Lisa McCance describes how her joint economic development bid for cash from a new government job creation fund yielded £355m With the aim of kick-starting the creation of around 150,000 new jobs, the Government launched the Future Jobs Fund in April. Local authorities, social enterprises and charities can all apply for a share of the £1bn fund to progress initiatives aimed at helping young people out of unemployment. Croydon Economic Development Company (EDC) is a recently-formed, independent, private sector-led company, and is leading on a host of projects to regenerate the economy in the south London borough of Croydon. The EDC recently won £325,000 from the fund for its project to match up around 50 unemployed 18 to 24-year-olds with jobs locally. The submission itself was a real team effort from my staff which no doubt reinforced the partnership element of the project we were outlining, a key element in any successful funding bid. Croydon EDC took the lead on this application on behalf of Croydon. Recently set up, the EDC is the lead body in the town's ambitious regeneration programme, and creating new job opportunities is top of its agenda. The EDC worked with three main partners involved in the bid – Croydon LBC, Croydon Voluntary Action, and Jobcentre Plus. The council gave its full support to the bid, ensuring that it was given key agenda time at the economic recovery implementation group – the local partnership formed to deal with recession issues across the borough. Croydon Voluntary Action wrote to local partners asking them to express their interest in taking on local young people, as well as creating financial profiles to identify how these employers could be supported, if they agreed to participate. Jobcentre Plus was instrumental in producing key information on the types of young people we would be supporting, and the numbers of clients which fit within this category. Without the input from these partners, the process would have been very slow, and the detail we would have been able to offer on our project, very minimal. And this would have impacted on the success of the bid. The Government Office for London alerted us to the launch of the new Future Jobs Fund earlier this year. In spite of the short timeframe for submissions, we decided to go for it. The application process and information required were relatively straightforward. However, we did need to provide details on the types of jobs we planned to offer young people. This meant we had to work fast to not only gain agreement from local employers to actually participate in the project, but also get them to commit to some detailed job descriptions. Proving that the project had lots of backers ready to take an active role in making it work was instrumental in the success of our bid. To ensure we maximised the number of employers signing up, we specifically targeted those who already contribute to the community, such as social enterprises and educational establishments. We knew that this sector would be the most receptive to the idea of a community ‘uplift' project, and also have the greatest need for additional staffing. Following careful calculations, the costs requested in the bid represented the costs we needed to pay the salaries of the 50 young people for six months. This played a key role in persuading employers to take part, because it meant they could gain an extra member of staff at no extra cost. In addition, they all acknowledged the long-term community benefits of reducing the number of young people out of work. Partners recruited to the bid include Croydon College, South London Learning Consortium and the Croydon Asian Resource Centre. I believe the success of our bid was partly down to us being able to clearly map out the project – ie, show a clear need, provide strong details on how we would address this, and how, by providing support for the employer, we would ensure the project's sustainability. We approached Jobcentre Plus and obtained detailed information on young people who were receiving jobseekers allowance, including information on the types of jobs they were looking for. This enabled us to show how the jobs we had lined up through the project, including admin, IT and event management, matched the employment goals of our potential beneficiaries. We also placed the project in the context of how we are trying to regenerate Croydon generally, bringing in local area agreement targets and national indicators. We felt it was important to show that this is not a one-off project that will simply fade away after the funding runs out, but that it is part of a broad and robust body of work we are already undertaking to tackle unemployment in Croydon. There are always things to learn from a bidding process, even if that bid is successful. In this case, we would ideally have set up a focus group of young, unemployed people – our target demographic – before submitting the bid. Including some of their views and showing how the project has been formulated to address their concerns would perhaps have strengthened the bid further. However, we will be organising such a group as soon as the project goes live in October. Also, we would have started conversations with potential employers earlier in the process, enabling us to provide greater detail in the submission. Lisa McCance is senior programme manager at Croydon Business
