The CCLA/Room151 Impact Awards will showcase the way finance teams have a direct impact on their local communities and the environment. This week we spotlight the work of Plymouth City Council’s finance department in the creation of co-operative company supplying school meals, and Newark and Sherwood, where finance officers threw their effort into supporting business through lockdown. Submission for the awards can be made here. Categories here.
Andrew Hardingham: CATERed’s ‘cooperative ethos’
The whole ethos of CATERed is to work alongside schools, parents and pupils to assist in the education of the food choices by feeding them seasonal, fresh local produce made into delicious wholesome meals that are fun to eat.
Run as a co-operative trading company CATERed is jointly owned by 67 Plymouth schools and the city council. All surpluses are reinvested in the business to support on-going development of the company, management of the school kitchen estate and delivering services to the children and young people of Plymouth, or distributed back to the schools in the form of a dividend.
Through pooling budgets, sharing risk and by providing commercial expertise, schools are given the confidence to work in partnership. Due to the co-operative ethos of CATERed, schools understand that by committing their budgets for school meals to the business means those funds will be spent where needed for the benefit of pupils across the city.
The company now serves 2.5 million meals each academic year with daily meals in schools and academies circa 12,500. It has continued to be operational throughout the Covid-19 crisis.
Entrepreneurial thinking has enabled CATERed to deliver many wider social benefits. The company launched “Lunch at the Libraries” to provide 50 free lunches to each library every Wednesday whilst offering activities such as reading clubs to support the Summer Reading Challenge. This concept was extended in response to the Covid-19 pandemic with over 10,000 free food parcels created for all those eligible for free school meals.
Ed’s Big Summer Food Tour, launched in 2018, saw CATERed tackling holiday hunger feeding just short of 9,000 children with food provided free of charge by suppliers and staff volunteers to prepare, pack and distribute. The Tour has grown exponentially since.
The council’s finance team proactively support the board and have recently worked with an external partner to secure a significant tax benefit to be reinvested in accordance with the company’s co-operative principles helping the company achieve positive outcomes for
service users:
- Children and families received nutritious, locally sourced freshly prepared meals;
- Staff through a commitment to paying the national living wage;
- Schools through economies of scale enabling more resources to be spent on children’s education;
- Suppliers through the commitment to “buying local” thereby supporting the local economy.
Andrew Hardingham is former service director for finance at Plymouth City Council.
Sanjiv Kohli: Finance made a ‘priority’ of supporting business during lockdown
From the very beginning in March 2020, finance officers at Newark and Sherwood DC have given priority to supporting local businesses, recognising the importance of making sure that these businesses survive the pandemic to emerge on the other side to service consumer demand.
Finance excelled in making grant payments, (under the various national schemes and local discretionary schemes), expeditiously to all eligible businesses. Since the national lockdown announcement in March 2020, we released more than £8m of our own funding from reserves to make payments, in advance of receiving government funding. To date, we have paid over 9,800 grants, totalling more than £42m, and have consistently been in the top 10 authorities nationally for this kind of work.
Finance officers have also worked with the council’s commercial tenants and, on a case-by-case basis, deferred payment of rent or provided rent discounts for all, or part of 2020-21.
In support of our economic growth team, finance officers stepped in to help establish a high street diversification fund to help small local independent retailers to re-purpose their business to trade on-line. A business resilience programme has been established with the Chamber of Commerce to support the key industries identified in our economic growth strategy with the objective of providing skills training, financial support, safeguard jobs and create new jobs.
Apprentices have also received help from finance. Our officers also worked with the economic development team to build links between businesses and local colleges to provide placements for 16 to 24 year-olds under the Kick Start scheme and to increase the number of apprentices taken up by businesses.
Finance officers have done all of the above while managing the council’s own budget shortfalls resulting from reduction in income from sales, fees and charges and the provision of significant funding support to its arms-length leisure operator. As if that wasn’t enough, during this period finance officers have continued to provide support for the delivery of key regeneration projects.
Sanjiv Kohli is deputy chief executive and director of resources at Newark and Sherwood District Council.
Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay
AWARDS INFORMATION
Read about the awards here.
Read about the seven categories here.
For submissions click here.
To read case studies of finance team impact, click here.
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