Skills Development
Within the Built Environment
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.
We 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.
We have spent a lot of time developing a 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. We 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.
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.
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.
