Matching Health with Growth

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Investing in our workforce

How EU Structural & Investment Funds could helpLocal Education and Training Boards deliver Health Education England’s priorities

Now is the time for LETBs and other NHS organisations to seize the opportunities offered by the new round of EU Structural and Investment Funds to help the NHS deliver high quality, effective and compassionate care, through developing and up skilling the health workforce. These funds can be used to co-fund activities to promote skills, employment and social inclusion, and to support labour mobility, for the period 2014-2020.

Health Education England’s mandate specifically includes deliverables to improve training standards for healthcare assistants and to increase the number of healthcare apprentices, which fit well with the EU funding priorities.LETBs should start discussions now with the organisations in their area charged with planning how to spend this funding (the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) – see below). Initial plans must be drawn up by September so there is no time to lose!

The NHS European Office is working to ensure that the NHS is well placed to access this funding, and this briefing is aimed at helping LETBs to do this.

Introduction

For 2014 to 2020 the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund (ESF) and part of the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) will be brought together into an ‘EU Structural and Investment (SI) Funds Growth Programme’ for England. The key spending priorities of this Programme will be research, development and innovation; support for SMEs; low carbon economy; skills; employment; and social inclusion. England will have a set total allocation to spend of around €6 billion in the seven year period and regional strategies to utilise this funding are now being drawn up. This NHS European OfficeBriefing outlines the opportunities that arise for LETBs from this funding and how they can access it.

Delivering workforce priorities in the longer-term

NHS organisations have benefitted from EU structural funding in the past, albeit sporadically and episodically. The specific focus of the SI Funds Growth Programme on skills, employment, and social inclusion, as part of wider regional growth strategies,means that it is particularly well suited as a mechanism to deliver some of the health workforce priorities promoted by Health Education England(HEE) on a longer-term basis. In particular, it can help to support the objectives in HEE’s mandate relating to “Competent and capable staff” and “Widening participation”. The devolved nature of Local Education and Training Boards (LETBs)will enable them to establish local relationships and utilise these funds more systematically in future.

European Social Fund (ESF) priorities are highly relevant for LETBs when shaping their workforce skills and development strategies. This is particularly true when considering flexible methods for entering training and employment forthe NHS workforce, such as apprenticeships and work-place learning, but would also apply to widening and improving the skill-sets of the existing workforce.

Identifying the priorities

Regionalstrategies to utilise the SI Growth Funds Programme will place significant focus on the following ESF-based investment priorities:

- access to employment for job-seekers and inactive people, including local employment initiatives and support for labour mobility

- sustainable integration of young people, in particular those not in employment, education or training into the labour market

- enhancing access to lifelong learning, upgrading the skills and competences of the workforce and increasing the labour market relevance of education and training systems, including improving the quality of vocational education and training and the establishment and development of work-based learning and apprenticeship schemes.

What the funds can support

Within these priority areas there are a broad range of relevant initiatives that can be supported by these EU funds, including:

- Innovative approaches to training for the unemployed, including marginalised groups, to help bring them to and support them in learning.

- Support for intermediate and high level vocational provision for the unemployed and for career progression.

- Supporting low skilled people in low paid work to help them progress and for apprenticeships in related projects.

- Innovative approaches to pre-employment training.

- Support for up skilling and retraining for industries identified in investment strategies, including training costs.

- Creating infrastructure to embed programmes for young people not in employment, education or training, such as traineeships.

- Brokering opportunities for young people, particularly with local employers and for young people who are not in employment, education or training, such as Traineeships and work experience.

Working with AHSNs

Alongside priorities on employment and skills development, there is a focus in the new SI Funds Growth Programme on innovation.We have therefore informed Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs)of the significant possibilities to use this funding to develop new health related products, systems and services. LETBs may wish to work with AHSNs to utilise SI Funding to help develop the associated healthcare workforce needs so that these innovations can be rolled-out at pace to improve patient outcomes, and to ensure healthcare staff will be able to understand and apply evidence of best practice in their sphere of work.

In this context, the EU is also particularly keen to promote social innovation through these funds. In this context social innovation means the process of finding and implementing new ways of tackling major societal problems, often drawing on the determination and knowledge of local communities and social entrepreneurs.

Cooperating with Local Enterprise Partnerships

In terms of accessing the funding, Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) are the key bodies with which to establish long-term partnership working, as they will be responsible for designing strategies on how best to use this funding locally.

Each LEP area will receive a notional allocation from the funds for the seven year period to be spent in line with the overarching priorities set out in EU regulations. LEPs will not be responsible for the financial administration of the funds themselves - this role will remain with central government – but they will be responsible for developing spending strategies and ensuring agreed outputs are delivered by working with a range of local partners. As significant local employers, NHS organisations will be ideally placed to engage with LEPs and to help shape their plans.

More specifically LEPs and their partners will be responsible for:

- coming up with an investment strategy for their area

- identifyingprogrammes and projects to deliver that strategy

- seeking match funding for those projects

- ensuring the projects deliver agreed output targets

- making sure their allocations are spent and outputs are delivered on time

- monitoring how well they are delivering against their strategies and the programme priorities

Each LEP, together with its partners, will produce a local investment strategy covering the above points as part of their wider plans for local growth – EU SI funding is simply one part of this strategy.LEPs will be able if they wish to collaborate across borders on their strategies to deliver a bigger impact, exploit synergies between LEP areas and achieve economies of scale.

The development of these strategies will have to take into account detailed guidance to be produced by Government and issued in July. The NHS European Office worked closely with the Government to ensure that the initial guidance on the SI Funds Growth Programme specifically mentioned the health sector as a key partner with which LEPs should engage and we expect this to be reiterated in the detailed guidance.

Given the tight timescale for the initial LEP investment plans it is important that LETBs establish relationships with their local LEP(s)now to input into the development of their strategies at an early stage and discuss possible investment priorities related to the health sector. Local plans will develop further, and potentially change, over the seven year period of the SI Funds programme, meaning there will also be on-going opportunities to jointly plan match-funded projects in the future.

What happens next?

The Government will be publishing further, detailed guidance to LEPs in July. LEPs are expected to submit their draft local strategies by the end of September. The Government will then work with LEPs to review local plans and offer advice on what else to do to prepare final Investment Strategies. These will have to be submitted to Government in January 2014. It is expected that the SI Funds will be available to spend from around mid-2014.

The NHS European Office is working to ensure that the detailed guidance to LEPs will describe the national health workforce policy context and will suggest LETBs as local partners with which to discuss, and possibly match-fund, regional projects.

We will continue to work with Government and the national LEP Network as the local Investment Strategies are developed andto ensure that colleagues in the NHS are kept informed of developments.

Further Information

Structural and Investment Fund strategies: preliminary guidance to Local Enterprise Partnerships and technical annex– issued April 2013

For more information about the issues covered in this Briefing please contact: