Dragons Scale Skills Summit

IDEAS aimed at tackling Liverpool’s skills shortage are to be entered into a Dragons Den at a major city-wide summit.  The innovative summit, at the BT Convention Centre on 4 December, will look at the future employment opportunities for young people and the long-term unemployed in the city.

It will be attended by 120 delegates representing major companies, education organisations, councils, business groups and training organisations.  The skills summit will feature a Dragons Den type event which will involve ideas on dealing with worklessness, improving skills and employment, enterprise and higher level skills being pitched to teams of 3 Dragons.  They will challenge the proposers of the ideas about how their plans would work , what alternatives there are and what barriers there are to them being implemented, sparking a debate about the issues highlighted.  A final session will see a priority list of actions drawn up with attempts to find a common way forward.

“We want to find ways of engaging young people and the long-term unemployed to gain the skills they need to find work.  There has to be a golden thread of education, skills training and employment running through people’s lives but that does not happen to too many of our citizens and there is no doubt that we have a skills shortage in the city. 

We have called this summit to bring together a wide a group of organisations with a interest in promoting skills – from the private sector to major employers in the public sector, people involved in education and training and young people themselves – to find new and practical ideas.

What we do not want is a talking shop which produces nothing. By having a Dragons Den we will be able to test the feasibility of ideas, see if people would “invest “ in them and find out which ones should be taken forward.  The summit itself is only the start – it is putting into action what comes out of it and making a real difference to the lives of young people, and those who have been out of work for some time, which is important.”  said Cllr Warren Bradley, City Council Leader. 

WINTER DEATH FIGURES REVEAL THOUSANDS OF OLDER PEOPLE ARE DYING FROM THE COLD

RESPONDING to the annual excess winter death figures from the Office for National Statistics which show the number of deaths among those aged 65 and over in the North West are still at unacceptable levels, Mervyn Kohler, Special Adviser for Help the Aged, says:- “This year’s winter deaths figures are a continuing disgrace to a Government who are there to protect the most vulnerable in our society.  Older people in the North West are struggling on a daily basis, with the rising cost of living leading to real hard ship.

New figures, which show 3,400 people in the North West died as a result of cold related illnesses, underlines the genuine misery faced by many hard-pressed pensioners.

Fuel poverty is a blight on society which has now grown to encompass 1 in 4 pensioner households.  If we are to protect our older people the North West this winter, the Government must act now to prevent the nation’s grandparents becoming casualties of winter. 

Money which has been made available to insulate homes is an important part of the solution but will have little impact this winter. The £60 promised in the pre-budget report will help, but the Government needs to provide more crisis payments for North West older people struggling to heat their homes this Christmas.

When billions have been spent to save our financial institutions surely some can be spared to save our older people.”

If you have any elderly people in your road, keep an eye on them and see if they need help, especially in cold weather.