Agenda item

David Ayton-Hill (Assistant Director – Communities) noted that there were a range of economic recovery and business support projects and programmes underway in Warwickshire. The ‘Adapt and Diversify’ scheme was set up with some government funding to support Covid-19 outbreak management. It was designed to sit alongside the funding Borough & District Councils received from Government to provide support to those businesses forced to close due to Covid-19; and instead focuses on the future activities of these businesses, helping them adapt and diversify their business models. £1.5 million has been issued over two rounds; the first round was only open for one day due to the amount of applications received. There were several ineligible applications as they did not provide enough detail on what they needed the funding for; these applicants were signposted to other funding sources. 

The ’Survive, Sustain & Grow’ programme was set up to help businesses in the pandemic and provided them with bespoke support and consultants. These consultants worked with businesses so they knew what they needed to do to restart their businesses and helped with future grant applications. 600 businesses took part in the programme which had received positive feedback and case studies were available online.

The ‘Tech Challenge’ was started as part of Warwickshire’s Economic Recovery programme to reach out to Warwickshire’s strong creative digital sector, to develop innovative approaches to aid Warwickshire’s town centres. Three projects were funded through this as of June 2021 with two still in progress and one going live in May 2021. The live project was the Leamington ‘Local Young Talent’ Festival (LYT) where creators put their wares in Leamington Spa shop windows, empty shop fronts were ‘done-up’ to create a marketplace for what the creators were doing. It was a popular project and increased footfall in Leamington and a full evaluation piece on the project was put online. Alison Robinson (Strategy and Commissioning Manager (Economy & Skills) clarified that these two other projects took place in other towns around the county. Things that worked well in the LYT project e.g. empty shop windows, were implemented cross-county. However, different needs of towns were considered, for example, if one town had more of a high street demand then another.

David Ayton-Hill continued that a redundancy support package was implemented and focused on re-skilling, but this was not as in demand as feared. 

A digital service with Warwickshire’s businesses sector was also set up to help school children that could not gain work experience and employability skills direct from businesses themselves. 30 videos were made with these businesses and provided to schools to increase student’s career aspects and promote apprenticeships. 

 Councillor Kam Kaur (Portfolio Holder – Economy and Place) praised the work done by the economy team and noted how agile the team and businesses have had to be due to the pandemic lockdowns. She concluded that all business types were aided by Warwickshire County Council and not just one type of business.

In response to several questions from Councillor Sinclair, Alison Robinson stated that they were disappointed by the amount of applications they had to discard in round one of applications for Adapt & Diversify. To prevent this for round two they produced online webinars and offered advice to people who had questions on the application forms. Alison Robinson confirmed that the return and outputs were published online for the ‘Survive, Sustain & Grow’ programme but more worked needed to be done to promote it. The ‘Tech Challenge’ was being reviewed so it could be applied to other Warwickshire towns and the skill hub information would be advertised more.

In response to Councillor Jackie D’Arcy, Alison Robinson stated that the Education Transition Fund was open until the 28th June 2021 and there was a good take up. 

Following a question from the Chair, Alison Robinson confirmed that the business videos for schools were on the school’s website and their skills hub website.