Case studies

At the end of March 2020, early into the pandemic, Gateshead Council formed a Covid Economic Response Group, with workstreams on people, businesses, capital projects, stakeholders, and innovation.

Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council has ringfenced apprenticeship and work experience opportunities through the council’s ‘inclusive offer’, a scheme which creates opportunities for young people who need extra support to benefit from work.

The COVID-19 economic taskforce has focused on bringing partnerships together to deliver SC’s pandemic response.

Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council provides a mentoring service for apprentices in the private or public sectors. This is part of the Council’s employment and skills team and links with wider services to support harder-to-reach young people, including care leavers and those with disabilities.

To date, SkillsHouse has supported more than 1,000 unemployed people to find work, while the wider Get Bradford Working programme has helped over 3,000 people into employment.

‘Grow our own’ is an important ethos at Somerset Council. T Level placements are one element of a variety of early career routes into the council, and T Level opportunities are making the council an attractive local employer to young people.

South Kesteven District Council allocated £1.2m of it’s Central Government ARG COVID-19 Grant Allocation to create a grant scheme based around supporting new and existing businesses to diversify and enable them to be more resilient in the future.

The collaborative working of the South Ribble partnership and the Lancashire Mental Health to Businesses (MH2B) Building Blocks Partnership has allowed South Ribble to be a representative sample of the wider Lancashire area, meaning that the focus on the development can be on a much smaller area, with recommendations able to be rolled out over a larger area.

Although the existing Surrey survey data was a useful tool, the arguments benefited from being broadened out to encompass evidence and examples from beyond Surrey to demonstrate to new partners the economic benefits of employing hidden talent and that this is not just a local agenda but part of a larger set of issues being recognised and championed globally by both small and large employers.