CLLR JOHN ROSS City Deal will bring investment across all of South Lanarkshire
I take great pleasure and pride in my role as your Council Leader, and if you asked me to pick out the best parts I think I would highlight two things.
First, I get to meet a lot of interesting and sometimes inspiring people. Second – and I genuinely think this is true of most politicians, of whatever party – I got into politics to try to help people, and my role gives me real opportunities to do this.
Often those two highlights come together, and they did so recently when I launched a new Skills Investment Plan which covers not just South Lanarkshire but eight council areas in what is known as the Glasgow City Region.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is Scotland’s economic powerhouse, as it contributes more than £41 billion to the national economy, has 34 per cent of its jobs and is home to 29 per cent of its businesses.
South Lanarkshire is a major part of the Glasgow City Region and we lead on skills and employability, a key objective of which is to make sure that local people can share in economic growth by getting the skills and training they need to get good jobs.
That includes more than 29,000 jobs that we expect to be created through the region’s City Deal projects – in South Lanarkshire these are roads projects and a number of community growth projects in our towns.
The Skills Investment Plan covers the next five years and is a unique partnership of councils, central government and public agencies, the business sector and all of the local universities and colleges.
Together, we are looking ahead at future employment needs and aligning our work to provide the skills and training people need to get fulfilling and rewarding work.
This will make a very real difference to the lives and prospects of local people.
We launched the plan at an event in South Lanarkshire College in East Kilbride, and that’s when I got to meet some of those inspiring people I was talking about earlier.
I don’t mean the other politicians, business folk and academics who were there – though they are interesting and inspiring! – but the college students themselves.
Young people who are desperate to get on in life, learning subjects as diverse as catering, construction work and events management.
Hearing their enthusiasm for the training they are getting and the life options they are determined it will give them was inspiring indeed.
It is young people like these that the skills plan is about, although there is also a focus on helping those older adults who are unemployed but can be helped back into work by “upskilling” – learning new skills or improving the ones they have.
Your council has a good track record in this area already. We run a range of employability programmes which have great results in helping people back into the workforce.
Also, the recently released School Leaver Initial Destination Results showed 96.4 per cent of young people who left South Lanarkshire schools in 2017/18 went into a positive destination – that is, a job, further or higher education or other training.
This was the fourth consecutive year the South Lanarkshire rate was better than the Scottish average of 94.4 per cent.
There is no room for complacency, however, and we are determined, as a council and as part of the Glasgow City Region, to keep working hard to improve the lives and life prospects of all our local residents.