PEOPLE
Increase prosperity, local employment and workforce diversity
We endeavoured to create significant opportunities to boost local employment and prosperity within London. We also aimed to increase workforce diversity, foster an inclusive culture and support those who need it most, including the young and the vulnerable.
Supporting London communities
Legacy commitments 31 – 39
The scale of the Tideway project and its route through 14 of London’s ‘riparian’ boroughs offered an opportunity to give a major boost to people in those communities through employment and through fair pay and treatment for our workforce. We also saw significant potential to develop an inclusive culture at Tideway and improve diversity – for example, women are hugely under-represented in the UK construction workforce, with current rates around 15 per cent.
I am born and raised in Fulham. One of my heroes is my nan … one of the reasons I joined the project as an apprentice engineer was my nan lived a stone’s throw from the Carnwath Road site A lot of my drive, my commitment, my effort has been to make my nan proud, as well as the rest of my family.” Ray Cantwell, Construction Engineer and Works Supervisor, West and Central Delivery Teams To see the full interview with Ray, see the Tideway website.
We reached our stated goal of providing 4,000 sustainable jobs around the peak of construction, signing off the commitment in 2020-21. We achieved a target that a quarter of our workers would be from one of ‘our’ 14 boroughs. We did not achieve a related target that 20 per cent of workers in our three drive sites (where the Tunnel Boring Machines began their journeys) would come from that site’s borough - we achieved 13 per cent. We had multiple instances where a project worker could not be counted against this target because although they were local to the site, they lived on the other side of the borough boundary or the river, a pattern we discovered after the target was signed into the DCO. However, we assessed the wider social value of these commitments. Not for pure economic value - if we had not set local targets someone would have had the job anyway - but on the wellbeing value of a short commute (valued at £1,060 a year for less than 15 minutes a day, compared with 1-2 hours), which showed £2.3m of social value.
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