Social value and traditional construction
How the Kirkstall Forge project marries social value with traditional construction - by Mark Rowland
Kirkstall Forge, four miles north-west of Leeds city centre, is over 800 years old – making it one of the oldest continuously used industrial sites in Europe. Now, it’s undergoing a transformation.
The Kirkstall Forge project, led by developer CEG and its project management partner (and APM corporate member) Pierre Angulaire, is a huge (around £400m) regeneration project for the area, involving new infrastructure, housing, office space, schools and retail premises. It’s also notable as a construction project with social value at its heart.
“One of CEG’s key drivers, within the company’s ethos and its corporate philosophy, is really wedded to community regeneration. So aside from building and regenerating the physical space, they firmly embed themselves in the communities that they choose to develop,” explains Howard Metcalf, one of the project managers at Pierre Angulaire.
Forging Futures Campus
At Kirkstall Forge, this is delivered through the Forging Futures Campus – a skills and employment initiative programme aimed at helping young people from all backgrounds in the region to develop the skills they need for a rewarding career. It involves three key programmes: the Skill Mill, which helps young offenders into work, the Employment and Skills Initiative and the Apprenticeship Academy.
The Skill Mill has taken on several cohorts since 2015. The young offenders that go through the programme work for six months on the site, getting involved in general logistics and maintenance work, such as clearing vegetation, and building and painting fences.
“These are individuals who come from massively chaotic backgrounds in the main, have had some involvement with the long arm of the law, and more often than not turned up on site with tags and court orders,” Metcalf explains.
Since the programme started, the chance of reoffending among graduates has reduced by 90 per cent, and more than half have gone on to further training, an apprenticeship or full employment.
Getting young people into work
The Employment and Skills Initiative takes 16- to 24-year-olds who are long- to medium-term unemployed and puts them on a 10-week skills course, working towards a Level One certificate in construction skills. The people who go through the course each get a Construction Skills Certification Scheme card and an improved CV. A lot of work is also done to build confidence.
“There’s a lot of enrichment in the course that works with the individuals to really help them to change their lifestyles, incorporating diet, exercise and wellbeing.”
So far, 74 per cent of individuals on the Employment and Skills Initiative have gone on to further training or a job, and not all in the construction industry – those who show an aptitude for other sectors, such as hospitality or office work, are given the chance to develop skills and gain placements in those areas too.
“Where they choose not to go into construction, we’ll signpost them towards working with our partners that operate out of the office space. They’ll work in the restaurant downstairs, or in some of the office space on the upper floors. It’s a collaborative initiative.”
It’s a source of young talent
The third scheme, the Apprenticeship Academy, is a two-year NVQ course in construction management, involving classroom study and vocational training with various partners on the project. The programme is running in collaboration with Efficiency North and the College of Building. Many graduates have ended up working on the site with various partners, including CEG and Pierre Angulaire.
“It’s a really efficient way of recruiting young talent,” says Metcalf. “There’s almost a ‘try before you buy’ aspect to it, where they’ve worked with individuals for some or all of the two-year course.”
Delivering these social value initiatives as part of a more traditional construction project involves a lot of communication and collaboration between the organisations involved across the projects’ life cycle.
Pierre Angulaire tries to apply the same level of rigour to all elements of the project, whether it relates to construction or social value. You just have to apply it slightly differently, says Metcalf.
“You’re not building a building here, you’re building individuals. You’re giving them opportunities to realise their ambition.”
Calculating social benefits
The steepest learning curve has been around measuring the social benefits that the project is providing. The overall aim was to do something that gave back to the local community, and that the region itself benefits in the long term. Pierre Angulaire created a social value calculator based on 30 criteria, including time spent supporting the initiatives, hours of learning per individual, and the rate of repeat offending for the Skill Mill cohorts. This gives a numerical value to the social side of the project that indicates the following statistical outputs:
- A Social Value Portal report, commissioned by CEG, found that the actual, quantifiable social value delivered to date by the Forging Futures Campus is over £10m and that, over the course of the development, the potential from future phases may be as high as £240m.
- CEG continues the good work, with new partners and now more than 116 individuals having graduated from the course: 70 per cent achieving a positive outcome, including 45 new jobs and 54 going on to further training, education and apprenticeships.
- Over 450 participants have benefited from curriculum delivery, site visits, workplace engagement, CV workshops and mock interviews in partnership with a number of Leeds schools, colleges and universities.
However, Metcalf is keen to stress that financial benefit is not the point.
“How we really measure this is the feedback we get from the individuals who have been through the course, both directly and through the parents... The life that was going off the rails has been put back on the rails – that’s the tangible demonstration of the good work that’s being done. You can’t really capture that in a nice, succinct project management report.”
There is, of course an indirect benefit to this social value work for CEG, Pierre Angulaire and their partners – the social and environmental impacts of projects are becoming more important when assessing whether a project will go ahead. Through projects like Kirkstall Forge, CEG and its partners have real evidence that they can deliver.
“You’ve got this card to play that you have a longer-term involvement and a demonstrable ability to deliver social value. It’s a great way to buy-in stakeholders and get support.”
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