Tackling Poverty Action Plan

the creation of up to 1,700 new jobs and the safeguarding of up to1,600.Requiring contractors to provide local employment and trainingopportunities as well as seeking to use local supply chains – throughhelping Welsh Government and the public sector to fully adopt theWelsh Government ‘community benefits’ procurement policy to allappropriate contracts over £2m. This will meet one of the LocalGovernment Compact commitments.We will make efforts to strengthen the economic benefits from routineexpenditure. National Health Service (NHS) capital spending has beenlinked to developing apprenticeships and the impact of the NHS capitalprogramme on job creation is monitored closely. The NHS has beenclosely involved with the efforts to squeeze greater benefits fromprocurement, and the NHS has trialled ways of using its recruitment toprovide training for people with relatively low skills to gain new skillswhich are transferable elsewhere in the economy.We will maintain a focus on health at work to help people hold on tojobs and avoid becoming unemployed by providing a range of supportand advice to individuals, employers and health professionals onimproving health at work, reducing the impact of ill health at work; andencouraging early intervention to support people who become ill atwork.Within our Strategic Equality Plan there is an objective to reduce thenumbers of disengaged young people including actions tailored toreduce the over-representation of certain ethnic groups, care leaversand of disabled people among those who are disengaged. Otheractions include monitoring traineeship / apprenticeship by ethnicminority and disabled young people as well as young men and youngwomen.What we will do in additionWorking with businessWe will review the evidence of success of recruitment and wagessubsidies as ways to incentivise businesses to employ individualsdisadvantaged by severe or persistent poverty and propose actionsaccordingly.We will assess our business support activities to see if more can bedone to lift people out of poverty and consider, where appropriate,linkages to Community First areas.As part of our appraisal process for grant support to business, we willintroduce positive weightings to allow for the impact of bringing harder15