UK Shared Prosperity Fund Investment Plan Project

This survey aims to capture stakeholder view on the supporting local business needs, opportunities and investment priorities for Aberdeenshire's UK Shared Prosperity Fund Investment Plan.  The programme's overall objectives for the supporting local business theme are:

• Creating jobs and boosting community cohesion, through investments that build on existing industries and institutions, and range from support for starting businesses to visible improvements to local retail, hospitality and leisure sector facilities. 
• Promoting networking and collaboration, through interventions that bring together businesses and partners within and across sectors to share knowledge, expertise and resources, and stimulate innovation and growth. 
• Increasing private sector investment in growth-enhancing activities, through targeted support for small and medium-sized businesses to undertake new-to-firm innovation, adopt productivity-enhancing, energy efficient and low carbon technologies and techniques, and start or grow their exports.

This survey aims to capture stakeholder view on the communities and place needs, opportunities and investment priorities for Aberdeenshire's UK Shared Prosperity Fund Investment Plan.  The programme's overall objectives for the communities and place theme are:

•    Strengthening our social fabric and fostering a sense of local pride and belonging, through investment in activities that enhance physical, cultural and social ties and access to amenities, such as community infrastructure and local green space, and community-led projects.

•    Building resilient, healthy and safe neighbourhoods, through investment in quality places that people want to live, work, play and learn in, through targeted improvements to the built environment and innovative approaches to crime prevention.

This survey aims to capture stakeholder view on the people and skills needs, opportunities and investment priorities for Aberdeenshire's UK Shared Prosperity Fund Investment Plan.  The programme's overall objectives for the people and skills theme are:

•    Boosting core skills and support adults to progress in work, by targeting adults with no or low level qualifications and skills in maths, and upskilling the working population, yielding personal and societal economic impact, and by encouraging innovative approaches to reducing adult learning barriers.

•    Reducing levels of economic inactivity through investment in bespoke intensive life and employment support tailored to local need.  Investment should facilitate the join-up of mainstream provision and local services within an area for participants, through the use of one-to-one keyworker support, improving employment outcomes for specific cohorts who face labour market barriers.

•    Supporting people furthest from the labour market to overcome barriers to work by providing cohesive, locally tailored support including access to basic skills.

•    Supporting local areas to fund gaps in local skills provision to support people to progress in work, and supplement local adult skills provision e.g. by providing additional volumes; delivering provision through wider range of routes or enabling more intensive/innovative provision, both qualification based and non-qualification based.  This should be supplementary to provision available through national employment and skills programmes.