David Draffan Covid1 Blog no10

Plymouth City Council Economic Development

David Draffan Service Director Economic Development

Covid19 Blog

No 10 - Thursday 7/5/2020

Hi Everyone,

My name is David Draffan and I am the Service Director at Plymouth City Council with responsibility for Economic Development. As a department we have been wondering how to get our key messages out. It occurred to me that a more informal, human blog might be useful, in addition to our normal methods, so that I can perhaps reach a different audience; but also so that people can understand the work that is going on behind the scenes. I intend this to be regular and short rather than longwinded given the massive amount of communication currently.

This week has been very different to my substantive role as the Council’s Director for Economic Development. As part of my wider corporate responsibilities I have been the Council’s Silver tactical Commander this week and will continue next week. It’s been an amazing insight into the wider elements of managing the Pandemic emergency across the City. The role is to co-ordinate the Councils tactical response to the crisis working with other agencies in the City and region. This involves taking actions from the Council’s strategic Gold command and implementing them across the organisation but to also inform Gold of the day to day issues and pressures in the Council’s operation. In addition to this we have a duty to co-ordinate a City response working with both within the City and the region. The biggest meeting this week had 54 attendees from across Devon and Cornwall’s public agencies. Each agenda is formal and mirrors a national methodology from COBRA committee down. The main issues this week have been linked to pre-planning for the likely relaxation of the lockdown next week. At the same time managing the health emergency which this week has been focussed on responding to cases in car home settings.

The other main focus this week has been formally adopting the Councils approach to its own recover – we calling it ‘Reset – and our approach to economic recovery, the ‘Resurgam’ Programme. Both of these were formally adopted by the Councils first ever virtual Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.  Back in the day job the main news this week was the announcement by the Government responding to our lobbying that a new small grants scheme will be launched. We have yet to receive full details but this will be a new scheme and it looks like Plymouth will be given somewhere between ￡2 and ￡3m – This is welcome but it NOT a lot of money compared to the demand. So we will need to manage expectations immediately.

Important things

RESET – The Council has announced its approach to recovery which can be found here: https://democracy.plymouth.gov.uk/documents/s102995/Plymouths%20COVID-19%20recovery%20and%20renewal%20framework.pdf

Resurgam – The Council has announced its approach to economic recovery which can be found here. https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/newsroom/pressreleases/resurgamplymouth%E2%80%99seconomyriseagain

New Business Grants scheme – The Government has trailed a new small business grants scheme which can be found here.  https://www.gov.uk/government/news/top-up-to-local-business-grant-funds-scheme

Business Grants – We have now paid ￡39.5m to 3276 businesses.

Plymouth City Council Emergency Planning

This week’s focus has been mainly in 2 areas. The continuation of the work to supress the virus; and in Plymouth the front line is now in our care homes. The other area has been preparing for the expected slow reopening of services and businesses that may flow from Sundays PM’s announcement. The announcement has been heavily trailed and there has been today discussion about the relaxation of the stay at home message. We have been preparing for various scenarios and in particular thinking about the reopening of schools, our Household waste facility, safe distancing in the City Centre and in our offices. We have a meeting of the Councils senior team on Sunday evening at 8pm to ensure we are ready to respond whichever way it goes. It looks like many employers will soon be returning to work along with the Council. Our top priority will be safety of our staff and the public. As a result we have done a lot of work this week assessing our buildings for safe working practices. This is not just our offices but operations like our indoor market. It is likely this risk based approach will be a major focus for employers in the coming weeks.

Resurgam

The Leader announced our recovery programme on Tuesday and we are now in the process of formalising the working arrangements. This includes establishing a programme board, programme manager and dedicated delivery team. We are currently hoping to establish the delivery team next week and to have our first meeting week commencing the 18th May. We are also in the process of mobilising our sector partnerships Destination Plymouth, Plymouth Culture, Building Plymouth, The BIDs, Plymouth Manufacturing Group and MBTC into the Resurgam programme. An early piece of work will be seeking to remobilise the Councils procurement, capital programme and projects pipeline. We spent a lot of time reviewing these this week with a view to using our own economic footprint to restart the economy. We plan for publish our plan for recovery in the coming weeks once we have completed the process of engaging with our stakeholders.

Business Grants Update

We have made really great progress this week on the small business grants and as can been seen from the table below we only have 552 businesses left to chase down from 1100 last week – many of these won’t be eligible or even exist.

The other key issue is the announcement the Government is to award Councils a 5% top up on their grants to deal with some of the gaps in the scheme that we all lobbied for so hard. We have yet to receive the detailed guidance and will publish the criteria on the Council’s website and social media as soon as we have more information.

It is important to state that this will be a new scheme with a new process. It is still looking at supporting businesses with fixed property costs. The c￡2.5m we are also anticipating is also tiny compared to the demand we know exists so it is important that I manage expectations.

But really good news!

Number of eligible accounts

3803

Number of eligible accounts applied

3271

Number of eligible accounts approved

3226

Number of eligible accounts awaiting action

7

Number of eligible accounts rejected, not reapplied

38

Number of eligible accounts not applied

532

% eligible accounts applied

86.01%

% eligible accounts approved

84.83%

C19 PCC News releases from last week.

https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/newsroom/pressreleases/newppesupplierhelpsourcevitalsupplies

https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/newsroom/pressreleases/chelsonmeadowreopennextweek

https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/newsroom/pressreleases/citycouncilholdallcommitteemeetingsonlineduecovid19

https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/newsroom/pressreleases/celebrateveday75homeplymouth

Shop4Plymouth https://www.shop4plymouth.co.uk/

We now have 14,000 users and a 100k social media reach.

Call 4 fish https://www.call4fish.com/

 The scheme has now reached over 1m people.

• 1500 fish boxes in its first week.
• 23 ports and a network of merchants.
• Engaged with 658,698 people through social media and 1million people through partner posts.
• Generated national TV coverage on BBC Country File, This Morning, Sky News, BBC Daily Kitchen Live & ITV news besides wider media coverage in the Times, Guardian etc.

ED Newsletter – are you signed up?

https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/economicdevelopmentplymouthcitycouncil/

Growth Hub

Did you know we have a dedicated business support service in Devon and you can speak to a trained business advisor for free? https://www.heartofswgrowthhub.co.uk/covid-19-guidance-for-business/

Share widely

Please do share this blog widely and not via the usual channels as it’s important we get the message of support and solidarity to Plymouth businesses not connected in the usual way.

Feedback

If this blog is useful let me know and if it is simply more noise in the system I won’t be the slightest bit offended! I will try and do updates a few times a week as anything changes.

 I hope you get some small comfort from that fact that you are not alone. There is a dedicated groups of people committed to ensuring your survival and will stop at nothing to help.

Contact

My mobile number is 07919226965 and my email is [email protected]

Please text or email any time if you think I can help – I’m a night owl and will most likely be sitting with the laptop at the kitchen table.

All the best

David