Purpose Coalition hosts Roundtable with Labour Party Chair Rt Hon Anna Turley MP
On Friday 12th June The Purpose Coalition held a Roundtable with the Chair of The Labour Party & Cabinet Minister, Rt Hon Anna Turley MP.
The roundtable, themed “Unlocking Opportunity”, brought together major North East employers and education leaders to discuss how business can play a stronger role in creating jobs, widening access to opportunity and support regional economic growth.
Attendees included Anglo American, PD Ports, Sodexo, Northern Gas Networks, Robertson Group, Northern Trains, Bell Group, The Wise Group, Teesside University, New College Group, and Redcar & Cleveland College.
The discussion explored how businesses, colleges, and policymakers can work together to strengthen skills pathways, support people into work, improve access to good jobs and ensure regional investment delivers long-term benefits for local communities.
The event forms part of The Purpose Coalition’s wider national and regional programme, which brings together businesses, education providers and policymakers to help address the UK’s major social and economic challenges.
Insights from the roundtable and forthcoming roundtables will contribute to a major Purpose Coalition report, to be launched in Westminster at the end of the year, setting out practical recommendations for how employers can help build a more inclusive, skilled and productive economy.
Paula Sherriff, Engagement Director at The Purpose Coalition and Former Labour MP & Shadow Minister, said:
“This roundtable showed the strength of employer leadership across the North East and the importance of building partnerships that connect skills, jobs, investment and communities. Businesses and colleges are already doing vital work, but by bringing them together with policymakers we can go further, faster.
It was fitting to hold this regional roundtable in Redcar – once the beating heart of the UK’s industrial revolution and steel heritage, and a town that has seen rapid deindustrialisation over the previous decades.
If the UK is to deliver stronger growth, it must make better use of the talent, ambition and potential that exists in every part of the country.”
