Economic Development
We have over a decade of experience and output relating to building regional economies through our existing and well-established focus on job creation, apprenticeship creation and recirculation of project spend from our projects. We have already created 761 jobs, 725 apprenticeships and recirculated £375m into our regional economies.
The spend related to built environment projects represents a significant opportunity to benefit the local economy. Over the years we have established the importance of tendering our projects as to align to our pillars of job creation, apprenticeship opportunities and the recirculation of project spend in the communities we serve.
To build our regional economies we have:
- Regionalised our outlook and are acting local within Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Dumfries and Galloway.
- Developed strong partnerships with our local authority employment and economic development teams, colleges, DYW offices and chambers of commerce.
- Helped shape regional economic strategies and regional skills strategies via our CWB forum.
- Input to local colleges on the skills demands of the Built Environment and input on future curriculum content.
- Listened to partner organisations and mapped out their requirements over the next 3 years, creating long term joined up objectives that we tender our projects on.
- Moved away from tendering on a project-by-project basis and instead created a long term programme approach.
- By moving away from tendering on a project-by-project basis and tying into this long term programme approach we have created a platform for linking into local strategies and making a real measurable impact on a regional basis.
- This is being demonstrated currently by construction partner Social Value TOM’s obligations being satisfied by them supporting the initiatives we are implementing
- Worked closely with local authority initiatives, local colleges and DYW offices and have positioned our offering to deliver in the regional setting. In Ayrshire we met with each of these organisations and mapped out what we want to achieve over the next three years as to move to a joined up programme approach, aimed at supporting our local authority skills requirements, local college initiatives, local chamber of commerce initiatives and DYW initiatives. The end 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.
- Developed a Design Engineer Construct STEM education programme in Ayrshire over the next 3 years and are aiming at linking this into Ayrshire College with the view to bring new entrants into the industry. We are monitoring this with the intent to roll this out in other regions.
- Carried out bespoke regional Build programmes that develop SMEs to be coached on key aspects that put them in a better position on winning work not only from the projects we tender but from the wider industry. Via our Community Wealth Building forum we now feed this with the requirements of our construction partners.
- Set up hub clubs that act as an education platform and regional networking events between Tier 1 contractors and local SMEs. A focus as we develop is coming down a tier and targeting the large supply chain members for these forums. Over the past decade we have kept records as to who has won what work packages, and this gives us insight into who actually employs the people working on our sites, hires the apprentices and buys from local suppliers.
- Employed Joseph Drugan to implement this strategy as our Community Wealth Building and Social Value Manager, working alongside our existing Margaret Milton to demonstrate our commitment in delivering CWB and Social Value from the public sector projects we deliver.
Managing inflation and market volatility
We have been providing quarterly market volatility and inflation presentations to the Territory Partnering Board to ensure our participants base are aware of the issues we currently face in the industry. This platform also enables the sharing of knowledge that we have established form the other hub companies and lessons learnt to share best practice.
Whilst it is important to educate project stakeholders on the impact of market volatility and inflation, it is equally as important to maintain our strong processes and challenge the position.
Through our dedicated development managers, processes and unique market testing method, we are able to best manage the current market conditions and forecast future outlooks at an early stage.
Our rigorous market testing process gains market returns from a minimum of 80% of packages and three tender returns. This process is ‘open book’ deriving the best price. This process feeds into a value for money statement. The speed of our development process is proving to save participants significant inflation risk.
