Warmer Homes Scotland - first annual review

Objective 5 - Community Benefits

In order to achieve this objective, Warmer Homes Scotland is expected to provide benefits to the wider community through vocational training and employment opportunities and Warmworks has committed to an Employment and Skills Plan ( ESP) which set targets to be achieved over the term of the contract. Table 10 shows the ESP targets against the commitments Warmworks and its supply chain have made to exceed these targets.

Figure 14: HES Customer advisors opinions of the scheme

Warmworks is also required to:

• Ensure that it operates the contract in line with the Scottish Government's Environmental Policy;
• Consider the use of social enterprises in the delivery of the contract;
• Consider engaging with Community-Based Activities that local people can engage with on a region by region basis, that are centred around alleviating the effects of living in poverty; including social isolation and poor health;
• Optimise opportunities for SME involvement; and
• Take a similarly positive approach to workforce-related matters as part of a fair and equitable employment and reward package as the Scottish Government (this also applies to Warmworks' subcontractors).

Anecdotally, the Scottish Government review team is aware that many of these have been achieved but formal reporting structures were not yet in place for the period of the review so Community Benefits should be considered a key element of the 2016/17 review of Warmer Homes Scotland. From 2016/17, Pennington Choices will audit Community Benefits reporting on a monthly and quarterly basis.

Table 10: ESP targets and Warmworks commitments

Recommendation 11 - Community Benefits reporting should be a key focus of the 2016/17 review of Warmer Homes Scotland.