Mayor of Liverpool Joanne Anderson has branded Levelling Up "nonsense" as thousands of job vacancies in the city remain unfilled.
Mayor Anderson was speaking this morning at a Labour Party Conference fringe event at the Tate art gallery, where she joined a panel to discuss the need to bridge to UK's skills gap. The city leader criticised the Tory government's Levelling Up agenda, which she suggested was more of a campaign slogan than a proactive policy.
She said: “I think Levelling Up is a nonsense really. I think they’ve tried to make a brand that rebrands the term equality and makes people thing its was their idea, when actually the Labour Party is the party for fairness and equality."
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Mayor Anderson went on to detail how thousands of posts in Liverpool can't be filled because of a chronic skills shortage. She said: "People think of Liverpool as an area that has high unemployment but we’re doing better and better and are now quite close to the national average.
"What we do have is a massive skills gap. From any day we can have 12,000 to 15,000 jobs available in Liverpool but we don’t have the people to meet that." The city leader spoke about how there are lots of "untapped markets" in the region's most disadvantaged communities, describing how Liverpool has the "best clinicians in the country" and so there needs to be a way to "fast-track" disadvantaged young people to get those jobs and opportunities.
Mayor Anderson said that while there were a number of problems with the current system, there are also "plenty of opportunities" to allow people to plug the skills gap and get into work. She pointed to local education centre, T he Learning Foundry, who have teamed up with Everton, Laing O'Rourke and The Skills Centre to give local people a fantastic opportunity to work on the state-of-the-art stadium development at Bramley Moore Dock.
The Learning Foundry offered 19 apprenticeships to people living in the city region, with all positions fully funded and available to people aged 19 or over and claiming a benefit. Mayor Anderson also expressed her excitement about Labour's Green agenda, which has been at the forefront of a number of events at this week's conference.
She said: “I’m really excited about the Labour Party’s Green agenda. I think it’s absolutely where we should be going. We’ve talked and talked about the risk to our climate with very little action being taken. Its a great opportunity to create jobs as well as reducing the cost of living an energy crisis so I’m really excited that's where we’re going."
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