 Hello again everybody and welcome to this session which focuses on policy work and opportunities outside London. It's very easy to look at think tank world or policy research world and see it as very London centric, which can be off-putting if that's not a place that you want to be. Of course there are a lot of London-oriented organisations in the sector, but there are also lots of organisations doing important and fascinating work outside of London, so this session is to give a bit of insight into that particular part of the sector. You've met me already if you're in the first session. I'm Nicola, I work for the Institute for Government and I should say that I'm here to chair this session and help sort through your questions rather than to provide specific reflections on policy work outside London. That's not something we do particularly at IFG, but luckily we have a stellar panel here who can speak to that. So we have Mary Towers who's a policy officer at the Trade Union Congress, Eddie Radcliffe who's a researcher at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, and Andrea Barry who's a senior analyst at the Joseph Roundtree Foundation. In terms of format, it's likely to be similar to the session that you just attended before this one. We're going to hear from each of the panel who are going to speak for a few minutes about their organisation and their role and about the regional structures of their organisations. And then once everybody's spoken, we'll use the rest of the session for Q&A, and as before, you can use the Q&A box or you can raise your hand if you prefer to speak. So with that, let's kick off with you, Mary. Well, thanks so much, Nicola. Firstly, I'd like to say that it's fantastic to see that so many people are joining this session, and I'm really excited to tell you all a bit about the TUC and my role there. So I think to make the best use of my time speaking tool, I'm going to do three things. I'm going to quickly explain what the TUC is in case any of you are unsure. And then I'll tell you a bit about our structure and my role at the TUC, and then just a bit about our regional offices because I know that some of you are particularly interested in opportunities outside London. So first of all, what's the TUC? Well, the TUC stands for Trade Union Congress, and we represent around 50 or so trade unions in the UK bringing together more than five and a half million working people from a wide range of different sectors. So just to quickly explain to those of you that might not know, a trade union is a bit like a membership club of workers. So you pay a fee to join and in return you get all sorts of work related benefits like advice and support, legal advice if you need it, help from union reps at work. So in the same way that trade unions are like membership clubs for workers, the TUC is a membership organisation for trade unions and we represent the needs and interests of trade unions and workers to government, and for example to politicians, also to the media to regulators to employers and really anyone else who's interested. So our structure at the TUC we have a head office in London and six regional offices, as well as an office in Wales and Scotland, and I work at the head office in London, which is on Great Russell Street just opposite the British Museum. At our head office we've got a communications department that deals deals with media work and publications and organisation services and skills department and rise, which is the department that I work in. There are a few hundred employees in total at the head office. Rise stands for rights, international, social and economic and we've got several different teams in rise working on different policy areas that are relevant to working people in unions, and I'm in the employment rights team. So my role will policy officers, I'm a policy officer in the employment rights team and policy officers deal with issues relating to all aspects of employment. So for example the quality issues at work, the use of technology at work, employment status and how this impacts on rights platform and gig economy work enforcement issues, collective rights and more. The role involves many different types of tasks. So for example we respond to government consultations work with our unions to formulate new policy. We can start research, we write reports, organise events, do public presentations. So it's an incredibly interesting and varied job and crucially it's extremely rewarding because we feel like we're actually achieving good things or at least trying to and working towards making the world of work a better place for everyone. Now in terms of opportunities outside London, I know lots of you are interested in this. I just want to say a few words about that and what the TUC could offer. So one thing just to start out with is just to emphasise that the TUC were currently reviewing our flexible working policy as a result of the coronavirus crisis and increased working from home and the TUC was already very progressive in terms of its approach to flexible working. But following on from the current review, there might be even more opportunities to have a role in London and then work some of the time at home and we do have many more job opportunities at Congress House in London than we do in the regions. But that said, in terms of our regional structure, we've got six English regional offices, each representing a regional council to which our affiliated trade unions nominate representatives. So we have offices in Birmingham Newcastle, Liverpool, Bristol and Leeds, and then the London East and South East Regional Council is based at Congress House in London. Each office has got a regional secretary and some staff that work with them. So for example, often a regional office will have an administrative assistant, a policy and campaign support officer and an education officer and regional offices work with regional unions in delivering trade union. TUC campaigns and objectives, as well as representing the views of trade unions to organisations and stakeholders across their local area. So for example, working with local politicians, local authorities, mayors and local enterprise partnerships. We've also got an office in Cardiff, that's Wales TUC that has an office there and also one in Glasgow, that's Scotland TUC that has an office there. So that was a really whistled stock tour of the TUC in our work and I hope it's giving you a bit of an insight into what we do. And I really hope that some of you might be interested in working for trade unions in the future. Thanks very much. Thanks Mary. Okay. Without further ado, on to you Ellie. Hi everyone. Also thanks Nicola for chairing this and thanks everyone for coming. It's great to see you all. So I'm Ellie Radcliffe. I'm a researcher at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies, otherwise known as CLEZ, is the national organisation for local economies. We call ourselves a think and do tank. So we work at the intersection between policy theory and practice. We deliver a lot of consultancy work. We work very closely with local governments, regional governments and also the devolved nations, so Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We do deliver some grant funded projects and we also obviously do policy work. So our areas of focus are predominantly around inclusive economy, thinking about community wealth building, which you may have heard about through the Preston model, deepening democracy, shaping places, making public services excellent and through all this tackling climate emergency. So we're actually based in Manchester, which was a deliberate decision in the 80s when we were set up. And we have however recently taken on colleagues in Sheffield and London since the pandemic. But like I said, the majority of our work is on a local, regional and kind of devolved nation basis. So our focus is not Westminster when it comes to policy. So in terms of my role within policy work, all staff within Cles are actually allotted kind of time to work on policy, so it's normally a day a week. And we have the opportunity to develop the areas of policy we're most interested in. So because I have a background in citizen engagement and also in community organising, I have been able to develop power strand around deepening democracy and thinking about things like new municipalism and the feminisation of politics. But also within my role, because we're quite diverse as a team, even though we're small, there are only 16 of us. We really have to do a lot of work to draw together the ideas that we get from our project work and our practice work to feed into our policy work. And that is really important within kind of the scope of how we think about our policy. The fact that we have really strong connections on the ground in localities means that we're able to test our policy recommendations and ideas with people who are actually experiencing the realities of what national policy does to local practice. And also alongside this, I think it's really important to say that it's often quite easy to get fixated on the national level when we think about policy, but there is a huge amount that's possible in the local outside of the London bubble. And thinking about the local and the regional as a unit for change is really important to consider when we're thinking about policy, not just in terms of where we're working, but in terms of who we're working with as well. So I'm going to stop there, just to get Andrea enough time. Thanks so much. Okay. Finally, over to you Andrea. Yes, so thank you invite for inviting us here at the Joseph Rountree Foundation, we are based in York. We are an independent social change organization working to solve UK poverty. And so that takes in many shapes so we have, you know, three research policy collaboration and policy solutions. We aim to inspire action and change that will create a prosperous UK without poverty. So to do this, we work with private public and voluntary sectors, as well as people with experiences of poverty to build our overall strategy of a prosperous UK without poverty. So, how do we do that so we, as I said we have research policy, but we also have communications advocacy and public engagement, and external affairs or media team, as well as our lived experiences participation team. We are based in York, as I said, because we have a reason we're based in York are the roundtree family if people probably knows round trees, we come from quite a interesting heritage. That means that we like we are based in York with the housing trust as well just a brown tree housing trust, and we are largest offices in York at the old roundtree family house. We also have an office in London, which is a bit of a smaller office, but also one in Glasgow for our Scotland team. So the offices in York do a lot of the policy, the research, the advocacy work in the comms work, and then the London office does external affairs work. But you don't have to if you want to be based in York and you external affairs work, you can be based in York and do external affairs work it's just how things have worked out. So, and when you walk through our office you'll notice that a lot of people are actually northern. Really, I'm northern American, but the majority of the officer from the north in the UK, and I just have a real passion of staying in the area and education and working in the area. We do a lot of public engagement work within the north as well so we've also been helpful in setting up some like public truth commissions in the north, including one in Manchester that I was able to go to the launch of, as well as being involved in the launch poverty work in Scotland. So, we also work with in Northern Ireland so we work with the, with some of our partners in Northern Ireland to also put some focus on the situation there and also so how we can also advocate for that. I can really very briefly discuss what I do as a senior analyst, I do work on making work a route out of poverty, and I help write a lot of the reports that we do on UK poverty as a whole and I do the work section so I do a lot on employment. Protect the characteristics and employment, labour market stats, all of that work. And I'll stop there. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you so much. So, we've already had quite a few questions coming in, but one question that a lot of people have asked is around kind of the impact of the pandemic. So, a lot of people are asking whether the panel thinks that the pandemic has prompted or will prompt more kind of think tanks and policy work to kind of head outside of London because it's not necessarily required anymore, whether you guys think that there will be kind of whether your organisations are changing the way that you're working in response to kind of the pandemic and increase kind of flexible working. So I don't know if anybody has any thoughts on that that they'd like to jump in. Go Andrea. I just thought I would say, it's not like a humble brag, but Joseph Ranshry Foundation has always been outside of our main office has always been out of London. And we've also always been a flexible working organisation because we understand just how important that is for people like single parents, for example, to be able to work because they need more flexible work as part of our overall research and it's just a really good thing to do. So we've been seeing a lot of them when we have an internship program that we did, we ran and did recruitment for at the beginning of the pandemic, and we had applications from all over the UK. And we essentially said, there was no obligation for you to be in the London office or the York office, you can be in Glasgow, you can essentially work in whichever office you would like, based on when your internship is based, except for if you're working for the housing trust you're going to have to be working in the north because that's where we're based. So I think for Joseph Ranshry Foundation, it sounds funny to say this, but it hasn't actually changed much for us because we've always been like this, which in a way I think is. Yeah, definitely. Ellie, did you want to come in on that? Yeah, just to say actually, again, like Andrea, Cles have always been outside of London, we've always been Manchester based, so northern and proud, but when it comes to thinking about kind of the impact of the pandemic, I think I mentioned that we have recruited since the start of the pandemic and we have actually ended up with colleagues who are much more dispersed than they would have been in the past. I think the fact that we're all more of a with digital technologies and thinking about remote working, I think will create opportunities for people who are outside of London to be part of kind of think tank world, whether that is with organisations not based in London or even organisations based in London. So yeah, that's kind of my reflection on that based on our recruitment recently. Mary, do you have anything to add there? Really just to echo colleagues in terms of the approach that the TUC takes to flexible working, so we advocate flexible working for the workers that our unions represent and so we had quite a well established flexible working policy pre the coronavirus crisis. So just using myself as an example, I've always worked part time for the TUC and have spent part of my week working from home and then part of the week working in London. So we're definitely very open to those kinds of arrangements. So even if there wasn't a role that was available at one of our regional offices, then there may well be something on offer at Congress House with that flexibility built into it. Great. I actually just wanted to ask you to use chairs proactive slightly by asking a question about whether when you're recruiting at your organisations, whether you whether people who are applying for your roles, you're keen for them to have kind of some kind of experience in regionally focused work already, whether you that's likely to be something you'd be particularly keen on, or whether somebody who's maybe done work in a kind of London focused or otherwise. Space previously is looking to move into regional work, whether those kinds of people you're still kind of interested in applications for those people from those people. I imagine a lot of people asking questions now are wondering a similar thing. Let's start. Go for it. So, because our work is national, and we have analysts that work on regional work, we have, you know, within the policy team we do work on what we call our place aspects so when we're interested in certain regions or certain areas. It wouldn't be a negative. I think it would actually be a positive you were able to show that you have done a lot of a lot of focus work on one region, because it could add some of the expertise that we may not already have at JRF. And it also upon arriving here you would get, you know, I can attest to this you get quite an extensive training and anything else that you think that we the organization might think you need to know. Coming in with experience maybe even on like say for example Scotland if you're, if you're trying to work maybe for Scotland team. It'd be a great opportunity for you to have focused knowledge on the region, but if you're coming into the overall organization having focused experience on one area like London is not and hindrance and in fact a lot of our interns when they applied to the program they had a lot of research and policy. So it's a great experience on London and it really wasn't a problem because you can use the same methods to apply to other regions. It's just understanding where you're looking at. Sure. Mary, should I go to you. I think really, so it certainly wouldn't be the case that if one didn't come from the region in which one was applying for a role that one would then be ruled out. There are definitely all sorts of kind of transferable skills that would be important to roles that we have at our regional offices that don't require local knowledge. However, that said, there's no doubt that local knowledge would be would be an asset in some of those roles, particularly since I think I mentioned during my presentation that the offices in our regional offices will be liaising a lot with local politicians, you know, the local mayor, local business enterprise organization, so I guess a pre knowledge about and having those sorts of networks would no doubt assist and be of benefit in the role, but you certainly wouldn't be ruled out of consideration just because you weren't from the local area. Sure. Ellie, have you got anything to add on that? I think the kids class is a slightly different type of think tank. We take a slightly different approach in that if you had London or regional kind of knowledge when it came to an experience when it came to policy either will be applicable kind of in a class setting. I think the big thing that we're interested in is practical experience of turning policy into practice. And that's the that's the kind of side of things that we find really fascinating and if people are really driven to turn it into reality. But that's that's kind of the approach that we take with our policy work as well so that's why. Yeah, sure. Okay, I'm conscious that we are about out of time. Thanks so much everybody for coming and for all your questions and huge thanks to Andrea, Mary and Ellie. The final two sessions of this event will start at 540 so in five minutes time for a will cover a day in the life of the researcher and for be will cover the role of membership organizations. Remember that all these sessions are recorded so if you're struggling to choose you can watch them back later. And we'll also be circulating that FAQ document afterwards which you'll hopefully pick up on some of the things we haven't had chance to answer here. So hopefully we'll see you in some of the final one of the final panels but otherwise, thanks so much for coming.