These were the remarks given at the launch of the new Rotherham Together Partnership plan launch at the University centre Rotherham, on Monday 30th January 2023.

The new plan can be downloaded here.

 

It’s been five years since we first gathered over at the New York Stadium and launched version one of our Partnership Plan for Rotherham; A New Perspective. So I was looking back at what we said that day.

In March 2017, we were talking about the College’s plan to build a new Higher Education Campus here in the middle of Rotherham. Phil Sayles, who was the Principal of the College at the time, presented RNN’s plans to us.

Then we were the only place in South Yorkshire not to have a dedicated facility for higher level skills. And today, 715 graduates later, here we are.

That’s testament to our partnership working – our ambition for our place and hopes for the people who live here.

And Jason Austin, the Chief Exec and Principal of the RNN group will be saying more about that later.

If you’ve seen me give one of these talks before, you’ll know I like to include a quote, and the team in first draft of this speech tempted me into a West Wing line. Because as we talk about our plans today, this seems to me to be at the heart of what we are trying to do. As Aaron Sorkin put it; “surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says we shall give our children better than we ourselves received.”

That’s what this college and this campus is all about.

So Jason, I wanted to take the opportunity to congratulate you and your whole team on your Ofsted rating of “Good”, announced a couple of weeks ago. That takes a tremendous amount of commitment and energy – thank you for all that you are doing for our young people.

When we wrote the last plan in 2017, the Urgent and Emergency Care Centre at the Hospital hadn’t opened.

The bus station was still falling down.

The tram-train hadn’t started running yet.

The day we launched the plan was just one day after the government had given the go-ahead for Planning for Gulliver’s Valley theme park.

Then: the Tesco building was still standing on Forge Island, and a month earlier four people had been charged with offences following the latest EDL protest.

Then: we’d secured £30 million to make possible the first major town centre housing development for decades – today the first of those homes on Wellgate are occupied, with the others along Westgate and Sheffield Road well on their way.

Then: we needed desperately to make changes.

Our approach was rooted both in a hard headed pragmatism: what could we actually do? But it was also about an ambition to improve the lives of local people in profound – and sometimes unmeasurable – ways:

• Could we improve the services that vulnerable children and adults most depend on?
• Could we help people to feel more safe in their communities, and less afraid of their neighbours?
• Could we change how people felt about their neighbourhoods?

Since then we’ve made great strides: joint police and community safety teams across the borough, neighbourhood policing restored, Children’s Services transformed, social care and health services working in close step even through the unprecedented current pressures. We’ve announced plans for a new £2m facility for people with learning disabilities at Canklow and now the families of service users tell us they wouldn’t ever want to go back to the way things used to be.

The proportion of the population in work continues to rise steadily. We’ve continued to attract significant private sector investment – Panattoni Park at Hellaby will secure hundreds of new jobs, City Fibre’s gigabyte broadband infrastructure, AESSEAL’s remarkable ‘Factory of the Future’ is going up in Templeborough, and the council’s new £5.4m business park at Manvers – which will host up to 38 new startup businesses at any time – is under construction.

Because of the tough choices we’ve made, we’ve been able to start putting more money back into street cleaning, the first three of our Towns and Villages Fund investments – those at Greasbrough, Maltby Laburnum Avenue and East Herringthorpe – to improve local centres have now been completed, and the number of potholes in our roads have been halved ahead of schedule.

Major regeneration works in the middle of Swinton will be on site in the next few weeks. 20 more Towns and Villages Fund projects – reaching right across the borough – are in development.

Parkway widening – the biggest capital scheme ever undertaken by the council is complete.

The new £12 million Parkgate link road, creating access to a new park and ride for the tram at Parkgate Shopping, is under construction. While work will start later this year on the construction of a new tram stop at Magna.

The biggest council house building programme since the 1970s is underway – delivering hundreds more affordable homes for Rotherham people.

And for the first time since we started to survey the views of residents, people tell us by a rate of almost two to one that people from different backgrounds get on well together here.

A lot done.

None of which made a blind bit of difference to the lady I spoke to in Kimberworth Park on Thursday morning. “Nothing ever changes,” she said.

So we can go further, faster. And we must.

Because what that lady meant was; “I’ll believe it when I see it with my own eyes.”

Fair enough.

For too many of our residents, life it still too hard. The cost of living crisis is too real, but it only compounds the challenges they already face.

It’s not acceptable that:

• A third of Rotherham children were living in poverty in 2020 – and that number has been rising
• 13,100 people have no qualifications, equating to 8.3% of our working age population, a rate significantly higher than the national rate
• Limiting long term health conditions are the reason why 1 in 3 economically inactive people are away from work
• And a women working full time earns almost £130 every single week less than a man

These were the kinds of inequalities that “Levelling Up” should challenge.

According to The Times, we were the ninth most successful council in the country in the first round of the government’s Levelling Up Fund. That money will go to support great projects, some of which you’ll hear more about today.

It will support business start ups and apprenticeships and training in Maltby – and save the façade of the old Maltby Grammar School.

It will support the developments at Wentworth Woodhouse, creating jobs and putting Rotherham on the map for all the right reasons.

It will enable the development of Skills Street at Gulliver’s, creating more training and job opportunities within the hospitality and leisure sector, and advancing our shared belief that job opportunities should be open to everyone.

It will improve the facilities at Rother Valley and Thrybergh Country Parks – two of the green spaces that people tell us they value so much.

And it will facilitate to the redevelopment of the town centre, enabling more brownfield housing sites to come forward and repopulate the middle of town, with enabling works starting later this year.

But you’ll have seen by now that last week the government decided not to fund regeneration projects in Wath and Dinnington – not because of the quality of the bid, or for any reason to do with us – but because they decided at the last minute that we’d already had some money.

Now changing the rules at the last minute like that would be outrageous in any case. Doing it after more than £200,000 of public money had been spent developing the bid only made it worse.

But here’s the real thing you need to know: if the council’s budget had only been cut by 90% of the amount we’ve lost since 2010; just 10% less than the budget gap we’ve actually faced, we’d be able to fund the Dinnington and Wath schemes not just once, but every single year for the rest of eternity.

Just reflect on that: £20 million every year, for only 10% less austerity.

I didn’t come into this line of work to rail from the side lines, and there’s a danger that we slip into the Brexit delusion of believing if only we cut off the outside world then everything will magically be better. It won’t. But neither should we accept being short changed.

For too long, that logic of “nothing ever gets better” has been too prominent in the conversations we have.

I’ve got saved on my phone a screenshot of the comment posted on Facebook when we announced the building of this UCR. It simply said; “What a waste of money.”

I’m guessing no one thinks that now.

But – to go back to where I started – why were we the last place in South Yorkshire to get an HE skills centre like this?

Why will we be the last to have a cinema?

Too often, the conversation is caught between “it won’t happen anyway” and “it should have happened already,” as if progress is made magically, without anyone ever having to take a chance, have a go, spend some money – or frankly make some mistakes.

Progress may well just be taken for granted when it’s achieved, but it has to be earned the hard way in the first place.

The Forge Island debate looked exactly like that: we’ve waited sixty years or more for that development. People rightly look at our neighbours and ask why we can’t have facilities like Barnsley’s Glassworks or Doncaster’s Cast. Then they’re horrified to discover that gems like those don’t just randomly drop from the sky.

I think we’ve got some of the Sunnyside Supplies guys from my ward here today. They do incredible things every week helping people who are struggling to feed themselves and their families, we’re so lucky to have them. But imagine if, when the pandemic hit, rather than Emma saying “people need feeding, so I’m going to work out what we can do” – before random foodstuffs started filling up our hallway – she’d instead said; “there’s nothing you can do, they’ll just have to go hungry.”

We should take heart. We’ve had bigger challenges than some other places these last few years, but as a lady said to me last week, we can’t keep looking back. And we just can’t afford to sit around hoping for miracles – and falling further behind while we do.

So as we recommit today to building a place to be proud of, we’ve got to do our bit to keep lifting our sights and saying “hey, this is a great place, filled with great people. We can keep doing better.”

I say all this not to bring you down, but to keep you looking up.

The Plan we’re recognising today sets out the next stages in our journey across five themes:

• Creating places to be proud of – with physical investment in every part of the borough, a programme of events and opportunities leading up to 2025 as we meet our commitment to give our young people what they asked us for: becoming the first Children’s Capital of Culture, and a town centre investment programme that begins at long last to turn around the decline
• Tackling climate change and improving the environment – working across the partnership to meet our obligations, delivering flood defences, maintaining our neighbourhoods, and investing in renewable energy.
• Improve the health and wellbeing of our residents – improving community mental health services, bringing together more services for families and young people in our communities, and securing a new NHS diagnostic centre
• Building stronger communities where people feel safe and well – continuing to challenge the threats that make people feel unsafe, tackling prejudice and discrimination, and putting more resources into the hands of local representatives to respond to local concerns

Before I finish though, I wanted to say something more about the “Inclusive economy” theme, because I think a lot of what else we want to achieve hinges on this.

It’s no use me banging on about silly numbers of pounds invested in buildings if people think they only exist in the abstract.

Each one of those investments is an opportunity for jobs, training, qualifications.

It’s why we introduced the council’s social value policy a few years ago, resulting in more than £10m now committed to things like training – with a staggering 1,038 weeks of training offered through the Council’s contracts as a result.

And it’s why this partnership echoed that commitment in our Social Value Charter.

Initiatives like Project Search, a partnership between schools and local businesses to support young people with autism and learning disabilities to find employment, are proof of what we can achieve together. 80% of previous interns are permanently employed in Rotherham and 10 interns are currently employed across Gulliver’s, Next Warehouse and health partners.

And I’m delighted that the Council was the largest Kickstart employer in South Yorkshire, taking on young people at risk of becoming long term unemployed, with three quarters of those we engaged subsequently moving into paid employment, self-employment or education.

In recent months we’ve secured commitments to local labour clauses for the developments in the redevelopment Swinton town centre, Churchill House at Eastwood and Callflex business park at Golden Smithies – ensuring the benefits are directly felt by people from the area. But over the next year we’ll be tightening up that policy too, so we’ve clear expectations of developers about their obligations to our people.

It’s why we’re reiterating our requirements on house builders to contribute to our council housing target when they’re building major development – so that “those new houses” don’t exclude people who aren’t in a position to buy.

I want to give a special mention to our Employment Solutions team, who bring together a whole range of disciplines. They’ve supported more than 1,000 residents, helping hundreds of people back into work or gain the skills they need to progress. Today alone two courses begin to support people who want to work in the hospitality sector and customers relations.

And it’s why I’m so proud that we are a Real Living Wage employer. It’s a policy that’s lifted the incomes of 3,000 low paid workers already. As we bring our household waste sites back into public ownership over the next few years, it’s another opportunity to go further. We simply shouldn’t be tolerating poverty wages in the year 2023.

In a moment I’ll hand you over to Jason Austin, our esteemed Principle of Rotherham and North Nottinghamshire College Group, but I wanted to leave you with one final thought.

If we want our residents to have faith in their community and their institutions – if we really want that – they’ll find it a lot easier if they’re not worrying about where the next meal comes from. We can’t do that alone, but we should do what we can. So I repeat my challenge to all the partnership organisations again today – let’s find a way to make it happen and make this a Real Living Wage town.

We shall give our children better than we ourselves received.

And we’ll do it together.

Thank you.