Discover New Talent: A Talent Strategy for Doncaster
6th October 2006
Vision for the economy
Doncaster's Borough Strategy and Local Area Agreement provide a vision for the Borough:
"By 2025 Doncaster will be acknowledged as a city of significance in the country and in Europe. This will be based on the recognised advantage of its strategic location, enhanced by its international transport infrastructure. The opportunity for everybody to enjoy the highest quality of life will have enabled Doncaster to attract and retain a growing population with world-class skills in the high growth industries that drive the regional economy.'"
The LEGI investment will allow us to put enterprise at the heart of our actions to achieve this ambitious vision.
Deprivation and super output areas
Doncaster is a modern city in the making: a new airport, a new university, new ways of doing things, excellent partnerships, the people, communications and land that businesses need. Doncaster has it all.
But history offers a bleaker picture, of closed collieries and factories; and of communities left behind, with few of the opportunities that encourage people elsewhere to acquire skills, get jobs, and start businesses.
According to the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2004 Doncaster has a score of 31.5 and is ranked 40th (most deprived) of the 354 districts in England. Within the region of Yorkshire and the Humber, Doncaster is the 4th most deprived district.
Doncaster is the largest geographic Metropolitan Borough in the country with an area in excess of 225 square miles. In addition to the town centre the Borough has a number of settlements with significant population centres including Thorne to the North, Bawtry to the South and Mexborough to the West. However the size of the Borough means that many of our urban villages are disconnected from the Urban Centre.
Some 26% (46) of our 193 Super Output Area’s (SOA’s) are in the most deprived 10% nationally and 41% in the most deprived 20%. This deprivation is spread across the Borough with each of our 6 management areas containing SOA’s in the most deprived 10%. The areas with the most SOA’s in this category are the Urban Centre (13 SOA’s), North (10 SOA’s) and West 10 (SOA’s). In terms of named neighbourhoods that may be more meaningful than SOAs these suggest Thorne, Stainforth, Askern, Adwick Le Street, Central Doncaster, Rossington, Mexborough and Conisbrough.
Market failures and opportunities
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) (see later reference in main text) conclude that Doncaster is in the top 30 most 'business deprived’ districts England.
The legacy of our industrial past is low output, high rates of inactivity, a weak skills base, and 7000 fewer firms than the English average for a town of this size. This enterprise gap is closing as Doncaster develops, but LEGI will accelerate the process and ensure our most deprived communities benefit. We aim for nothing less than a transformation of the local culture of enterprise, and this central purpose should be remembered in reading the dry figures that necessarily under-pin our plans.
Opportunities abound and we are making significant progress toward our goals. The opening in April 2005 of Robin Hood Doncaster-Sheffield Airport, the only new international airport that has opened in the UK in the past 40 years, is a huge opportunity for us. The airport is an economic driver of regional and national significance, and is identified as such in the Sheffield City Region Development Programme. Robin Hood airport has already carried its 1 millionth passenger and:
- • Expects 2.33 million passengers per year by 2014, will create over 7,000 jobs, has capacity for an 100 acre business park and has attracted £80 million worth of private sector investment
In addition we are experiencing and driving an urban renaissance with inter alia:
- • A new retail heart for the town centre comprising:
- o Over 860,000 sq ft retail space, 20,000 sq ft office space, an integrated public transport interchange (with bus and rail facilities)
- • Town Moor and Racecourse Development, which includes:
- o Investment to secure the future of the St Leger in a world-class facility, refurbishment of stands, development of an exhibition and conference centre.
- • A new 15,000 seat community sports stadium
- • A new College campus - the DEC Hub - and drive to University status
- • A civic and cultural quarter comprising 22 hectares of the urban centre.
LEGI’s role is to connect our people and businesses to this drive to city status. For this LEGI programme to be deeds and not just words, we need structures and people to take forward the action that we envisage. The private, public and voluntary/community sectors all have a role and our many partners will coalesce around:
- • Doncaster 100, our rapidly growing club of the town’s leading businesses, currently with over 60 members committed to securing regeneration through enterprise.
- • Our six Area Management teams, through which the local authority and its partners are already delivering services within our communities. It is this infrastructure that will provide the focus, targeting and deliverability of our LEGI investments.
- • Doncaster Education City (DEC), a new approach to providing all our residents and businesses with access to a comprehensive range of high quality learning opportunities enabling them to maximise their potential and to develop a knowledge based enterprise economy.
Our delivery infrastructure and partnership is itself a key opportunity.
A strategy for talent
Enterprise is about personal skills, aptitudes and abilities; in short about talent - and unlocking the talent of Doncaster people is the central theme of our bid. Our ambition is that wherever enterprise talent exists in Doncaster it should be nurtured, and that no artificial barriers should impede its growth.
Enterprise to pervade the culture …
The talent strategy is not just about creating new firms, important though this is; an enterprise culture needs new attitudes to enterprise amongst children in school, amongst employees, for instance in the Neighbourhood Management teams, who support entrepreneurs, and generally throughout society. Enterprise must become pervasive, casting off its past marginal role in Doncaster.
… but our four action plans are hard-edged
Experience shows that ambitious aims can be achieved only through carefully marshalled programmes of action. LEGI in Doncaster will be brigaded into the four areas briefly summarised with ‘headlines’ below:
Discover … new partnerships - is the key engagement theme in our bid, mobilising the firms in Doncaster 100, and their partners, to help spread enterprise, crucially by providing an enterprise dimension to our established neighbourhood management structures. This theme introduces:
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Discover … new skills - spreading the word in schools and communities and encouraging enterprise formation in groups and communities traditionally considered hard to reach. This theme includes:
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Discover … a new future - supporting start-ups and helping existing people to start in business. Supporting existing businesses to become larger and more productive. This theme includes proposals for:
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Measures of success
We are realistic. Closing the enterprise gap is a long-term goal. In the first three years of LEGI we will:
- • Raise the stock of firms by 550 of which 250 firms will be VAT registered.
- • Accelerate significant progress already being made in Doncaster, narrowing the enterprise gap by a gross total of 1400 firms (total VAT and non-VAT).
- • Conduct original research to establish a Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) baseline and update this figure annually. We will close the (anticipated) gap between Doncaster and the national TEA rate on an annual basis.
Our programme will include a formal Performance Management Framework (PMF) including a detailed ongoing evaluation plan. The development of the PMF will be among the first tasks of the LEGI development team. This PMF will be integrated with our Local Area Agreement PMF. We will evaluate our programme on an ongoing basis, and our plans for phased implementation in year 1 include provision for an assessment of impact, which will inform implementation in years two and three.
Our broader indicators for success reflect a joined-up approach to LEGI/LAA:
- • Improvements in core Indices of Multiple Deprivation
- • Significant increase in the number of new firms and jobs created, especially for key target groups, (including women, BME, IB, ex-offenders and workless households)
- • Increased employment rates (including self-employment)
- • Improved connectivity between opportunities and target areas.
A sustainable and value for money investment
In the context of our projected outcomes we believe that our LEGI proposals represent exceptional value for money at their planned cost of £16.4m in the first three years. In narrow terms they offer good value for money against the firm creation and employment outcomes we have described. More importantly they offer a cost that in context is modest, as the combined ‘critical mass’ of our LEGI programme will result in a transformation of both Doncaster’s enterprise culture and economy.
Through a sustained, long-term partnership approach between our neighbourhood services, community based organisations, specialist providers and the private sector we anticipate that significant capacity and knowledge will be developed. The legacy of our programme will be a strong delivery structure with enterprise truly embedded in nieghbourhood services, a thriving network of local business forums, and a reinvigorated enterprise agency, all supported by a strong enterprise culture across the Borough.
What’s different?
We propose to target individual and groups of micro businesses in our most deprived neighbourhoods, they will be core beneficiaries of LEGI business support interventions. The resident populations of these areas will also benefit from our actions and we will specifically target:
- • People in our most deprived neighbourhoods (by IMD these suggest Thorne, Stainforth, Askern, Adwick Le Street, Central Doncaster, Rossington, Mexborough, Conisbrough ) and in this context our proposal is to target workless households and especially those with children. Doncaster has 6.2% of households classed as ‘workless’ with children compared with the region at 5.2% and England at 4.8%. Doncaster has 8,124 lone parent families.
- • Women (there are particular issues with economic inactivity, earnings and start-up);
- • Young people (11% of our 16-18 year olds are not in employment, education or training (NEET) compared with the English average of 9% in July 2005) NB our proposals target young people generally and are not NEET specific;
- • Older people (50+) especially those on Incapacity Benefit. Boroughwide IB/SDA Claimants Nov. 2005: 17,400 – 8.5% of all over 16s cf 5.9% England.
- • Ex-offenders - The Community Rehabilitation Team based at Doncaster Prison (one of four prisons in the Borough) has an annual caseload of 1200 ex-offenders (most of whom are believed to reside in the Borough).
All of our work includes a requirement to be aware and positive about the needs of BME communities. In particular our core start-up programme will target BME and women entrepreneurs.
Our previous policies have tended to concentrate on employment and the attraction of large-scale inward investment as the key goals for economic development. For us LEGI creates a fresh and additional approach that should complement our work on active labour market policy for the Borough. LEGI is different because it adds the enterprise dimension to our core offer and above all seeks to harness the talent and potential of our communities in order that we can create a culture of responsibility through: self-reliant individuals; self-reliant households; self-reliant communities.
Partners
Our LEGI proposals have been developed through open stakeholder meetings from across the DSP (our Local Strategic Partnership). Specific and detailed consultations have taken place with individual and collective private sector companies including work with the Chamber of Commerce and the development of a new engagement vehicle for employers, Doncaster 100. We have also sought and received views from neighbourhood business forums across the Borough.
We have extensive involvement of the diverse community/voluntary sectors, including our Social Enterprise Network and representatives of our black and minority ethnic communities. Key development partners and supporters of our bid have been Neighbourhood Communities and Children’s Services and Education Standards of Doncaster MBC, Probation Service, PCTs, Business Link South Yorkshire (BLSY), DEC, Doncaster College, LSC, Chamber of Commerce, South Yorkshire Police and Job Centre Plus (JCP) among others.
