David Draffan Covid19 Blog no9

Plymouth City Council Economic Development

David Draffan Service Director Economic Development

Covid19 Blog

No 9 - Tuesday 28/4/2020

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.

I can honestly say that it’s been a very intense week since my last blog just before Easter, which, I think was a welcome break for everyone. The main focus over the last week has been planning in earnest for recovery. Some people are talking recovery and other are talking pre-recovery but what is clear is this is going to be a long slog and we will need to be working with our partners harder than ever to provide whatever economic stimulus we can as a City for the foreseeable future. The biggest challenge at the moment is of course to find any certainty against which to base your planning assumptions. I think it’s fair to say we are planning for the worst and hoping for the best.

We have continued this week to try and support as many businesses as we possibly can and whilst the volume is perhaps down a little the complexity and distress of the cases if perhaps greater. In particular the process of dealing with the last 20% of the small business grants is proving difficult – It’s the 80/20 rule but in reverse. What has been really brilliant for me is problem solving some of the really difficult cases - some colleagues at the time did say I was insane to give my mobile phone number out to 2500 businesses! There have been a number we have sorted this week that needed some creativity on our part and patience on that of the business. What has been lovely is the large numbers of TY notes we have received – not something we normally get in Local Government. I am still really worried that we don’t track down every eligible businesses but we intend to try and today we shifted significant additional resources into this element of the operation.

Important things

Small Grants – We have paid out ￡34.5m to 2851 businesses. We have 2982 eligible applications to date. We have taken 2590 phone calls since March 27th.

Shop4Plymouth – On the back of Call4Fish we launched Shop4Plymouth last week. It’s a very simple concept and signposts shoppers to the many amazing deals that our retailers are currently offering online. Not only can you shop4Plymouth you can shop FOR Plymouth. Please do check it out and share with your retailer contacts. https://www.shop4plymouth.co.uk/

PCC Rates deferral – If you pay by direct debit we will not be taking payment in April or May. More information can be found here: https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/businesses/businessrates/coronaviruscovid19supportbusinesses

Invest In Plymouth Website - https://www.visitplymouth.co.uk/invest/business-support/covid-19 

Plymouth City Council Emergency Planning

We had our first formal emergency debrief on Friday which usually happens after the emergency phase of the incident. What is unique about the pandemic is that we have an extended emergency phase so we had what’s called a hot debrief instead. This was an opportunity for the Council’s Senior Leadership Team to review what is working and what isn’t. One of our main discussions was planning for the phased release for the lockdown that we are currently seeing across Europe. There are 3 elements to this for us: 1) Restarting those services that we stopped at the outset of the emergency 2) Reopening public facing buildings 3) Repopulating our own offices. One of the first areas we anticipate re-opening nationally is retail and we are already in detailed planning for how we can ensure safe social distancing in the City Centre including our open spaces, car parks and Pannier Market. The British Retail Consortium has issued dome useful guidelines: https://brc.org.uk/news/corporate-affairs/social-distancing-in-retail-stores-and-warehouses/

Through operation shield, for our most vulnerable citizens, we are supporting nearly 4500 people currently and delivered c 200 food parcels last week and 165 prescriptions. We also now have 738 registered volunteers. PEE is also starting to flow with 300,000 items targeted for deliver this week. 80% of our staff are currently working from home. Our bin collection rate remains over 99%. The other interesting thing from last week is the expansion of c19 testing from just medical and health workers to key workers – clearly part of the national strategy. Finally our digital democracy programme starts next week with our first formal Cabinet meeting online – a real first for us.

I personally will be the City’s Silver Commander for 2 weeks from this Friday which will be interesting. My role is to act as the interface between the City’s strategic Gold Command and the Council. My predecessors have dealt with everything from temporary morgues to digital democracy.

Recovery Planning

So just to say a little more about our approach to recovery. We plan to do a formal announcement on this probably next week at the Council’s Cabinet meeting. Our approach will have 4 stages allowing for us to deal with the acute phase and building in time for analysis and reflection. We plan a sectoral approach and will to make strong use our existing partnerships such as Plymouth Growth Board, Destination Plymouth Culture, Building Plymouth, City Centre Company, PWP, Employment and Skills Board etc. We have commissioned some initial work into the resilience of our key sectors, an analysis of the new funding landscape, a review of our capital programme and projects. We have an amazing pipeline of projects that we believe much of which remains very relevant to our recovery e.g. National Marine Park, British Art Show, Civic Centre, Brunel Plaza, Oceansgate Phase 2 and 3, direct development programme to name a few.

One of the strands of our recovery is to drive and exploit the economic footprint of the Council. This will be trying to get our capital programme and procurement up and running as quickly as possible. We see a major role for construction jobs in stimulating the economy. The name of the game will be local employment, local procurement and local supply chain. There will also be some new opportunities for some sectors and we had a great discussion about the Health Sector at the Science Park for example last week. There are also major opportunities in defence for the City. We also spent some time looking at the Mayflower Programme and the Box to see how this content can best be repurposed for recovery. We are in the process of appointing a programme manager for the recovery programme and to identify a dedicated delivery team. This will be up and running early May.

Business Grants Update

Whilst we have paid out 2851 grants of 2982 eligible applications the story is a little more complicated. The main problem is that the rates systems selected by Government to pay out money is designed to collect tax. We believe there are still c 800/900 eligible businesses out there. These appear to be in broadly 3 categories:

1. Businesses who are eligible but have been refused – we currently have 417 of these and whilst there some ineligible or fraudulent many have simply provided us with the wrong information and sometimes more than once. We now plan to ring these businesses as soon as they get refused to immediately resubmit.
2. Incorrect information on the rating database – There are numerous cases where the rates database is wrong and we need to make changes. This is time consuming and quite a technical area that we have resourced up internally.
3. Businesses not aware – we are working through a list of c700 businesses and where we can we are making contact direct via Facebook, phone, LinkedIn etc. In some cases we only have an address and no business name.

This morning we significantly moved resources from approving applications to tracking down businesses and hopefully we will see significant progress this week. The Chamber has been very helpful in identifying 30 businesses to get paid – TY Stuart and team.

Full guidance here https://www.visitplymouth.co.uk/invest/business-support/covid-19/business-grants

C19 PCC News releases from last week.

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

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

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

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

I wanted to say a bit more about this as it is very close to me heart. The idea came from many of us telling stories of small local retailers who had wonderful offers. My own example being Lidstones butchers in the Broadway who do an amazing meat box delivered for ￡50. City Centre Manager Steve Hughes, Tudor, Mark Lowry and I put our heads together and seconded Box social media expert Till Craig to build the site.

We have had 40 businesses sign up to date but we need many more and we need more activity on social media for this to work. But so far we have had 9000 unique users over the weekend to our website, 23,500 Facebook users and decent activity on twitter and LinkedIn.

So if you know if a business doing an offer tell them to get in touch via the Shop4Plymouth site. And if you use the site please shout loudly on social media.

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

Keep supporting local fishermen and but direct. More boats are going out and the trade price is slowly rising. Our scheme in Plymouth is now being replicated nationally and more fishermen are joining locally too.

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