Reconnecting Deprived Communities With The Labour Market

The Hull Community Led Local Development (CLLD) was a grassroots approach to tackling local issues in Hull. It was a £7.5 million programme funded by the European Social Fund and European Regional Development Fund. The goal was to help people in Hull’s most disadvantaged areas reconnect with the job market.

We evaluated the CLLD programme over four years, aiming to provide Hull City Council with new insights each year. We focused on different themes each time, including:

• How the local socio-economic context changed over the four years and the impact on target groups.

• Identifying “soft” outcomes and creating a framework to track them throughout the programme.

• The impact of Covid-19 on the programme.

• Identifying what worked well and what didn’t to improve the rest of the programme.

• Holding workshops with project delivery partners, the management team, and the Board.

• Conducting in-depth interviews with many participants to understand their experiences.

• Mapping participants’ postcodes against factors like deprivation to demonstrate programme reach.

• Undertaking a Social Return on Investment assessment to measure the financial value of the programme compared to others, assessing value for money.

• Detailed analysis (using cluster analysis) of over 1,200 individual participants’ journeys and distance travelled towards employment. We identified five groups with different needs and identified what worked for whom and in what circumstances.

We’ve since gone on to evaluate similar CLLD programme’s in other places, like Wakefield and Hastings.