the moment partly because of the budget and and we we had really good relationship with the nighttime economy pre-pandemic a post pandemic and now we have that nighttime economy kind of inroads that we had with the businesses because of confidence in the hospitality sector specifically they're not keen to hire hire through us and specifically they're looking essentially that the hospitality industry has become more trans transient so people are like crossing the road to other businesses just for like a pound more an hour if that makes sense um it's it's not it's not the lack of will for people for businesses to essentially hire it's because they're not confident enough to hire and put that investment in but we are trying to reach as many businesses as possible and like billion said through the comms piece to come and engage with us how to math martins if you'd like to go ahead with your question and i've noted you council route you will be the last question thanks chair um i just wanted to ask a question um about the support for global majority communities um so i'm looking at the breakdown and specifically around the caseload demographics i know that the black and global majority community um are i guess the largest group but it'd be good to understand what that kind of further breakdown looks like in terms of age brackets but also um kind of a two-in-one question as well in terms of apprenticeships specifically um i'd be interested to know how many are um over 30 um just because typically um when we say apprenticeships we typically think of a younger demographic um but obviously we know apprenticeships are also open to those who are um of an older and age age group as well um so yeah i'd leave it like that for now but just wanted to understand a bit more about the demographics particularly within the black and global majority community thank you councillor martins i'll also take councillor across now as well um thank you a couple of questions from me and one sort of slightly similar to councillor martins in terms of sort of getting a bit more information on certain groups um so the hackney works uh 230 job starts only one went to someone who disclosed a disability um and i was just wondering what specific measures about being put in place uh to improve employment outcomes for disabled residents um and then the other question was around um it was around the apprenticeship levy and and just that kind of point about the kind of the levy um levy expiry so they said in the presentation you need a minimum of 200 active apprentice apprenticeships to avoid um levy expiry and but the numbers were a bit lower what sort of specific action has been taken to counter that and what uh financial impact that's actually having um okay who would like to take those questions yes um it is me so councillor martin's questions how many um in terms of how many apprentices are over 30 and then the demographic of black and low majority um jobs i don't have those stats to hand now there's definitely something which um will take away i don't think actually will have those stats to hand either that will take away um how many prints we definitely have those stats council martin we do track them i know that the internal apprenticeship program tracks them and outstanding apprenticeship program we do track them i mean one of the hormones of our apprenticeship program is the fact it's open to all age groups and we promote it very much in that way so i'd be actually quite confident that a decent proportion of our apprentices um are over 30 or at least over 24 you know historically apprenticeships targeted at 18 to 24 or there is something it's a challenge and that we in terms of a communication challenge that we encounter quite often with with businesses for example who still assume even today their apprenticeships are still just for those who are 18 to 18 to 24 but everything about the problems that we do around our apprenticeship program even in terms of in some apprenticeships in particular um and you may have seen in the slide that there are some um when tia was talking there are some where there are challenges or have been challenges to recruiting certain apprenticeships so we will have a tailored approach um to engage in a wider demographic around those apprenticeships but also as well to target certain demographics um that are not so for example the enforcement apprenticeships we have to consider the intersectional um barriers to the you know the number of applications there you've got stuff around um people working locally in enforcement jobs in the same borough that they're potentially working and working with that department to then look at ways in which we can do recruitment that avoids that say for example recruiting people to work in enforcement in certain wards in the borough that are on the other side of the borough working with specific demographic groups from a black and global majority backgrounds who also are reticent to apply for certain jobs in certain sectors and certain apprenticeships in certain in certain sectors um so our demographics about black and global majority i mean a part of this is down to the fact that the the population of the borough um has a higher proportion of black and global majority residents but also unfortunately that they are more affected um by by economic deprivation in the borough so we target our work in in in certain areas of the borough and working with certain agencies in the borough um to be able to overcome those barriers and we um i mentioned we we did a piece of work with ucl ethnographic labs and the council's um coms and engagement team to look at essentially our own service but also how it is that we're doing engagement with residents of the black and global majority backgrounds off the back of the survey that the common engagement team ran um and we saw an upward trend of people feeling that they didn't have access um to jobs in the borough from black and global majority backgrounds it was a resounding response from people black and global majority majority backgrounds particularly young people um since then the recent surveys come out and that trend is there's a positive movement in that trend less people now feel that they don't have access and that is in part due to that project but we haven't really launched the outcome for that project in terms of our interventions around that but what we do know at the very least is that we now have the numbers of black and global majority projects that we're working with and the type of job that they're going into but also the type of jobs that they're not going into and especially also working with the lift project we've got those stats there for black and global majority you know all the demographics and those with disabilities and we can see essentially where the trends are occurring around people not moving into certain jobs they are moving into and our own apprenticeship program um i highlighted recently that we've we've seen an increase um in a demographic background going into certain apprenticeships in in in our own council around accounting for example but that you know that's been so significant in its success that it's now become something of a problem that we're compounding ourselves that we're possibly creating our own that lack of diversity the other way so we have it's a strategic approach that we have to take to remedy that and find a balance moving forward so i know i haven't properly answered your questions from mine but we will go away and get that later and come back thank you um i'll look forward to that day so where were we council narcross was your question answered on so the levy um you're asking about the um the levy expiring yeah um so the the actions on essentially so you saw there the figure there in that essentially we need to have 200 apprentices to to negate expiry it's not that's not a a kind of course that we're approaching with well i'm not going to say much optimism but it's that to have 200 apprentices on on on the program at one time is a very big undertaking it would require um probably a budget level at the council that isn't currently available because current services the council would need to do that i mean what we're doing we just try to maximize the number of apprenticeships that are available so we work with or we're currently in the national apprenticeship week with last week um we invest a lot of time and resource into the promotion of our apprenticeships into working with council services to just maximize those and also work with council services as tina mentioned around um restructures etc and making sure that services are able to use the apprenticeships effectively as part of the resources one because it saves cost in some cases um and the other the other element is that actually our because one of the hallmarks of our apprenticeship program is the retention rate we have a really high retention rate if you benchmark against national and regional apprenticeship programs and that's because of the pastoral support element of our apprenticeship program so that's you know our pastoral support is delivered by a former apprentice of the council who has self-transferred from an industry that you know she was a bus driver for escaping the council and remarked herself on the amount of impossible synergy she got when she came here but it's the pastoral support that we've always had as part of our program that had meant that we retained a minimum of 84 percent in terms of retention rate um on our apprenticeship program and that goes a very long way to increasing the amount of levy that we spend because obviously you only the levy basically gets turned on a monthly basis because it's based on you staying on program the apprenticeship stops getting paid for the levy stops getting transferred so that those are you know the actionable things that we're doing we very much have an intention and aspiration to increase number of apprentices as close to 200 as possible but i say that the caveat of being realistically at the especially at the moment current economic climate it's very unlikely that we get to a position of 200 apprentices on progress and there's also the question about improving the job outcomes for residents with a disability as well so that's fine um yeah we we do a lot of work a lot of work targeted around the reason of disabilities i mean we have specific programs uh in in esau um we've got a support employment program we've got a number of individual placement support programs um which puts us in good stead so the connect to work program which is coming on stream and which actually we're going to start delivery of that program in june that program is specifically looking at people with multiple barriers you know the majority of those individuals will be people that have disabilities so we're going to have increased resources to work with those individuals but at present our sub-regional partnerships with the live program um our own partnerships we run events and we recently ran an event which was for individuals um neurodivergent individuals um and the event was you know based in one of our partner organizations in hoxton and it was about not just about how you access jobs as a neurodivergent individual but how are you retaining your job and also then also teaching us how better to work with employers um about making jobs you know more comfortable for residents so we have you know i would probably say half of our employment provision is centered around working with people with disabilities there is you know the numbers and the statistics the caveat is that the statistics are likely higher in terms of the individuals that do have a disability but we'll work with numbers of those who choose to disclose their disabilities to us um so we always caveat that because you know like i said we have if the number of oh if about 300 plus individuals a year are registered in our programs which are designed for individuals with disabilities to get into employment at the moment and that will increase by 2026 we will have at least 469 people per year starting on program with us thank you um so now the two uh final question oh councillor williams did you want to come in there sorry um yeah the point that i wanted to make was why around the flexibility of the levy um and to point out that the expiration date is one of the reasons why we need a levy that is much more flexible so the growth and skills levy hopefully will deal with some of the expiration um uh issues that we were facing uh not just us but but other employees as well and the second point that i wanted to make was around uh councillor martin's question um and that question was basically one of intersectional analysis of our data and and you everybody in this room i'm sure will be sick and tired of me talking about the need for intersectional analysis but understanding um how uh different people with different demographics and characteristics protected characteristics um enjoy or not the labor market and the support that we're able to give as a council as hackney works is incredibly important um understanding who accesses our higher level of apprenticeships um versus um who who uh which will and of our staff are able to access cdqs how we approach um uh closing our diversity pay gap gender and ethnicity pay gaps because of those um intersection of that intersectional analysis is really important we should be doing it right across the council otherwise we can't direct and target our services equally um i just want to re reassure you councillor williams that we very much um value you know the work that you do on this front and we always want you to be addressing these issues for our residents okay right okay council pinkerton then council route i'll take your two questions together if you can try and be concise thank you thank you coming at the end thank you chair um i wanted to ask about the apprenticeship program and the the different strands that you you talked about um particularly the the newly hired apprenticeship strand and the career development qualifications strand um so if i understood correctly the career development qualification is more for upskilling current staff um so i just wondered to what extent are those kind of kept separate or do they ever overlap this resource ever moves from kind of one strand to to the other um so just to what extent is there you know certain apprenticeships that are targeted at newly hired you know creating new hires and or are some targeted at upskilling current staff or is it just kind of you know um whatever fits the best and if i may just very quickly i just wanted to also ask about who are some of the skills providers you're working with um particularly at kind of level six and level seven um or any of those like providing degree apprenticeships um through the program so thank you thank you council pink picture council route thank you um i think councillor williams has partly answered some of my questions because i was quite interested in the way that um the amount of apprenticeships offered in different sectors can vary depending on confidence in the sector and what have you and you mentioned that the flexibility um that there could be with the levy going forward would help i wondered if you could give me some examples of how that might be would it just be because somebody doesn't have to take somebody on for a whole year that they just they can just do it for eight months is it just that or or is it that they could be offering apprenticeships in different sorts of skill areas um that was one thing and then the other thought thought is just have we got any way of monitoring the quality of these apprenticeships outside of the of the council at all um traditionally you know big corporates like i don't know john lewis or somebody like that they kind of have gold standard um and but as we as we try to encourage more of our smaller businesses to take on apprenticeships um which i think is really good thing to do it must also be quite difficult to ensure that the same quality is coming through i wonder if we've got any way of doing that yeah so i'll ask you a question about kind of the vision of the apprenticeship work team first you know if you want to come in you can um so the senior apprenticeships uh continuous development qualification apprenticeships are managed in by hr and od um specifically you want to talk on that yeah so those are managed within and yes there's definitely an overlap okay because you could have a newly hired apprenticeship come in and just for argument's sake they're doing a level two in business admin they're now in a permanent job within the organization the upskilling is then if they want to go to a level three level four depending on the qualification so there definitely becomes an overlap and that information well that data is very much tracked so we have we have that information and that we can do those breakdowns and watching that progression it's a lot easier to do the progression through those apprenticeships rather than through staff um because of just applying for different jobs within the council so yeah so we manage those we look at those but we're also very much always looking to explore the range of apprenticeships that we can do because of diversity of the different roles within the organization as well so again it's if they're moving and progressing from level to level that is where that is when you actually see that tracking and that overlap thank you gino um so yeah i mean that really answered your question because that is the cdqc in hr and od and then the new higher apprentices sit in yourself apprenticeship program team but that crossover comes into play at the point in which they complete their apprenticeship and move on to to another um division so sorry what influences the number of businesses i've kind of clustered your questions slightly um so and you you articulate some of the examples around the length of the apprenticeship that definitely has an impact if someone in now can go on an eight-month apprenticeship as opposed to a 12-month apprenticeship that means that you're asking a business to commit to eight-month worth of salary as opposed to 12 months of salary um the level of apprenticeships also the standards available so businesses quite often have an ambition um to do apprenticeships in in certain areas but their standards may not be available um and the standards you know they change um you've got kind of core of standards a core of standards and some apprenticeship standards yeah apprenticeship standards thank you apprenticeship standards that then do change if the standard apprenticeship standards aren't available then you can't run an apprenticeship um and also that you know very similar for businesses that come to us to use our levy to upskill their staff so we've spent we use the network um and about three years ago we had a specific kind of comms drive on engaging businesses um who in breweries for example a new standard came about in brewing and we engaged all the breweries in the borough around the ability to use an apprenticeship standard to upskill their staff to become senior breweries and become a manager of a brewery and so on and so forth to then you know teach them how you can use this to create a pipeline for you to move your people up for the business and then be in a position to hire new apprentices so it saves the money because these businesses if we're engaging a business about using levy to pay for training for their staff we're doing it under the provider that you know if they're developing their stuff already they're paying out of their own pockets to do so so that's one of the ways in which in which we engage businesses the new reforms um aside from the level of apprenticeships the prerequisite um skills functional skills have been both a barrier and a pathway but definitely that barrier should now be removed and that businesses can essentially hire people into an apprenticeship if they don't have functional skills um and that could we don't know yet how significant that's going to be but it could be very significant and it could be quite groundbreaking not only just for us and our own apprenticeship program here at council but for many in in in the wider borough that would you know they have an ambition to do apprenticeships particularly lower level apprenticeships level two and three um but in most cases if you're engaging residents to access a level two and three apprenticeship there is a risk there that they're not going to have their functional skills prior and that risk is definitely associated with residents that come from backgrounds where economic deprivation is the highest um because that would normally lead to them not having a prerequisite school before an apprenticeship so you know essentially government's whole reason for for doing this around the functional skills is to remove the barrier that is compounding a lack of access to apprenticeship opportunities for people from um lower social social economic backgrounds um or economic deprivation i think i answered your question about level six and seven crunch yeah and just who who are the providers and are there any yet are anything like degree apprenticeships yeah i don't know i'd have to come back to you on that on actually who those providers are but i know we use our local colleges for some of those um as well so we'll provide you a list of those providers for liverpool six and seven yeah that's just to finish that that is one of the um things that you've had information network also done outside of the council um is it holds that the data on which um providers we use and the gold standard in terms of investing cloud providers so sorry i didn't miss that question as well so that is one of the things that we're doing to the work with organizations to make sure that the apprenticeships are working to a gold standard so we hold them to that at the bare minimum the same standard that we hold ourselves in terms of our own apprenticeship program whether it be cdqs or internal program and we if their network is running the same team that runs the apprenticeship program so they're able to apply the same level of skills relationships and networks that they have to be able to work with businesses to ensure that they can operate apprenticeship programs that are essentially on part of us or lots of john lewis etc and whether that be using the the right training providers or whether that is picking the correct standards and also training the managers of the actual apprentices and understanding how to manage an apprentice because that is a key factor in successful apprenticeships in that the people who are managing apprenticeships often don't know that there is a nuance to manage an apprentice to a non-apprentice although apprenticeships are jobs there are elements you know and people think the big scary 20 off the job etc so it's about training you know organizations and the managers of inner organizations to understand that apprentices apprentices are a benefit to an organization and here's how this is how you can maximize your apprentice and how your apprentice can maximize their experience with the organization okay um i think we can bring this item to a close now i'd like to thank um officers for attending um it's really good discussion and you know thank you for your time for your presentation you do have the option you need to leave the meeting now if you wish to do so and also like to extend my thanks to the procurement team who um yeah who just came to answer any questions appreciate you coming as well thank you okay moving on to item five um we have attached in the main agenda the draft minutes for the meeting on the 10th of december 24 um that's pages 43 two 67 um does anybody have any comments on those minutes can we agree the minutes thank you um and just to say that the draft minutes for the meeting in january january will will be available at the next meeting moving on to item six um our scrutiny commission work program to be turned to pages 71 to 83. we've only got a couple meetings left for this municipal year the next meeting in march is going to be um it's going to be the economic development plan and i think a couple of days before the papers are due to be published the london growth plan is um due to be published so we hope to have to in um incorporate that as part of that item and any reflections on hackney and the april meeting um is going to be sustainable transport um sorry i'm just reading this memory because i haven't quite got to the right page yet um we have yet to scope out the meeting but we would like to shape it around the kind of transport strategy that is kind of going up to consultation soon and involve all of the feedback from residents in the scrutiny con consultation across a whole wide range to make sure we really do represent the concerns that residents raised in that um survey council davis sorry i was going to ask on that section is there going to be the inclusion then about lime bikes and the kind of strategy for them would that be included in sustainable transport we did align bikes earlier on in the year i don't see why you can't ask a question as part of the transport yeah i mean you perhaps would not um mention you know you know you would talk about docker spikes in general but you know it it will be part of the transition i know they've got the contract negotiation in june so it's time relevant but it'd be good for you to have a look at our meeting minutes and the papers for that meeting which was in july july two and yeah because i suppose we didn't meet in june because the general elections but we met in july and that was a deferred item wasn't it so july if you look on the council website july 24 i think i think it was anybody else got comments on the work program cancer smith yeah just on the on the sustainable transport where i'm just wondering if you might be just in terms of what we're going to look at how it relates to our net zero ambitions ultimately any kind of you know carbon emissions yeah i mean that's um very relevant so yeah um and i just wondered also uh chair about um from the minutes of the last meeting by the way the minutes i thought were fantastic by the way the minutes for that for the last meeting were amazing i mean there's so much detail in there it's unbelievable but i was wondering if we had any recommendations at all from those minutes because there's a lot of stuff in there yeah we haven't yet but i think that's a piece of work we need to do to put some to pull some recommendations out of that and then just one last thought if you don't mind just no slightly different subject on this um apprenticeship levy i don't know about everybody else in the room members i mean i did feel a little bit like the alarm bells ringing a little bit just around how all of that works i know it's a sort of national sort of legislation that coordinates all of that but i just felt that there was something there that we need to make a recommendation about i don't know what but i think council and our cost could have sort of put his finger on a little bit you know we've got 200 they're aiming to get 200 in order to spend it i presume that's how i understand it i don't fully understand how it all works but it just seems to me if they can't meet the target they're going to sacrifice it just doesn't make sense to me and i think there may be a recommendation around that but maybe i'm not understanding it right i don't know i think what might be useful is if we wait for the minutes to be produced for that meeting and we'll have a look at those in detail there were certainly some follow-on questions there were certainly some follow-ups for this meeting tonight of data to be sent i think as well and then yeah well certainly i mean i mentioned the recommendation in the meeting about um looking at the duration of you know apprenticeships related to procurement in you know particular um but you know there will be more recommendations i'm very happy for you to suggest we have to be careful that i need to relate to the actual discussion in the meeting itself but yes any recommend and then welcome welcome also any any discussions from members just to just explain to me a bit more how it's meant to work i mean not now but just in general we can perhaps look at having maybe a meeting about you know recommendations from meetings perhaps uh an informal meeting while we're scoping those out council narcos um yeah just it was on that so i think my my question was based on my understanding which also could be incorrect around um you know so they they get that percentage from from their salary bill and in order to kind of keep it for whatever for sort of apprentice purposes they have to have 200 so if they don't get to those 200 they then have to give it back to the government i think for it to be spent elsewhere yeah yeah so i think um so yeah so my question was around kind of what that cost them but obviously as he said you know they for them to get to 200 there would need to be a significantly larger budget because obviously that levy amount doesn't cover the cost of a whole apprentice so you kind of have to spend it to get it though if they don't have enough to spend to get the 200 they won't be able to keep all the levy of the 200. but i don't know how that's changed because obviously councillor williams mentioned that the way the the levy works is is being changed and it has been a lot of criticism of it being too restrictive so i'd be interested to know how you know whether the the change of the levy will have any impact on that because it obviously it's not ideal that the council has the opportunity to use this money for this possible purpose and it's kind of you know essentially losing that that ability but if it costs a lot of money to do i can see why they're in the position they're in council august currently um i think my understanding is similar although um it's based on the salary paid by an employer therefore one would like to think that given the salary pay wages wage of the local authority the limitation in terms of monthly limitation shouldn't be an issue what could be an issue is if we don't have enough apprentices in place and if you don't utilize that monthly uh some allocated based on the wage bill percentage of the wage bill then we end up losing that but when i say we end up losing and i'm also out of circumstances in in which some employers especially local authorities can recoup that money back as part of their other obligations from hmrc so it's more a tax question i guess as well as or finance question as well as that so it may be worth raising an inquiry with um finance directors about clarification one whether it's kind of on a monthly basis based on the wage bill the percentage of it and two um whether any any process in which authorities can recoup that money back if it's not used or is it completely wasted yeah certainly counter smith i realized yeah we are spilling over international legislation but i think it's important to have a local perspective on this like if you look at the graph on page 27 i mean i read the government's website they said one percent of salaries the government website says 0.5 percent of salaries so i don't know what's going on there but if you look at the the graph on page 27 you'll see i mean obviously it's covered then but it was 79 000 you know and it says you know pledges and so i'm looking at the graph and i'm thinking right okay 2025 we've employed more staff uh because the levy fee has gone up um but maybe that just doesn't correlate but if it's not 0.5 percent or one percent of the salary amount then that that's what that would imply um in terms of the 0.5 and i suppose i'm just coming from this from a sort of budgetary perspective really in that it's something i've never really thought about before but i think if we're losing you know if we're losing money if we're if we're providing the government with a pot of money and we're not using it and it just goes back to the government or hackney i mean you know we're not using it for hackney then that doesn't seem to add up for me really i'm thinking we could perhaps carry on this conversation yeah in the meeting but i think you know we need further clarity on that yeah so that's okay any other comments on the work programs at all and obviously feed in any further questions because we can forward those on comments on the work program okay so moving on to final item we have item seven any other business i haven't been notified of any other business so um we can formally close the meeting thank you to councillor martins who's online um have a good rest rest of your evening thank you bye everyone so