Good Jobs

Government set us a 30 year target of 10,000 jobs. The reality is 4,800 new jobs in just four years and another 2,700 jobs saved by our investment through the pandemic. The jobs we are creating are all permanent, well-paid with good career prospects and are all directly attributable to our funding. Every £1 we spend returns over £3 to Treasury in payroll taxes alone.

But good work is about so much more than job creation. The North of Tyne’s employment charter, the Good Work Pledge, was launched November 2021. It is the result of collaboration and co-design with the business community and trade unions. It is backed by the CBI and the North East Chamber of Commerce. It underpins all of the thousands of jobs we are creating. It boosts companies’ productivity and boosts workers’ quality of life.

To date, 72 local employers, from both the private and public sectors, have become accredited. Together, these organisations cover over 50,000 employees. I want to see good work becoming the norm through supporting initiatives such as the development of employee-owned cooperatives and community interest companies in sectors which have often been characterised by exploitative employment practices.

One such is the supply teacher private agency sector. Since early 2020 we have been working with the teaching unions to develop a social enterprise alternative which will provide better pay for supply teachers and be of benefit to schools. The co-op has now been registered and a provisional launch date is early in 2023.

As well as creating good jobs we’ve also started measuring our performance against a Wellbeing Framework developed with the help of the Carnegie UK Trust. Just because something is hard to measure it doesn’t mean that it’s not important.

Related Achievements