Page 5 - Annual Report 2022 / 2023

I am pleased to report on my second year as Chief Executive of hub South West. Over the past year we have continued to focus our priority on listening to and serving our participant base and investing in our long-term partnership approach.
The past year has seen increased challenges for our public sector participants. Market volatility and inflation, overlapped by budgetary pressures has created a challenging landscape to operate in.
The drive to net zero and advances in the regulatory requirements of our built environment have added to this challenge. The team at hub South West have done an amazing job in helping our participants in both these regards and we have taken a progressive forward thinking approach to share knowledge and lessons learnt to help unlock and drive projects forward.
Over the past six months we have experienced significant challenges in the built environment, particularly the growing skills gap and a lack of new entrants to the industry impacting the delivery on construction sites. We have focused our attention on learning from this and working hard to address the same challenges with our construction partners and wider industry.
Inspiring the next generation speech Ayrshire College graduation 2022
I firmly believe that our continuous improvement model, invested in long term partnership objectives makes hub South West very well placed to address these challenges for our participants.
I have spent a lot of my time over the past year developing the regional approach. Here, we are focusing on what is important for our three regions of Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Dumfries and Galloway.
We have worked closely with local authority initiatives, local colleges and Developing Young Workforce offices and have positioned our offering
to deliver in the regional setting. We met with each of these organisations and mapped out what we want to achieve over the next three years as we move to a joined-up programme approach, aimed at supporting our local authority skills requirements, local college initiatives, local chamber of commerce initiatives and local Developing Young Workforce initiatives.
The result is a programme that influences the Social Value TOM’s we tender our projects on focused at supporting established initiatives with our anchor institutions. I firmly believe that this joined-up approach will deliver on the regional skills strategies that we have actively developed and ensure that wealth from our projects stays within our regional economies.
Delivery of the Design Engineer Construct STEM Education Programme
We have also breathed new life into our SME engagement build programmes and hub clubs and are set to hold a series of Community Wealth Building forums for each local economy to refine these existing established platforms and to help develop local SMEs to win more work and employ more people.
We have embarked on a re-education of what the hub model can offer our participants. We were set up over a decade ago by the Scottish Futures Trust and our public sector participant shareholders to create a project delivery partnership that delivers projects more effectively, with continuous improvement leading to better value and the aim of creating local jobs, local apprenticeships and recirculating spend from public sector projects in the local economy. Never has this model been needed more than in the current economic climate.
Michael Ross
Chief Executive Officer
hub South West Scotland Ltd
2022-2023 Annual Report
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