1. Moving forward - Challenges for the Region WMRO Conference Tuesday 20 October 2009 John Lee Assistant Director Economic Inclusion Government Office West Midlands

2. Tackling Worklessness: 5 Key Challenges

• 1. Understanding the shape of the Economy

• 2. Creating sustainable jobs in growth sectors

• 3. Driving the Workforce Planning Agenda

• 4. Harnessing Public Sector buying power

• 5. Nailing Best Practice - the Holy Grail!

3. Understanding the shape of the Economy

• What will it look like?

• What are the Growth Sectors?

• Who is doing this work?

• Do we need more data and analysis?

• Or do we need actions?

4. Creating sustainable jobs in growth sectors

• 3 Trillion Global Market

• Higher Entry Level Skills

• Creating Supply Chains

• A West Midlands Green New Deal

• Green Technology School Challenges/Prizes

5. Creating sustainable jobs in our own back yard

• 1b Future Jobs Fund

• 11m C2O

• What happens in March

• 2010?

• A return to JSA

• The prospect of sustainable employment

6. Driving the Workforce Planning Agenda

• Demographic Change

• Ageing Society

• Apprenticeships

• Diplomas

• Graduate Internships

• Work Experience

• Reversing the upward drift in job entry level requirements

7. Nailing Best Practice - The Holy Grail

• National Programmes

• Local Flexibilities

• Demonstration Projects

• Pilots

• C20

• Economic Assessments

• Work and Skills Plans

• But will the JSIB prove to be the Round Table?

8. Harnessing Public Sector Buying Power

• UK: 175 Billion Annually

• Region: Circa 16 Billion

• Goal: 10% of contracts include Jobs and Skills requirements = 1.6 Billion

• Assumption: 2-4 jobs created per 1 million of procurement

• Outcome: Access to an additional 3,200 to 6,400 jobs every year

• The potential is ten-fold

9. The strategic consideration of jobs and skills requirements in the end-to-end public procurement process

• Whereby public sector organisations

• deliberately adopt a default

• position, which requires clauses

• pertaining to jobs and skills

• requirements to be routinely

• considered for their relevance to all

• stages of the commissioning and

• procurement process and each and

• every procurement exercise

• undertaken (and measure, on an

• ongoing basis, the percentage of

• contracts and the proportion of

• expenditure to which such clauses

• apply, in addition to tracking outputs and

• outcomes).