 Good morning, everyone. Oh, I'm sorry now. Good morning. Thank you for joining us here today, both to our in-person and online audience. It's great to see so many of you here. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Emma Selinger, and I'm the Ventures Manager at the Resolution Foundation. So I've been working on everything we're going to talk about today for the past two and a half years with the team here. I'm really pleased to be welcoming you to our first ever Workitech conference. But before we dig into the sessions that we're going to have today, I'm going to let my colleagues, Gavin and Louise, do a little bit of introduction into why we're here and what we're going to be talking about. So Gavin, over to you. Good morning, everyone. I'm Gavin Taylor, the chair of the Resolution Foundation, if you don't need me. Is this echoing or you? It is a bit, I might have to shout about it. If it's really echoing, can you wave at me and I'll just get rid of it. So I just wanted to say welcome to all of you. It's fantastic to see so many familiar faces that we've worked with over the last few years. And I thought I would just say a couple of things, really. One is just to talk a bit about why we're in this game. Why are we in the business of social investment and backing innovation? And I say that because possibly people here are familiar with the Resolution Foundation more widely and what we do, we focus on living standards, we focus on low pay and we do lots of analysis to try and put those issues on the agenda. And a traditional method, if you like, a method of change, not to put too far in the point on it would be to bludgeon, if you like, the public, the public debates and not least those in power through a kind of river of analysis, timely, credible analysis on all sorts of economic issues of the day. In fact, I think I can say this is the first ever Resolution Foundation event in 17 years which is not going to feature a big slide deck analytical presentation. So this is a different method to normal, this standard work we're going to be talking about today. And the lack of the PowerPoint is both sort of highly liberating and slightly unnerving all at the same time. And the reason why we are taking this different approach and having an extra sort of arm to our work to that that we've traditionally done is that our mission is not just to describe and analyze the society and the economy that we all live in, it is to change it for the better. And that's all the politics are easy to say and everyone says things like that. But it really is. And our straight line that we kind of often use is from analysis to action. There's an equal weight on both of those words. And that's hard to get right. But we do that in part, we set the real living wage, we do the calculation behind that that 14,000 or so employees pay. And obviously we advocate, like lots of organizations, we advocate in the policy political arena on all sorts of issues. But a few years back, we decided that that didn't suffice, that we needed a gear change and that we needed to get more directly, more actively involved in backing organizations that we thought could make a difference in the world of work, particularly focused on the low wage insecure precarious work, but broadly improving the world of work. And so we started in a very small scale, tentative way backing some social entrepreneurs who are promising ideas in that sort of space. And you're gonna hear, I think you're gonna hear from three of the people that we've backed during the course of today and you'll hear about many others. Now that work, which is different to the traditional resolution foundation work is, I think has required both a degree of ambition and a degree of humility to sort of take it forward. It definitely requires ambition because it's really, really hard. It turns out that trying to change in real life, working practices, working the quality of work through bringing on organizations that sort of see things differently, have got a new idea for how to improve the plight of workers is seriously hard. It's much harder than writing clever policy documents or doing fancy analysis, even though they're very important and you should all follow the work that we do in that space. And it requires a different set of skills. It requires coalition building. It requires taking risk, embracing uncertainty. It requires an acceptance. You'll get some things wrong and it requires a lot of resolve to stay the course and to do all those things, you have to be ambitious. At the same time, you have to be humble. You have to be humble in part because the problems you're trying to get are really, really big and we're quite small and the organizations we're investing in start off quite small. Some of them have, it's been heartening to see grown quite a bit, but they all start off quite small but you also have to have humility because there are lots of other people out there. There are trade unions, there are social investors, there are other foundations all doing great work and the last thing the world needs is someone coming along and sort of pretending that they don't exist and replicating. So you need to find out how you add value in a landscape. And so we have been trying to do both of those things. We're trying to be ambitious about the work we're doing and we're trying to have a degree of humility about how we work with others and how we add value in this space. So that's one bit of context. Another bit of context is really trying to understand how this arm of our work on social innovation, social investment to improve the world of work fits with our wider policy agenda because it's not an accident we're doing these two things and under the same roof is quite deliberate. And in our view, they are absolutely and explicitly complementary to each other. One doesn't replace the other and to make that kind of more concrete. The biggest thing the Resolution Foundation has been doing for the last two and a half years which I've definitely got more gray hairs than I did even about six months ago because of it, it's been writing a major report which we're going to publish on the 4th of December on the future of the British economy and how to make it grow and how to make it grow more equitably over the next decade and beyond. It's a 2030 inquiry and we're going to launch it with Keir Starmer and a very senior government minister who I'm not allowed to name but I am allowed to say they're very senior. And if you're not coming along you should sign up and come along. Now I mention that because that piece of work will set out a stall on all sorts of things and basically how we think we can change the British economic model which needs a lot of change. And within that there will be a whole raft of stuff on the future of the minimum wage, changes to employment law, investment in workplace skills, creating new sexual institutions to deal with low quality working particular problem sectors and so on and so on and so on. There is major policy change being laid out which won't happen in one month, one year or even one parliament much of it. It's a long-term agenda for building a different type of economy. Today's conversation and all of our social investment work in this space sits alongside that. It's part of that. It's not at odds with it. They work together of a synergy between the policy and the social investment and having done 25 years or so of public policy work and I guess five years of social investment work I'm clearer than ever but these two things are both needed. You shouldn't just have one without the other but you definitely need large-scale policy change but given the structural problems we face in this country we can't just rely however brilliant on innovation and social investment alone but we do need it too. So before I hand over to Louise it's gonna give you the real detail on what we've been doing, the real context to it. I just wanted to do the important thing of saying finally a couple of words of thanks. First and foremost to our partners, many I think all of whom are represented here today and right from the start of our work in this space it's been really clear to us that there are other foundations, civil society organizations who had a broadly similar view of the world of problems in the world of work but they're broadly similar to do something about it that have worked with us and they've provided some funding but really genuinely equal to that they've provided lots of support ideas, amplification of what we're doing and as of what they're doing and it's been fantastic to work with them. So thank you to Joseph Ramsey Foundation Trust for London, UFI Vocational Tech Trust Friends Provident Foundation and Accenture for everything they've done. So that's the first thing. Second thing is beyond those immediate partners there's a much wider community of people who again, many of them here today from other foundations, from trade unions, from training organizations who we've drawn on hugely for expertise, for mentoring, for advice, for challenge and we wouldn't have been able to make the progress we've made about that pool of goodwill. So thank you to all of you and I definitely wanna say a very personal thanks to Louise Mastin who you're about to hear from who's our Director of Ventures who's led all this work and definitely deserves all the credit as along with side Emma who you just briefly heard from who basically are the Ventures team and they do a huge amount of fantastic work on the Resolution Foundation's behalf and not least Tara Goatley who's here somewhere who's ahead of events who this event wouldn't have happened without Tara's genius. So thank you to all of you. Most importantly today is partly about us sort of telling you stuff we've done which we are kind of interested in telling you about listening other organizations who've been involved but speak about what they've done as part of this program so partly it's sharing that. Much more important than that is us finding and building alliances for the next wave of this work which we're gonna want to take. So we want, don't just listen, speak up, engage with us, ask questions, get involved. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us today. It's a real joy to bring together this network. So many of these discussions we've had over the last three years of running this partnership have been online and it's such a joy to see so many people in person here today and to build connections between this network. One of the main things we hope you get out of the day is the ability to meet people, to make connections, to find other people with common interests. We're gonna facilitate that partly through just having breaks and having coffee outside but also through a couple of discussion sessions upstairs. So when we get to those sessions we'll give you instructions on what to do but we really want you to bring your ideas, your opinions and into those sessions and we will facilitate discussions to get as many voices as possible heard today. If you're in the room or if you're online you can use Slido and the hashtag Workatech to put forward questions, to put forward ideas, to put into those discussion sessions and to kind of have a bit of discussion of what you think of what's going on. We don't just, as Gavin said want to talk at you today we really want as much conversation as possible. I should also say that if you need any help at any point all of the RF team are wearing yellow lanyards so that you can find us and you can ask for help and if you are extroverted out at any point there's a quiet room upstairs as well where you can hide yourself away. So we've been on a journey that's Gavin's described over the last three years building this partnership and building this network. When it started there were relatively few organizations and institutions who were focused on the potential of technology and its opportunity for low-paid workers. There were starting to be organizations like co-worker in the United States demonstrating that you can build networks and connections between workers with technology and there were obviously really big organizations like LinkedIn and Glassdoor who were demonstrating that you could build huge networks of workers but mainly focused on those knowledge work and those on higher earnings. So we felt that there was a gap to be filled. We felt there was an opportunity if we could find amazing impact entrepreneurs with a real purpose to what they were doing who wanted to build sustainable models in this space. I'm really pleased that we found and backed 13 companies many of whom are here today in the course of this journey to build that. Gavin's alluded to some of the scale of the problem here and how it fits into our broader research work at the foundation. We think there are 10 million workers in the UK who are on low pay or in precarious work with volatile incomes. Good work is really fundamental to our living standards to our finances and to our mental and physical health. It matters to all sorts of different aspects of our lives and too many low paid workers are missing out on the really basic attributes of dignity, respect and security that higher earners take for granted. We know from the research that we do and from reports like Low Pay Britain which we publish every year that the bottom fifth of earners are twice as likely as the top fifth to have little or no autonomy in the jobs that they do. We know that the bottom fifth are four times as likely to say they have a volatility in their hours and their pay. And we also know that over the last 30 years job satisfaction for those workers has declined by 16 percentage points. It used to be a premium if you're a low paid worker at least you got a more satisfactory job you enjoyed it more. That premium has disappeared alongside all of these other challenges some of which have been amplified and facilitated by technology. And we've heard through some of the qualitative research that the inquiry has done over the last three years that we've heard from workers who just have to compromise on their earnings to get the flexibility they need to look after their kids or their parents. We've heard from workers who just don't believe that better is possible that there's no point in taking a risk on a new job because everybody is as bad as each other. And we know that so many workers are really failed by the enforcement system shockingly a third of workers who are paid at or around the wage floor are underpaid the minimum wage. So even where we do have policy and regulation that tries to put in place standards that enforcement system isn't always getting to those folks. So we know that social investment isn't the whole piece of the puzzle but neither is policy. There are so many different pieces of the good work landscape and people who want to improve work and lots of those voices are here today. We know that amazing work that the Living Wage Foundation do in improving standards and raising people up especially with new campaigns like the Living Hours campaign. We know that unions are doing amazing work helping put in place protections for workers particularly around these emerging changes in the workplace and technology. But we think innovation has a really important role to play as well. We know technology can make things worse it can also mitigate the worst effects of low paid jobs but it can also make things better it can provide new opportunities and routes. We think about that in terms of giving people more information, giving people more connections and setting up different types of organisations. So we're going to hear from a bunch of the ventures today on the panels but there was not enough panels it ruined the day for enough panels to have everybody speak so we will hear from all of them hopefully in the discussion sessions. Better information, break room who you'll hear from on the first panel are providing hourly paid workers with better information on what they do. Valor are helping people navigate a really difficult employment grievance system with their templates and guidance. Building connections between people organised is a huge network of workers campaigning for better work and mobilise is eventually back that helps support unpaid carers in their caring role so that they can thrive at work and beyond. We can also look at how you connect people to opportunities help navigate the jobs that are out there and find the best ones. Slinger and Tasker are both networks that provide people with labour platforms to get into hospitality and to trades work and Early Bird provides voice recognition and AI tools to help onboard people into employability support making the most of that augmentation that technology can provide by helping people make the most efficient use of technology and complement it with real human support. And then we can change the nature of the organisation of work as well. You'll hear this afternoon from Emma from Equal Care Co-op who was set up as a cooperative to supply care work giving a better choice and better power to care workers as well as better care delivery. So we can try and achieve lots of impact directly through the ventures. We have published today our impact report on the Worker Tech partnership and we reckon that around 130,000 UK workers have been reached and impacted by the ventures in our portfolio so far and we know that there's much, much more to come. So it's a small portfolio right now but it's growing and there are so many other people that we can reach. So to give you a sense of the shape of the day we've got a couple of panels this morning to dig into some of these questions. Then we'll have discussion groups upstairs where we can hear lots of different voices. After lunch then we're going to focus on worker power and worker choice with another panel and then a discussion session following up from that. Because of the nature of the panels there might be some room for questions but a lot of the discussion and the questions sessions will really be happening in those discussion sessions upstairs. So please make connections today, share your ideas, tell us what we're doing wrong, what we could do better, what we can do more of, how to make more of the potential of this field. I'd like to now introduce the chair for our first panel Sarah O'Connor is a journalist at The Financial Times and author of a column which is essential reading for the Ventures team and most of the Resolution Foundation. I'd like to invite her to join the stage and then welcome her panel. Thank you. Yeah, I'm Sarah O'Connor from the NT. It's a field of delight to be here. And I'm actually on foot leave at the minute. I'm not writing my column but I'm sure you've noticed. Because I'm writing a book and actually the book is about work and technological change. And the way I'm envisaging it is it will be about sort of two thirds dystopian and one third sort of hopeful. So I'm really delighted to be here to gather some ideas for the hopeful final third of my book on the selfish level. And I should have turned that on. There we go. So I'm delighted to welcome the panellists for this first panel. So we have Sherry Kutu, who is the chair of Workfinder and a Maybank, the founder and CEO of Break Room, just referred to. Stephen Mears, the CEO of Big Society Capital and Andrew Pakes, who is the Deputy General Secretary of Prospect. Would you all like to come and join me? Doesn't matter. Excellent, welcome everyone. So we've got 45 minutes. I'm not going to waste time on trying to introduce these very professional people because they can do it themselves. So I suggest that we'll take each of you in turn. And if you want to introduce yourself, tell us a bit about who you are, what you do and give us some opening thoughts on what you think are the kind of the key opportunities to use technology for making work better. And should we start over here with you, Stephen? Great, thank you. Is that microphone working all right? Yes. Sorry. OK, well, wave or shout if it goes wrong. So thank you very much for the introduction and thank you Resolution for the invitation. Very, very pleased to be here today. I'm Stephen Muir's CEO of Big Society Capital, which is a leading social investor in the UK. And it's also relevant here that I wear another hat as chair of the Friends Provident Foundation, which is one of the other partners in this program. We've been very pleased to work with Resolution over the last few years. And I'm going to try and give a bit of sort of context around the wider field of investing for impact, particularly in innovation and venture. I think others on the panel in the room are much more expert than me on the specific cases that are showing real progress and are really exciting. So I'm going to try and instead paint a little bit of a wider picture and you'll get some more specifics and grit from many of the others here. And so our overall mission at Big Society Capital is to increase the amount of capital that's invested in tackling social challenges in the UK. And we have various approaches we have for doing that, but a crucial one, the crucial sort of pillow in our strategy is impact venture. And that's so investing in funds that are then backing potential high growth, high impact organizations and the work attack field is sort of one part of that, where we see a great deal of potential. And looking at that impact venture system, we're very excited about where that is at the moment. And the UK is definitely a sort of leading hub for some of that movement. A way of illustrating that is earlier this year, we launched a community called Impact VC, which essentially is for venture investors of all types who are serious about creating more social impact from what they do. We found that here it's got a Europe wide reach, but the vast majority are in the UK. And in the first few weeks, we've got hundreds and hundreds of people literally joining that far more than we expected. And the level of momentum and interest over the last period has been really, really very impressive. And this is all about our wider strategy of trying to sort of bend the venture system in that ecosystem more towards impact to show how taking social impact seriously can be a viable, sustainable and successful investment strategy commercially, while also delivering real scalable change through the kinds of organizations you're going to hear a lot about later on today. But we're seeing in lots of fields with work tech being just one example, among others, real momentum in this sort of area. And I think some of the themes of successful impact venture sort of change that we're seeing in different areas of policy or different areas of social progress, which all I think apply in different ways to what we're going to talk about today. I'm just going to illuminate. So one thing we're seeing is where there's been impressive sort of technological innovation in a particular broad field. People then in a sort of almost a second wave using that for greater social impact. There's companies that are doing something differently. How can we take that insight, that different way of operating and apply it in a way that is much more beneficial to those on low incomes, those who've traditionally been excluded and so on? Big example, there's lots of this going on is in the sort of FinTech space. You'll all know there's lots and lots of challenger banks, FinTech functions, all these sort of huge wave of innovation there. But what we're now seeing is people taking what's been learned from that process and applying it specifically to the challenge of providing financial services to people who've traditionally been excluded. So haven't been able to get insurance, haven't been able to get bank accounts, haven't been able to get affordable credit and so on. So that's just an example of that sort of taking something that's been sort of tested in the broader market, if you like, and then applying it with an impact lens. I think we're gonna talk later about education and skills. And I think that there is a really big opportunity there in this space of there's been loads and loads of ed tech innovation going on for a while. How can more of the learning from that be applied into the particular group of people and particular challenges facing certain industries, certain worker sectors and so on that we're gonna talk about. I think you'll hear examples of people who are already doing that and progressing it today. And I think another sort of theme that we see in lots of the impact venture what we do is around the recutting information differently and providing it to different people, which then changes power relationships, changes options, increases choice and increases yet the power that different people have. And again, you're gonna hear lots of examples of that in the work tech space, but that's been going on more broadly across other fields of impact that we see. I think is really, really exciting and I say definitely very critical in this field. And the final point, which is perhaps slightly off the side of some of what we're gonna talk about, but I think it's relevant when you think about the impact we're trying to create. There's also an increasing large desire for mainstream institutional investors to take more account of the impact that they're having when they invest in a whole range of companies and actually workers rights, treating workers fairly, it is increasingly important to large asset holders and wealth holders. And so I think there's something in here about what information can be provided, presented, rankings, exposing bad practices and so on, but using tech as a way of actually informing the holders of a lot of large institutional stakes in all sorts of companies and using that to put pressure on to increase the wellbeing or improve the way that workers are treated. It's a slightly different take, but again, in other fields, particularly in the climate field, you see a lot of that going on. I wonder if a future wave of that might be in the work tech space as well. So I'll pause there and hand over to the rest of the panel. Brilliant, Stephen, thank you. Right, let's move on to Anna. Good morning, everyone. My name's Anna. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Break Room. Very proud to be one of the Resolution Ventures portfolio and great to kind of pull together everyone here today and hear a bit of the kind of bigger picture, whereas my day today at the moment is a lot of talking to employers. So it's nice to kind of zoom out and think about what we're trying to achieve. So at Break Room, we're a platform that helps lower paid front-line workers find better quality jobs. The way that we... Sorry, is that... Am I really echoey and unbearable? It's all okay. Okay. The way that we do that is to help workers compare their jobs by taking a 30-question quiz that covers all the important aspects of front-line work, so pay, hours, flexibility. We use that data to rate their jobs and help recommend better places for them to work. So since we launched in 2020, more than 700,000 UK workers have used Break Room to compare their jobs and we rate publicly more than 5,000 UK employers. So shorthand Louise was talking about this earlier. We're a little bit like last door, but focused on lower paid hourly workers. We then work with employers to help them improve their jobs and recruit better quality candidates. I guess my take on what the future of work looks like and how technology can help improve that is obviously all about how we use the kind of data that we're collecting and publicly publishing to do some of the things that Stephen was just talking about and shed a light on what it's really like to work in lower paid roles and then to use that data to help applicants and workers make change in their own jobs but also help employers change. I think some of it, we've now collected a very large amount of information directly from workers, which I think is unique because typically, if you're collecting ESG data, that's coming from a kind of top down within a company and what we've done is create a mechanism for collecting data bottom up. Sadly, I think a lot of what Louise was talking about earlier is definitely reflected in the experience of frontline work. So more than 70% of people who've taken the break room quiz say that they think that head office has no idea what's going on on the front line, which is concerning. More than 50% of people say that they find it hard to change their shifts at the last minute. More than 30% of people say that they're doing work that they're not paid for. So I think our data collected from workers, really unfortunately reflects a lot of what Louise was talking about earlier. I think there is, we are starting to leverage that information to get in front of employers, which is incredibly exciting. So we started with this mission of helping turn every job into a good one and we started by collecting and building that mechanism for collecting that information. And now we are working with an increasingly large number of employers who want to monitor their break room profile, who want to recruit with us. And so we're starting to see the beginnings of getting in front of employers and having serious conversations about, this is how you're rated, this is how you compare to other people. We're providing them with information that they don't have and they can't get from their own workforce. So I think there's the beginnings there of using data to shine a light on what working conditions look like that's both beneficial to workers and to employers. The other thing that I'm starting to see is the scale of opportunity for operational change within businesses and employers themselves. So a lot of our data is actually showing operational problems within a business that is ultimately bad for workers, but also bad for companies. And I do think companies recognize that but they often don't know what to do about it. And I think, again, the opportunity there for technologies is making some of those operational changes. Shift patterns is the most obvious example where more than 50% of people not only find it hard to change their shifts but they're only getting their rotor a week in advance. That should be a solved problem and because we have the technology to make that easier but the reason it's not is often because of some of the operational challenges that businesses and employers have and some of the under-investment in improving that operational efficiency and productivity within a business. So I think there's both some opportunities then also some challenges that we're starting to see from working directly with employers. Thanks Anna, that's fascinating. It reminds me there was a very interesting study done in the US by some academics on GAP, you might have read it. They were looking into GAP had this kind of just-in-time scheduling software and the kind of terrible effect that it had on workers' lives and they piloted in some GAP stores predictable scheduling with sort of four weeks notice and obviously not only did the workers benefit and enjoy their jobs more and there was lower staff turnover but the quality of the stores improved and actually revenue in those stores increased and it makes you think, well, why did chief executives not already sort of know about this and it turned out that it wasn't that they were sort of burying their heads in the sand or that they were just determined to make their work as miserable. What the researchers realized was that every time a kind of board level or senior exec went to visit a store the store knew a couple of days in advance so they just scheduled extra people in so that by the time the senior people arrived the stores looked perfect gleaming and so if you were running GAP you would think there's no problem at all here. Our scheduling system is very efficient and cost effective and the stores always look beautiful so yeah, it kind of shows why getting this ground level information from workers could be really useful from a kind of commercial perspective as well. Great, right. Let's move on to Sherry. Thank you. So, thank you. Service here. Hello, is it all echoing and horrible as well? No, I got thumbs up. Okay, great, thanks. So, I'm Sherry and I'm here with my super power hat on which is a renamed work finder. We changed the name because people weren't looking for work but they felt they had super powers. And the story with super power actually started with a grant from UFI and they gave a grant to a charity called Founders for Schools to help people on their transition to work and it's very much a platform. It's a platform that serves skill seekers. We're very much about skills first rather than academic based and it also serves employers who are trying to recruit additional people to their team but also up skill people to their team. And it absolutely uses tech. My background before this was in helping companies like LinkedIn go from zero to 500 million and helping them structure their databases with tech so that you could see the skills that people had so you could help them being the people grow their skills. And it was when I was working within the sort of school sector that we thought there's a much better way of doing this recruiting and up skilling. As an investor, I like to do investments in important things and I've been an impact investor for 25 years and I wish everybody were impact investors because it clearly would make the world a much better place. So in terms of the things that we're doing at Superpower we've integrated most of the databases that are available and their taxonomies and we have a recommendation engine, what about two? One that serves people who are thinking about changing their roles and it serves them recommendations of other roles that they could think about. It serves them courses that help them be better at their role and that is again using databases of career trajectories. It recommends mentors to them that are in their target area and it also recommends master classes so they can get comfortable with the place where they might want to be later. For the workers themselves and all of this is AI and ML, probably a little bit more ML than AI and not very much gen AI. For the skill seekers, it's improving their skills by about 30X over 18 months. We're helping women like one of our case studies as a young woman called Nushin who we are tracking 2,200 skills that she has on her profile which means that when she applies to things we can help that employer understand her very well. If the employer rejects her, we give her a diagnostic of who the employer did not reject and we recommend courses that she can take that are free that allow her to improve her skills. In the industry at the moment, this industry is so broken, it's just shocking. On average, apparently it takes 300 applications of a young person to get a role. On ours three years ago, again if you come and you're not super tagged then it takes about 60 different applications to get a role. 80% of employers left to their own devices ghost young people who apply which is fundamentally wrong and yes, should be known. And we set about wanting to stop that. So the employer who posts a role with us has 72 hours before they get a notice from us saying do you have any idea the catastrophic effects of you ghosting someone who is applied to you has on that person. And they're given a notification and 24 hours to respond if they don't then we take that applicant away from them and we inform the applicant that they should go to a different employer and some of the things they can do to improve their skills. We have bias alerts for the employers who need a lot of help. I had no idea how much help employers needed when we started this out. But we let them know if there's a bias on gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic or disability that we detect in their behaviors or in their role descriptions and we advise them on what they need to do to improve it so that their behavior and their content no longer contains that bias. Very much humans in the loop if they have neglected to put compensation in which means no sane person is going to apply we let them know that if they actually want to be successful and fill that role they'll put in compensation and we query all of the databases that there are and we let them know how much compensation they should pay because sometimes they don't know so we give them the benefit of the doubt. It is so easy to see the really important and good things that you can use tech for in this industry to help not only people who are seeking to upskill themselves and get themselves out of a position that they feel uncomfortable with but also to help employers fill those roles. There's a million open roles in the UK. If we filled those open roles the benefit to our GDP would be about 40 billion pounds per annum. The cost of youth unemployment is about 7 billion pounds per annum and the cost of just open jobs is again another 6-7 billion pounds per annum so it's not just damaging young people's lives it's also impairing our ability and our competitive advantage. So I love what you guys are doing thank you for doing it and I think it's really important but it's not just a thing about the young people the recruiters and the employers themselves need some help and the best thing in the world is to use tech and AI to help them do the things that they want to do. I don't know. Thank you. That's great. Sherry, thank you. The FT did a big survey of young people a couple of years ago and it was like a qualitative survey so people just wrote I thought they'd write maybe a couple of hundred words people wrote long essays about what they were worried about and how they kind of felt their lives were going and it was really striking to me how many young people talked about the kind of brutality and sort of really sort of dehumanizing feeling of trying to apply for a job particularly when you're young and yeah just feeling that there's no one there's no one on the other end of that transaction I mean what an awful way to enter the world of work so I think there might not be humans on the other end well right many of those platforms exactly increasingly so but going down to two you know two applications to get a role is where we are with the use of AI at the moment and it'd be nice if you could get it further down but that's what has been achieved already and gives me reasons to be hopeful about our futures. Great stuff. Thank you. Andrew. Good morning everyone. So I think I'm here for I think two reasons one is to be a representative of one of the oldest pieces of the puzzle for this good, better work agenda which is the great trade union movement of ours and secondly I'm a tech optimist and sometimes I try and reconcile these two competing things around what's happening but I feel really privileged to be in this room. I come from a social justice and a work background and too much of this whole debate around technology, AI at the moment looks at the issue around trouble but in my learning and starting point there's some of you may be aware great US civil rights activist called John Lewis who coined the phrase good trouble so I feel very privileged to be in a room of people who are committed to the cause of good trouble and making tech work for us rather than us work for the tech itself. So look there's a couple of things I will talk about from that vantage point around trade unions and where do we fit into this and I think this ecology of making work better needs to involve all of us in the solutions. I think speaking to you the previous one what Sherry said about an industry that's broken I think for too many people in Britain today and around the world the economy full stop is broken and if we want to address some of these bigger challenges we all face around anxiety, around loneliness, around agency, around trust the way to do that is to start by solving the issue around how people fit into the world of work and what work means to them and too often this big debate we have whether it's robots are coming for our jobs whether it's about the huge economic change and tectonic plates that are gonna shift in the economy much of which can largely be true people hardly ever fit into that conversation and that's the bit that really worries me. When you looked at the government's AI safety summit representatives of civic society and worker organizations were largely silent and absent when you look at the government's AI strategy which looks at tech and the economy as a whole it is specifically focused on in a bad way I think your way was good in this bad way of superheroes that there's only a small number of people who will have the skills and the ability to succeed and code and create the future that by implication the rest of us are secondary to that or second fiddle to that process and I think anything which creates a discussion or debate which makes us feel othered or separate from our future is gonna create a discord that we already see within our society and to me that's the real power so how do we use and harness our good trouble to do that? So there's three challenges that we would look at I think to try and resolve from this with your help in terms of the future of work and I say this from a union that's represent we represent around 160,000 people primarily in the private sector but also government specialists lots of people working in tech itself so we have a growing tech workers branch of around 2,000 to 3,000 people in places like Spotify, Twitter and others we work with some of our international sibling unions because we know some of this big tech is transnational and our responses as a movement need to be transnational as well and it's brilliant to see so many trade unions beginning to get into this space and I will embarrass completely now by making a shout out to John Wood who is in the room, John can you give us a wave? Brilliant, John is here from the Trade Union Congress and leads their digital lab I would encourage you to ignore me and speak to him for large parts of the day because John has a brilliant overview of how the international and domestic union movement are doing that so what are my three challenges? My three challenges are people, place and power and unless we can use technology to address those we're going to fail to succeed in our quest to make good or better work for the majority of people in this country so what do I mean by that? People is what I'm going to talk about technology needs to be about the prism of people and how it adds to our human endeavor and too often government strategies, business strategies are around technology being implemented because of the bottom line or because investor capital has seen different ways of doing work, it's about saving costs it's about driving shareholder value it's about moonshots for society when governments are looking for distractions from their wider economic performance and its impact on the rest of us what it isn't about is how it adds to human wellbeing it isn't about the kind of worth we have around about two thirds of our 2033 workforce are already in work and how much time do we spend in that balance of debate between investing in schools which is critically important to come out with an adult skills solution which addresses most of us and I've traveled here this morning from one of Britain's lowest paid cities where warehousing, cool centers and logistics dominates our private sector employment we know in three to five years half of jobs in cool centers will be gone because AI and technology will make a better service but us as customers if you regard that as a technology discussion it makes perfect sense improve something for your customer base use the technology, save money and create a virtue if you stop there and don't include the workforce what happens to those half of jobs in a low skilled or low paid economy and how we get that and that in itself to me tells a really easy story about if you don't involve people in your narrative or your stories that you're constructing and you make sure that we are outside of that conversation with no concerns about our impact we shouldn't expect any other outcome than people being distrustful or anxious about the way brilliant technology could play in helping them because they've only experienced it as being something bad to them in terms of what's happened second challenge is about place the brilliance of our technology means that we can work from just about anywhere but actually jobs have to be done somewhere and the big fear is that we will end up like we've done in previous forms of economic change where old industries have died in some places and capital itself has been the sole derivative of where that new industry comes from because actually we need jobs in cities like mine we need jobs in the Northeast in the Midlands and elsewhere and the ability of technology to allow the economy to happen anywhere negates from an experience of where it happens to happen somewhere so there has to be a place-based policy approach to this to understand how it helps youngsters get opportunities and their older generations to get pride and place out of the work they do and finally it's about power I'm for reunion it's always about power who makes the choice who gets to edit where the data lives and how it's used and how do those things come about and actually I think the things that some of the most brilliant wonderful examples at Resolution Ventures has helped support and many in this room is about letting that sun shine in it is about co-production and co-value the co-optives and mutuals in this room the mutual experiences the kind of examples we've already heard but about trying to give people a sense of dignity or pride about the choices available to them and unless we address that in a way that government policy currently fails to do we're going to set ourselves up for failure in terms of how those policies get about and we see that every day in our work and John will do it for other unions here as well we've seen even in some of the most tech driven things we represent workers in Twitter who were on Christmas Eve last year digitally locked out from their work spaces so when we talk about people being able to work from home and have all the flexibility we want it also means they can be turned off by their employer at the moment's notice what is that physical connection that happens to them when we represent workers at the likes of Spotify who work across multiple countries what means that workers in this country have power and have dignity here to be able to work with their colleagues and derive futures to make for them when companies decide to invest in AI and new technology how are we sure that is adding to our well-being and dignity as opposed to just driving value elsewhere in it and what frightens me most is that we are walking down a pathway where technology is done by the giants and those who have power not people who are excluded from power but what excites me most in this space is the kind of work you're all doing in this room alongside unions, alongside mutuals, alongside others to try and redefine what this future is I was saying to someone at the very beginning and I'll end there on this point which is we have spent so long playing catch up in terms of the impacts of what's happening and I'm really pleased this talks about better work rather than future work because the future work is already here so this is about how do we make work outcomes better for people for us we've got to get ahead of it because actually better work isn't just an end in itself though it is important as an end it is part of the process that defines how we build a better, more connected, more inclusive democratic society for all of us because if we have that respect at work that ability to earn and learn and share with our families and our communities all of us benefit including the businesses investing thank you Thank you, Andrew that did feel like a round of applause moment, didn't it? Rousing so you've made the case there for why we might want an awful lot of investors' money to be flowing into technology that makes work better gives workers more information more sort of power that sort of tilts those scales a bit so let's kind of discuss a bit how how to make that happen and what are the kind of barriers to making that happen I'm really curious to learn more about the the kind of the social investment space and I mean maybe you two actually Sherry could speak to this what needs to happen to enable a lot more capital to kind of flow into ideas like this because clearly, you know if you're a company like Deliveroo or Amazon you have no problem in raising vast amounts of capital in order to deploy technology which arguably makes the quality of work worse for lots of people so what needs to happen or what is happening or what's not happening what are the barriers to kind of facilitating a rush of money into this space Very briefly and then I'll hand over to others I think what we're trying to encourage and we are seeing some signs of is it's almost a mindset shift actually and I still get events or conversation of people saying oh aren't you always having to make a trade-off between your financial returns and your social impact and that's fine for some investors and it's fine for you, a big side to capital but if we're running a pension fund we can't accept any trade-off because we've got a duty to maximise returns to pensioners as many of you are quite low in consales and so on and so on and in some cases that is true but when you actually look across a range of areas work take would also be on actually it isn't a simple trade-off and frequently impact is actually a source of value and the commercial success of many organisations is tied into their ability to create impact and that's definitely the example on the panel here if you're going to reach more people deliver more value for them more benefit for the workers that's how the company will itself succeed and there's a whole load of areas where it is not a trade-off there is a correlation and as long as the organisation that's being invested in the organisation is staying true to its impact mission that it can also be aligned with commercial value so there's sort of the mindset shift that's needed looking for where is it that those things can come together what pools of capital are interested in impact and there are more and more of those that's foundation endowments or certain pension funds or wealthy families individuals, lots more people who wish to generate pools of impact for their money and there are definitely more examples appearing of where impact is also a source of commercial value you can bring some of that together it's not the case everywhere this is not a sort of panacea there are areas where there are genuine trade-offs and choices but equally there's bits where the two can go together and if I look at our portfolio a lot of the impact stars the organisations that are achieving outside impact for large numbers of people are also financially pretty successful in one way or another Great, Anna, tell us about the pursuit of commercial success as well as impact how easy is that? You know, I don't actually think about it that frequently because it's just so obvious but... Sorry, sorry Sorry, but I mean what Stephen's just said is that that's not always, you know there's a we've got this bridge to cross in terms of that becoming obvious to lots of people into the mainstream so maybe I'm the worst person to ask I know in terms of sort of how to get more people thinking in the way that the Resolution Foundation has been trying to think if you look at the kind of traditional VC industry really it's a fashion industry, right? So like at the moment what's in fashion is AI whatever that means, right? There was a point where delivery and a lot of money because what was in fashion was the gig economy like when I first started my career this is going to sound really old now the thing that was in fashion was something called Web 2.0 and like basically you just pitch the same thing and put a different moniker in front of it and like I think the other thing is that those trends tend to be you know, the old school trend of VC has also been whose problems are we solving we're solving the problems of people who can build stuff oh that tends to be young white men who have traditionally been engineers, right? And so I'm not sure I have a full kind of answer to like how we solve this but I think it's partly about what's interesting about what the Resolution Foundation have done here is to say okay we're going to try and solve problems for people who aren't from that community and we're going to pick a theme and we're going to try and explain why that theme matters and why there's a big opportunity there and I think that's by every contrary to how the traditional VC industry works how you get more kind of LPs invested in that thinking about that that I think I'll see but but yeah those are some of the kind of my experience of pitching in this industry has been Great, thank you Sherry you've been doing impact investing for 25 years do you have any thoughts on how to kind of suck more money into this sector? Well how about attract more money into this sector? I was also on the impact investing commission that was looking into this one of the at the moment there are mechanisms in the public realm so I'm a chair of the remuneration committee at Pearson and we are asked by our institutional investors to prove that we do good things and we've built it into our bonus and also our long-term incentive plan but that's just public companies which is not the vast majority of companies so for private I think private equity is probably a bit difficult but I know that there's been an accord but I think holding them to account would be helpful for VCs I'm really heartening to hear what you said earlier about the impact in investing if we could get the pensions there's a move to bring money from the pensions that invest everywhere but here and in everything but our private companies if they could, if one of the things that made them more easily invest in here was that it brought about the circular economy and made the world a better place that would be brilliant so I think that the pensions being released could be massive an impact that they could have on is if you tied it to it being impactful at a societal level that would be brilliant I like as a director of a large company I like being held to account and I like being asked are you sure that you're doing things that make the world a greener place or a S, usually more S and I think we need to be clear about how we're doing that how we build it into our products and how we live it how we structure an increase in the development and the coaching of staff who were from disadvantaged backgrounds I think we can do that as employers and we should celebrate the employers that do that and the investors that ask for that as well so at a systemic level, we procure from a government could say I'm not gonna have this contract with you unless you do that they should as a creator of companies I want them to do that because I don't want the bad guys to win who have flaky corporate governance structures and who don't take good responsibility with AI and their tech I don't want them to win and they shouldn't win and we control it we buy it, we invest in it so if you buy it or you invest in it you are in control so I would ask all of us to think about what we can do Good stuff this is quite a short panel it's only 45 minutes we've only got five left so I think let's if you had any questions I think you need to save them for the discussions that will be coming up or indeed for a later panel I think let's just have a kind of a slight broadening out to a big picture because I'm conscious the rest of the day will also be quite focused on the details I mean, Andrew, you talked about this sense that actually a lot of people look fearful and mistrustful about technology and about how it might change their prospects for getting work and the quality of their work in the future I was in Sweden recently for a reporting trip actually for the book that I'm working on and everyone that I mentioned this to kind of looked at me blankly and they were like, really? No, we love tech here bring it on, more robots yes please, let's do it and I thought it was really striking that actually, you know, there are there is a potentially kind of different future in which we feel much more optimistic about technology and what kind of underlying conditions need to exist in order to make that possible whether that's about having a sense that you have a voice in the workplace and how this thing is implemented or whether it's just that you trust that your safety net is sufficient to kind of hold you through a period of disruption so I wonder if each of you have like one big picture thought on what needs to change maybe outside of the kind of technology space itself but you know, a kind of big thought about what kind of country or policy needs to be different to help us navigate this with more confidence Anju, do you want to start? Sarah knows that saying Sweden is like catnip to me in terms of the economy because we do a lot of work with our Swedish sibling unions and what struck me on probably about six or seven years ago in one of my early trips to the Swedish movement was they've got this great phrase actually the Swedish prime minister used to say it Ed Miliband used it for a while as well so it's come over I'm not the only one who said it which is that workers should not fear the new machines they should fear the old ones and it strikes me as a really interesting thing about the whole psychology of Sweden who know as a small country the only way they can afford the high level of social benefit and welfare that they share as a national characteristic is to export more and sell more because they're a small country to export more and sell more they need to innovate because they always need to be ahead of the game because they're not a big trading block the only way they innovate is by investing in their people so that their workforce as a whole can deliver that innovation and then by doing that they then create the value throughout their companies not just high level to sell more to pay more taxes and through paying more taxes they have a better quality of life than us so is that virtual win-win and I see this completely as a win-win if we can solve together so my big play is always we often approach this as a question about technology when really at a bigger level we're talking about change management or human relations the technology is a vehicle and we've seen two, three really good examples already on the panel in this room that when people wish to we can use technology to create liberation dignity and respect for people in ways they've never experienced before the power of this technology is greater than anything we've seen before in many ways so it can solve problems if it has human endeavour so my great play is let's make this about social partnership the win-win is that workers and business and innovators together we can control our future if we choose it Thanks Andrew, Sherry I completely agree with what you're saying I think it's fantastic so I wrote down Mindset and I've been amazed at how capable we are as humans of reconfiguring ourselves that could be called upskilling it could be called learning we used to think that learning stopped once you were finished university or you were finished school but we continue to accelerate our learning through our lives and that's getting harder so I think for me invest in the reconfiguration of adults' skills and experience so that they don't fear the machines and the old machines and the old way of doing things will stop and it will stop at an accelerating pace but our ability as humans to adapt ourselves is infinite so let's think about empowering people to understand the mindset that that is the case and that they control it and they control the pace that they can learn and make sure that employers who could be thought of as an educational institution in itself that they bear in mind that they need to invest in their people as well Thank you Sherry One big thought In about 30 seconds Okay fine I think we've got to continue pushing down this path of showing that there is this huge shared interest in better quality jobs for both workers and for employers like the bigger break room grows the more and more that's just clear to me in the data that we collect where there's this huge overlap between this is a bad situation for a worker but it's also costing a business money or they're not making as much money as they could be doing if they changed how they were working and I think the more evidence we can show of that the closer we'll get to proving what Steven was talking about earlier of like actually impact and profit are not they're not working against each other they're working together and I think the more we keep talking about that the better data we've got about it the more there is going to be a slow kind of cultural shift towards that and I think people younger than us are going to see that as just see that as obvious and I think that's got to be where we kind of continue to push Great stuff, thank you and Steven Last word to you Yeah, thank you I'm going to leave right back to what Gavin was saying actually in the intro session about the why resolution do this work to adventure's work and alongside the heavy policy analysis piece because I think we clearly need all sorts of policy changes to drive forward the agenda we're talking about here and I think one of the things that what we've talked about in this panel can do is open up the window of possibility by showing to government, to policy makers, decision makers actually there are different ways of doing things these examples exist breaking them exists super exists there are models here that you can then design your regulatory frameworks, your policy frameworks to point in a different direction you don't have to just do what's already happening or what the three big tech companies in the world tell you you can do there's actually some other models which you can use as sort of painting the space where policy can operate and expanding the window of policy choices which then enable the bigger shifts which can move the whole dial in the right direction so that synergy between innovation and policy change I think is really critical Wonderful, all right well on that note I will wrap up this first panel thank you so much for listening please give the panel members a round of applause and I will hand over for the next one Thank you very much for such a brilliant first panel of the day a lot of food for thought about good work and a great way to set the scene for the rest of the day in particular the discussion around the skills needed for the future workforce which brings us really nicely onto our next panel on improving access to training and skills and how technology can be used to facilitate that so if I could now invite the next panel to join me on the stage chaired by Danielle Walker-Palmer from Friends Providence Foundation one of our Workitech partners unfortunately Theo is unable to join us today due to Covid but everyone else is here so I'll hand over to Danielle Hello, I'm Danielle Walker-Palmer from Friends Providence Foundation I'm just going to invite you all to stand up and just give it a shake come on just get the energy going in this room because I know when you're sitting for a long time it can be a bit much so anyway, that was it don't leave, sit down we're good thank you all for your engagement and presence as I say, I'm Danielle Walker-Palmer and I'm from Friends Providence Foundation you've met my chair in the last session and my colleague Charlie will be joining us in the afternoon in the audience and Friends Providence Foundation is a supporter of the Workitech Fund development and one of the reasons we are interested in this work is that as Friends Providence Foundation our focus is on how we can have an economy which is fair and sustainable and you can imagine that having work or voice community voice and also addressing some of the issues around information asymmetries and how they operate in the economy is central to actually restructuring the economy we tend to think of restructuring the economy in terms of what we call the four Ds which is okay, this is always tricky to make sure I remember them all decentralized, democratized decarbonized and also we call it diversified but we actually mean that in a kind of decolonized so actually addressing some of the structural inequities in our economy and so you can see how in terms of the last discussion and hopefully what we're going to talk about here and when we talk about skills and training it's vital to get those four Ds operating those are conditions they are not sufficient but they are a start toward having a fairer economy so I will stop chatting on and introduce the panel and we have a fantastic panel and like Sarah I'm not going to go through and introduce them all and I'm sorry that we're missing Theo but we have Helen Geronief who's another supporter of the Worker Tech Fund and Activity and we'll talk a bit more about that we've got Claudine Ediammi who's one of the ventures supported by the Worker Tech Trust Louise Murphy from Resolution Foundation who's going to be able to give us a big picture and me as well so I will not talk too much but I will hand over first I think to Louise who can introduce herself and also give us a good sense of the overview of what's going on in skills and training Perfect, morning everyone I'll just speak for two or three minutes to introduce myself and set the scene and then I'm sure as the panel discussion goes on can delve into some things in a little bit more detail so I'm an economist at the Resolution Foundation focusing broadly on labour market employment and also skills and education and I thought I'd briefly outline the three lenses through which we've really been thinking about education and training over the last couple of years as Gavin said we've been doing this big piece of work looking at how we can transform the British economy and we've been clear throughout that education and training is a vital part of that so the first thing that I think is important is really thinking about how we can reduce inequality in the UK and how we can make it possible that there's good jobs available up and down the country to people from all backgrounds and we really need to think about how we can improve education and training to do that for example we know that there's been a decline in the number of apprenticeship starts among young people that's been a pretty constant trend over the past decade or so and so we need to think about how we can improve that so that young people that maybe don't have a sort of educational bent that don't maybe go that kind of traditional path from GSSE to A-level to university can get the skills and training they need to find a good career and then the second lens through which we've been thinking about this is really in terms of growth I mean that's something that we're hearing constantly from politicians of all backgrounds how we can boost growth, improve the British economy and again I think it's hard to think about that without thinking about skills and training we obviously need to invest in transport and things like that but we also need to make sure that workers really can do these high growth jobs and what we've found is if we want to boost the parts of the economy that the UK does well on things like life sciences, creative industries these jobs, these careers really require people to have high levels of education and training and then finally the third lens through which we've been thinking about this is really in terms of health so again we're hearing a lot at the moment about the growing number of people that are out of the labour market due to ill health or disability and we've been thinking particularly about how we can improve the education and employment prospects of young people who have health conditions and again it's become really clear that skills and training is a big part of that a shocking four in five of the young people who aren't working due to ill health don't have a qualification above GCSE level so I think it's really impossible to think about how we can get Britain working get people into the labour force without thinking about how to make it easier for people to get the skills and training that they need Brilliant, thank you can I hand over to Claudine sorry this is unrehearsed so it's a surprise when I come to people so can I hand over to Claudine to talk a bit about Early Bird Yeah, sure, good morning everyone I am the founder and CEO of Early Bird Early Bird builds technology for employment support organisations so organisations that are delivering hyper-personalised programmes to support people into work or training we build a technology that helps them to capture a much deeper set of insights and understanding on the participants that they engage with through simulated voice-based conversations for us, really why we exist is to support people to thrive in employment and we're at the very early stages of the journey of them getting into training and skills because they're at the point of the journey where they're not really sure maybe kind of the pathway that they want to take they have a number of barriers that are preventing them from accessing work or training, which can extend from the typical kind of employability challenges around not having the right CV or not having the right qualifications as has been mentioned, right the way through to having challenges on a more personal level that can affect their ability to work or learn so those could include things like challenges for their housing challenges for mental health, personal relationships and so on so our technology supports those organisations that are helping those people to overcome those barriers by enriching their understanding of those so they can improve the quality of the support they deliver That was wonderfully succinct, thank you very much we'll come back and hear a bit more about it as well Helen, can you get an input from your perspective? Absolutely, hi my name's Helen Gironi and I'm director of ventures at UFI Ventures and we basically support or we invest in technology businesses that are helping adults so post 16 years people upskill and find good quality work we've invested in 16 ventures so far offering a very diverse range really of innovation in this area and I guess my take on providing greater access to skills is that technology is a great enabler, there are a lot of great innovative businesses in this space so I think there has been, we've got the technology to provide greater access or greater access to skills but it is also a very fragmented system and I think that means that it's a bit of a sort of postcode lottery essentially actually somebody chancing upon technology that is suitable for them and that they're supported to realise that that's the right thing for them at that point in their journey so I think a big part of enabling access to this is more intentionality essentially from FBE colleges, from schools, from employers to showcase and show what available technology is out there for people and to provide people with better information really about what's available fabulous thank you very much and now we're going to have a little bit more of a panel discussion and I wanted to go back picking up on the theme that came up in the introductory sessions as well as the last panel really what is the role of policy in this because I think Louise you outlined your three lenses but in some ways what's the policy role in addition to obviously thinking about the social investment tech adventure type level but what's the policy solution? Yeah I think yeah definitely good to think not just about what the problems are but also what we can do about it I mean I think the first thing is just reflecting or thinking properly about you know what's going well and what needs improvement I mean I think too much of the debate is currently around university whether we've got too many graduates what sort of courses they're doing actually when we look at kind of the skills demand and supply we're doing about right when it comes to the number of people going to university but where we're doing less well and where there's definitely need for policy is both on making it easier for young people who are less academic to get sort of so-called sub-degree level qualifications those at level four level five what sort of is traditionally seen as HNDs and HNCs the UK does pretty bad compared to most international countries in providing those qualifications and so there's certainly a role for policy both in just practically you know making it easier for colleges and universities to provide those courses to work with employers so that they're given the recognition that they deserve so that you know practically a you know a young person feels like that is a good decision for them to do one of those courses I mean I think at the moment it's not surprising that few young people take that trajectory when you know most people haven't even heard of these courses they don't know anyone that's done them so you know how can you convince someone that that's a good thing to do and then I think secondly the other real area where you know policy could be doing more is to try and you know reverse this trend we've seen which is a decline in in-work training so consistently we've seen fewer workers receive training and what's particularly concerning is it's the the lowest educated workers who receive the least training so they're sort of doubly disadvantaged and also what we've seen is that the decline in recent decades has been most pronounced among younger people you know we have some policy in this area notably the the apprenticeship levy which is I guess increasingly being used for sort of in-work training for existing employees rather than being seen as something to upscale young people but I don't think we should see the apprenticeship levy as the only vehicle for providing in-work training there really should be more or an easier way for employers to kind of give shorter and kind of more gradual training so we've for example proposed some trialling of things like human capital checks credits kind of slightly similar to what happened what currently happens for research and development but certainly thinking more about what we can do to incentivize employers to upscale their their workers is should be seen as a priority I think. It's brilliant it's really helpful and then looking at it from the other end of the the sort of telescope or the other lens you know what is the role of technology I mean Sharia gave us a little bit of a sense of how technology can support training but Helen from what trends have you seen in terms of some of the ventures other ventures you've supported in terms of the role of technology in in ensuring low-paid workers in particular can get access to skilling and upskilling and reskilling. Yeah it's a really interesting point I think there are a number of ventures in our portfolio that are doing really interesting work here in in terms of ensuring access so for example Caps Lock one of our portfolio companies is essentially it's a bootcamp in cyber security and their their intervention their learning is fully funded so they provide through a partner affordable funding upfront for the upskilling and essentially what they're seeing is that the graduates post-learning go on to something like double or there's a significant uplift there's a you know tens of thousands of pounds in terms of their salary uplift post-completion so that the learning is affordable as long as they can get access to funds pre-learning so that's a that's a really interesting way of making sure that it works for both the learner and the provider of the the intervention as well I think also one of our excuse me sorry portfolio companies called Assemble You is providing access to learning for mobile first employees so people who aren't sat at desks and in fact 80 percent of the global workforce doesn't use a computer in their working day and so what they're doing is they're providing bite-sized learning to people through their mobile phones which means that they can access you know 10 minutes of of learning in the car on the way to work or when they're walking their dog and they're seeing that this is a really popular way for employees who are not not able to access a computer to learn and it and it really is the engagement rate is very high and completion rates are very high so I think you know really making personalising the learning to to the individual is really important and making sure that it is fully funded up front and that there's this funding available. Thank you and turning to you Claudine what are the biggest challenges that startups have in terms of making an impact in this kind of fragmented but also huge area I mean what are the biggest challenges that you faced setting up a venture in this space? Good question so I think one of the key challenges and I think it's quite common for a number of different startups as funding and that's fun to lean up and so thankfully resolution ventures have backed us and supporting us to do that but I think that is one of the the big challenges and then I think it's thinking about what your business model looks like and how you navigate the space so Helen was talking about fully funded programs and things like that where you typically are looking at government schemes that are funding these these these programs and then you're kind of having to sit within a particular box for that and thinking about how you can penetrate those contracts where some of them it's not as easy to integrate tech into some of those as well so I think that's one of the challenges that we've that we've seen and come across and then another point that Helen was talking about was seeing increased engagement with some of the technology that exists and I think that's really really critical so we've seen that there's been an increase in different types of forms of learning that have been fully funded so for example boot camps from the DfE but we've had reports from loads of providers where the engagement levels and dropout rates are really really high on those types of programs and so it's really looking at how you can build technology that is really really user centric and user first and looking at how the engagement rates of the learners are high and to combat some of these challenges I think the other thing for us is really thinking about what is what is the reason for the challenges that exist today and for us a lot of it is around one awareness so a lot of the people that we come across they aren't even aware that some of the opportunities to learn exist both unemployed and people in work as well and particularly for the people who are in work there is huge challenges around time so having technology that is really accessible is really important because you have people that have all sorts of other commitments working long shifts in their jobs and things like that where they just don't have time to to commit traditional courses and then again funding so having those opportunities that are fully funded so I think as a as a founder it's kind of looking at what the landscape looks looks like what the needs are of those learners and those individuals who need to access skills and training and how you can marry the two and insert yourself into that landscape that's really helpful I suppose from where I sit I sit in a kind of different not necessarily in this space so it sounds like we've got both fragmentation and compartmentalization so you get trapped in boxes like you have to operate in that box regardless of whether that makes most sense to the problem you're trying to to solve and so one of my questions really to all of you is how can this system be more dynamic and responsive to the needs as they develop so I think I take Andrew's point in the future of work is now so how do we help workers respond to that but also yeah just a feel for how how do we deal how do we create a dynamism in how we provide things for or how we create opportunities I don't know if you have a sense of that Helen I think it's quite difficult to do on a sort of company by company basis because each company has its own you know things that are important to them and I think also it's quite difficult for companies or it's rare I've seen it rarely that a company will put aside a substantial amount of resource to focus on this area for me the obvious solution if it's affordable is for it to happen through for example the further education network or in schools at the beginning of people's careers but again that's a resource issue you know who pays for that that's you know that's a big issue perhaps it's you know employer organizations grouping together there's a there is a lack of information flow it seems between further education colleges and schools and employers in terms of sort of understanding what the local challenges are what the local needs of employees are and the sort of upskilling and learning that's happening on a local basis so I think definitely better communication and you know government funding would be would be great I think I'd in particular like to see the government funding like test and learn opportunities whether they're involved or not but really kind of putting money into and allowing partners to test and learn technology in in new environments and partner up with different types of organizations I think that would be really cool and there has been some examples of that in the past in terms of inclusive economy partnership that happened a few years ago and things like that but I'd love to see more of that do you want to talk a bit more about that because I'm not sure everyone will know how that works how do test and learn opportunities work well they don't do it much but I think so with the inclusive economy partnership to my understanding I think that's completed now but we were a part of that program where they delivered a program called Boost which combined government civil society and startup founders and the idea was to really kind of bring them on a journey to explore partnerships funding education communication between those parties so we use that program to connect with government bodies with potential customers with other founders and also with investors so it's really kind of bringing that space together and I think that kind of model could exist where you're kind of funding opportunities for particular organizations to for example collaborate with a further education college and see what they can kind of come up with or partner with an employer and see what they can come up with I think that would kind of help inspire motivate more conversation it's really helpful and Louise I don't know if in the research issues of dynamism and how we get some inject some energy into this process yeah I mean definitely echo what's been said before I mean I think there's some movement in this space so for example we are seeing you know a bit of a commitment to changing the sort of the way that loans work to make it easier for people to kind of chunk up their learning do modules rather than having to commit to doing you know a full kind of year or multi-year long course and I think you know as we've heard just for many people particularly low-paid workers who might be juggling shift work or juggling work with other commitments you know that just isn't isn't a viable opportunity so I do think that is you know a necessary part of what needs to change and I do think hopefully technology would would make that easier for people to to fit training and education into everything else that's that's going on in their life but I do think maybe what's what's still missing or that we need to think about a bit more is just really thinking about skills and education in a strategic way so not just thinking about where we are now but thinking where will we be or where do we want to be in say 10 years time so that includes just thinking about you know how we want to grow the economy how can we make sure that the skills and training opportunities are there for for people to go into these kind of high growth sectors like you know like life sciences or like some of the new technologies that the UK is pretty competitive in but also thinking for example about the transition to to net zero and what that might mean for the the jobs that we're going to be doing and making sure that you know for example some of the the things that are topical now you know do we have enough apprenticeships or training courses for heat pump engineers or electric vehicle mechanics you know these should really have been things that we were thinking about 10-15 years ago rather than than now and so I guess as we now think about AI and things like that we should be trying to to get ahead of the game. Thank you. The question I have and it's something that actually is a holdover from work that Franz Proben used to do a lot more of which was relating to financial inclusion and one of the things we noticed in this area was that people when talking about financial inclusion you talk to corporates quite often about financial inclusion they were very keen to talk about financial capability which was actually about the skills that people had to manage and navigate financial system and financial products and what began to be sort of echoing in our in our collective organizational mind was actually these were very much solutions about fixing the people not fixing the system and just really wondering if people have like reflections on you know other collective solutions here which actually start to redress some of the the challenges around power and how that gets held but also reflecting some of the points that were made in the previous panel about really employers not knowing how to fix stuff like they can see there's a problem but they actually don't have solutions to hand and I just really wanted to get any reflections from the panel before we allow you to have your your break proper break we can actually leave the room and you to to these collective solutions solutions which are about trying to speak and redress some of the power imbalances in the system I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that for Dean from a venture perspective and in terms of the you talking about in terms of the end users yeah connecting them to each other or yeah um I'm not sure to be honest off my head yeah that's fair I don't know Helen you've come across anything in your well not not specifically from a not a not a venture but I think there is to Louise's point about thinking strategically I think there's a part that as a as a as a country we all have to play in helping people who are outside of the workforce think strategically about what skills are are sought after for example green skills skills in the construction industry for example there are pockets of there are areas in the economy where if they got the right training at the right time it would be much easier for them to find really good quality work and I think that information is getting through to companies that are in the right position to understand how it works but there is a there's a problem in you know basically people you and I understanding where the pockets of demand are and and you know I don't know about anybody else on the panel but when I was thinking about my career I wasn't thinking strategically and I think that can make a massive difference to somebody's start in in their career and how the initial years go and progress we know. Any thoughts? I don't think I think that that sums up pretty well but I mean I think just the way that we think about this is really you know in terms of you know better access to skills and training allowing people to find you know good jobs that have dignity that they feel that they feel proud of and I mean I think just there's a you know I guess a huge prize to be had what we can see is you know at every level just kind of getting you know even going from you know level two very low level of qualifications up to something like an A level equivalent results in people you know having higher wages so I think we shouldn't forget just sort of how transformative this can be and what that can mean for low paid workers both in terms of you know money in their pocket but also just yeah a job or a career that they feel proud of. Brilliant thank you. I want you to hold questions and points you want to make about skills and training because I believe the next session is after the break the real break I keep promising you and you actually get to go into breakout rooms and have kind of discussions about that and make connections but I'd like to invite you to thank the panel in the usual way and then I'll hand over to Louise or Emma. Thank you Daniel. Another really interesting conversation and before we head out to the break I just want to explain quickly what's going to happen in the breakout sessions afterwards so we're going to ask you to switch from listening mode into talking mode so we'll be heading upstairs to the second floor and splitting out into two different rooms the first which will be which will be a kind of facilitated discussion sessions the first will be learning and training unfortunately Alex isn't here today but Helen who you've just heard from will be facilitating that session and then the second session will be on careers guidance and employability with our own Louise Marston so in the break have a think about which you'd like to attend and have a think about the questions and discussion points you might want to bring up so yeah I'll let you go for coffee now. Welcome back everyone and welcome to those of you who have just joined us for the day I hope you enjoyed the breakout sessions before lunch which were around training and learning we had some really interesting discussions in upstairs particularly around I thought the net zero green skills group was really interesting that was the first time we talked about kind of green skills today so yeah really really enjoyed that discussion so this afternoon we're going to take a look at work and tech at us with a slightly different angle looking at worker power and worker choice so I'm delighted to hand over to Clara Skorankova from Trust for London who is another of our work tech partners so Clara over to you. Thank you Eva oh that's very loud I can I can whisper welcome back after lunch and we've got the privilege to bring the energy back into the discussion for this afternoon this panel is going to focus on workers worker choice worker voice and what does the advancement of technology mean for workers there is loads of opportunities that we can find for workers but also loads of challenges we are seeing erosion of rights we are sealing diffusion and disconnect between individual workers as they become managed by algorithms and it makes it hard to access your rights to advocate and to enforce them and to talk about these challenges but also touch on opportunities we have got a great panel of four speakers I'll ask them each to introduce themselves first before we launch into discussion and I will start from Kate Dearden Can you hear me thank you so much really great to be here I'm Kate Dearden from Community Trade Union and we're a union representing workers in sectors all across the UK economy from steel workers prison officers teachers tanker drivers and the way they work in a range of ways from employees the self-employed and freelance workers to everything in between so a real diverse union sort of representing those workers all across the economy and dealing with numerous challenges they face so really looking forward to this discussion welcome Kate and over to Hannah Slaughter from resolution foundation hi my name is Hannah Slaughter I work at the resolution foundation and my work covers lots of different aspects of the labour market but in particular with a focus on low paid workers working conditions enforcement of rights and also kind of work of power and the way that that shapes people's jobs and their working lives and on the other side we have got Emma back hello everyone pleasure to be here I founded Equico co-op five years ago we are a platform co-op which is a rare breed of entity but one which I hope will eventually take over the world there are lots of us all over the globe essentially that means that we're building a digital product to enable caregiving and to promote both worker choice and power but also the person who's on the receiving end and family members as well we work to a model of care that where power and choice is kind of built into the DNA so it's not just about being a co-op people receiving support build their own team they choose their workers the workers choose them it's a kind of negotiated consent on both sides and everything that we do is to facilitate and enable that and to help that caregiving relationship be the best it can be we then organise into circles locally so we sort of work to a more decentralized model where workers are then able to recruit new workers to bring on new people who are looking for support and so to sort of start to open up the way the organization works to to not have that kind of very that that triangle that that is the default for sort of every organization everywhere in many ways welcome and then we've got Jigar Khakad from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change good afternoon thank you very much for having me I'm Jigar Khakad I'm director of government innovation for the Tony Blair Institute we're a political consultancy operating in 35 countries across the world my job is to think about how the state needs to adapt for the challenges of the 21st century in particular how technology is changing the relationship between citizens governments and businesses and right at the heart of that is how technology is reshaping the future of work to that end we've done some work on classifying and quantifying atypical work here in the UK including the gig economy but also looking across different markets and how gig economy and gig workers feel in London Singapore Nairobi and Jakarta thank you so to set the scene for the discussion this afternoon I'll ask Hannah to give us a bit of a background into the current labour market situation and in particular in the context of enforcement thanks Cara yes as I said at the beginning a lot of my work focuses on kind of broader issues of job quality worker power and kind of at the very sharp end how that kind of translates into breaches of workers rights so just to give a bit of a sense of the problem so from a purely financial perspective we know that wages are lower than they could be otherwise because employers have power over their workers academics have estimated that wages could be about 100 pounds a week higher if employers didn't have that power over workers on average so that is kind of a big financial kind of consequence of what we're seeing from the imbalance of power we're also seeing kind of a prolific space of poor quality work we know that after the financial crisis in particular there was a big rise in insecure contracts things like zero hours contracts temporary contracts and that hasn't gone away even as kind of the jobs market has has recovered after that recession and then at the very kind of most acute end we see workers not getting the rights that they're owed in law so we estimate that around 350,000 people are being underpaid the minimum wage about 900,000 people say they don't get any paid holiday entitlement and about 1.8 million people say they don't get a pay slip so they can't actually check that they're getting the right pay and the right the the things that they're entitled to so this is kind of a big a big problem it's also unequal it probably won't be that surprising to people in this room that it's particularly low paid workers who are bearing the brunt of these poor working conditions and also other marginalised groups such as people from migrant backgrounds people from I think minority backgrounds these these are kind of particularly a key for some groups of workers so there's kind of a big problem there kind of more kind of about kind of what's going on underneath that like when workers face problems what what's kind of happening it's really difficult like the way that the labour market institutions are set up for workers to actually assert their rights and argue for better practice you know aside from kind of the the well-known decline of kind of formal collective bargaining in the form of unions it's also just become kind of harder for workers to leave their job you know lots of workers if they're getting treated badly their you know their natural response would be to to kind of leave a job but if there's either you don't know what options are out there or if there are no good options out there for you or if all the jobs that are out there are equally as bad then that's just not really an option for you so that's kind of making life really difficult the the kind of state systems that are set up to enforce workers' rights are weak and patchy and kind of underfunded and so that's kind of a big problem and then workers often struggle to enforce their own rights to an employment tribunal because it's costly it's really stressful it's you need to know what you're doing and so there's kind of a big gap and and I suppose you know it's there's obviously a role here for the government and for policy and that's what I spend a lot of my time thinking about in my kind of day job and you know there's certainly a role for the government in strengthening the rights themselves strengthening enforcement of those rights and helping to strengthen labour market institutions be that trade unions or we've proposed setting up new kind of sectoral institutions to get the sector to agree on better conditions in sectors like social care like cleaning and like warehousing but there are also kind of areas where either policy isn't moving quickly enough or where you know policy national policy might not kind of be best placed to kind of help workers you know know their rights know what's out there and kind of improve their power in the workplace which I suspect we'll get into discussing today I think that's probably enough from me there is a lot in there thank you Hannah I think then the impact the financial impact of the lack of power that you set out at the beginning is is is quite significant and I think that's something to really illustrate what it means in financial term for low paid workers not to have power now you talked a lot about what needs to change in policy and some of the barriers but let's talk about what the employers can do maybe I can start with Kate what what can employers do to shift or contribute to shifting the balance of power and give more powers to low paid workers thank you very much I'm officer I'm speaking from a trade union and I think recognising trade unions and the absolutely incredible work trade unions have done across sectors and working in good partnership with employers has transformed workplaces across the country and sectors and at community we like to work in partnership with employers for that purpose when a business does well ultimately our members do well and that's the achievements that we've managed to work with employers on whether it's driving up better pay introducing transformative policies in the workplace whether it's around menopause on mental health on a range of issues that are really transforming the day to day lives of our members but also the wider society and communities that they operate in because you know we really feel like trade unions and isn't just confined to the workplace it's really important for our society and communities too so obviously I think the trade union movement is absolutely vital in answering that question and I think for low paid workers in particular and you touched on all the challenges that we are operating I think that context is is really important and how we look at the world of work and today people are much more likely to move sectors careers and combine those different approaches to work and more than what trade unions were used to we were formed a hundred years ago and how different the union is now and the sectors that we make up has really made us think about how we represent our membership and the different approaches we have to take because we are seeing so many workers who are now in those non-traditional roles so from freelancers and subcontractors to agency and gig workers and we have seen a lot more low paid work on that side of things so I think that brought a picture outside of the union not just employers but reflecting that context that we're operating in and that challenge that the nature of work has called into our system a question the system of workers rights that you mentioned and that has fallen far behind that blended labor market that we see today and that we see in our membership and workers do are taking on sort of those greater risks with less security and protection in exchange for perhaps more flexibility at work and that raises a whole load of questions around government policy but also what employers can do better but they aren't employers sometimes that we've worked with in the past they are on platforms and you know there's different relationships there and different ways to navigate it so I think that raises a whole load of questions around who their employer is is our employer sometimes these low paid workers how do we then navigate that bargaining system and how do unions respond adapt and reflect on that and to make sure that we represent the needs of at the modern worker worker of today Emma you described a very different model working and what I would almost describe as a sort of the self-management teal concept of organization but that's not something that's not what we are talking about today but what would your suggestion be in terms of what employers can do differently in order to enable more power to be in the hands of workers using your experience and the model that you have set up with your organization. I would expand the term employers just in recognition of what you've said and thinking about platforms, agencies kind of any organization that it is essentially a provider of work or a an enabler of labor to kind of occur and to say that any entity that is doing that has a moral obligation to both its customers and to its workers regardless of whether they are employed workers self-employed whatever other category kind of people want to fit into or are designated so that's kind of the ground that you have a responsibility if that's the work that you're in that's what you're doing. The second kind of key component is consent so whenever you get a job there is this sort of tacit kind of right I've signed the employment contract I'm working for this employer and for the duration of me working that's me working in consent regardless of kind of how they treat you or sort of the levels of exploitation that you might experience the employer is working off that initial day that you came into the office and signed the contract and then you know then all bets are off certainly in social care and the other low paid sectors that we're talking about here. So if you look at consent as something that is not day one and then you can forget about it but look at it as a concept that is a daily sort of micro interaction kind of thing then you can start to build organizations that are much more collaborative and don't need to take that kind of combative employer versus employee worker versus provider you know gig worker versus platform and to say well we're all building something here obviously cooperatives are really great format for that but they're not the only one and then that also goes for your employment basis it goes for what you do on a daily basis it goes for who you work with and actually the more that you're able and this is also where technology can help to personalize and experience in a job I mean we say to people that they can be employed they can come on self-employed and there are obviously different implications around that we ran a bread fund over COVID just to kind of pick up on the on the safety net aspect of self-employment as well but there's still more to do there and in terms of the agreement that you're making with somebody when they start work with you if if you're saying things like if you want to whistleblow your position will be protected if you want to raise the grievance or an issue your position will be protected and actually employment is not usually a protecting factor for that regardless of what the legislation says but if employers if providers of work if agencies are able to make those conscious commitments to say regardless of how you work with us you will still access these rights and we we renew the agreement that we have with you on a daily basis not just at the beginning of your engagement with us those could be some some great steps thank you Emma and Jagar you talked about the work that that your organisation has done specifically around the non-standard types of employment can you explain a bit more about what that actually means for worker power but also how can we offer more choice to workers and sort of shift that unbalance of power yes definitely so we used a new survey in the UK called understanding society or it's an old long-standing survey of 40 000 households but they had a new wave of data that allowed us to understand a kind of full spectrum of atypical work everything from your kind of traditional self-employed kind of consultants to gig workers and other agency workers where there's a third party intermediating their access to work to those that have kind of more zero hours contracts and what we found through this is basically as I said there are three categories of atypical workers what we call hustlers a traditional self-employed the giggers your gig workers and the impermanence of people that are very very precarious in the relationship with work the first thing to pull out is that only about two percent of all people in work over the age of 16 are gig workers which stands in stark contrast to some of the bigger estimates out there by TUC and others and I think res foundation has found similar levels of gig working so I think just one to put into context some of the work we're talking about in terms of the experience of work while they're in work we like to say that atypical work is about flexibility it's about having choice etc but what we found it was only really the traditional self-employed that are typically older workers in a second or third phase of their career that had genuine control over their hours when it came to gig workers agency workers or those are slightly more kind of on zero hours contracts they had the same agency over their hours as traditional employees despite all the rhetoric around flexibility they had less they had the same amount of control the problem we found was that they tended to be paid by the hour by the task which made their attachment to work far more precarious and that became a problem they also had different forms of training from their employer or their the person and providing them with work I think but it's a good distinction it's a really important distinction that Emma made we can't we can't just talk about employers because it has a certain context the other thing we found that that a lot of this work was was traditionally temporary and for example gig workers 43 of them that were gig workers in 2016 were in traditional employment by 2019 so there's a lot of movement between different types of workers in addition the last thing I'll say and then I'll come on to what our recommendations were about how do you give them choice of control when we did our work across four different cities Jakarta London Singapore and Nairobi what we found is that workers sense of control can be undermined undermined by lack of clarity on how decisions are made around their work around their hours or around their pay and their inability to react to influence or control the way in which decisions are made really undermines their their attachment to work and I mean that's not surprising I think it was actually quite satisfying or kind of like across the world just despite different types of labor markets different types of economies workers pretty much had the same concerns and same desires from work where we've landed is on how do you support workers and worker voice is what we call a minimum set of worker rights across digital rights including transparency over day important transparency over data portability over data and and pay minimum set of rights around pay including access to the right to request sick pay parental leave even access to pension payments minimum represent access to self-employed being represented in bargaining units and I think while we've been here at the Supreme Court has determined that delivered drew drivers cannot be represented by a trade union for collective bargaining rights if you allow the self-employed to form parts of bargaining units that would solve that problem and give them a right and a voice and the last thing is right to access kind of different different things around health safety and well-being especially for people working from home I think just really specifically on choice it comes back to data and transparency the more that platforms in particular can be transparent about the the pay people are getting paid workers are getting drivers are getting and the more that that data is portable and comparable across platforms and I think there's a great company here rodeo that's trying to do some of this the more choice and power the individual worker individual have because that puts them in the driving seat and you you can get to a position where platforms aren't using you know the opaqueness to kind of drive down wages is actually visibility over the different types of wages you can earn at that given point platforms might have to start to compete and I think that's where you get worker power and worker choice is through that transparency of data great so we're moving into the discussion around well how can technology be an opportunity to enhance worker power and your example around transparency around data and actually giving workers the data that they otherwise would have in a different type of employment relationship is is one of the examples so what else can we use technology for what opportunities are there either of you thank you and there's so much to cover so we will get cracking on a particular on tech and I can speak to a bit about what we've done at community and internally with our members and our reps in terms of giving them the tools they need to sort of bargain around technology so come back to that earlier point I mentioned around the role of trade unions in this conversation and but just take a step back on what we've spoken about in terms of that playoff and the the risks that workers are taking when it comes to security and flexibility and and how we sort of overhaul and our system of workers rights here I think for for us as a union and what's really important in ending that trade off and instead delivering on a vision that makes new forms of work work for everyone but in a meaningful fair and decent way is really important and part of that is rather than inhibiting innovation we actually make innovation work for everybody in all these different forms and ways of working that we've spoken about and and when it comes to technology actually understanding who the technology is serving and thinking about that before we even approach what legislation for example we would want to see and to make sure we can secure that better work and and better experiences of work and so for unions I guess making the most of technological opportunities I would break it into into two parts and workers themselves using it in order to have a better time at work also how unions are using it and we've been sort of seen those ways in which new technology can make jobs better so that more positive side and to the story and more efficient and flexible if it's deployed in the right way and less demanding physical work and we know that if technology leads to greater productivity and profitability that does mean more money in our members pockets and so for us it's how we then manage those tech changes at work correctly so we have the opportunity to create positive change for workers and a lot of our members are positive about the opportunities but they're concerned that they are not being consulted when technological changes are introduced in the workplace and so there could be a positive story to tell here when we're in sort of relation to um employers and partners that we work with them in around technology in the workplace sort of moving towards those shorter hours for the same pay or better work environments and safer workplaces and that's a huge question around that existing regulation that protects workers from those risks posed by the use of AI and our algorithms or encourages the development of systems and that's actually support human dignity and making sure that yes workers do feel positive about about this which I think the earlier panel touched on slightly too and so we have done a bit of work around sort of training with our members and with our reps and a lot of other unions across the space and the TUC too have been doing some work around how unions can change our systems to to sort of bring our members and reps with us and but we also want to see technology change sort of brought firmly into the scope of collective bargaining and and recognises an area in which work consultation is legally acquired and at the moment the TUC and lots of other unions are working through a bill of how we can actually make that happen and and sort of bring it into reality looks like we won't get that from the government in the form of an employment bill in this parliament which is obviously a huge missed opportunity and but it's still really important that we start on that work and and make sure we can ship what it looks like in the workplace and and also with the Institute of Future of Work which I think Anna is in the audience we've been doing some work and sort of more practical things for our members to get stuck into in the meantime and so actually how we can create those tech champions in the workplace and bargain around technology so we sort of developed a four stage process for workers with the institute to follow when consulting so it's sort of identifying that technology that may have a significant impact on work and assessing the risks and impacts that technology might have to engage in dialogue and meaningful consultation and which obviously isn't new to to our reps or to trade unions agreeing an action plan and sort of having that useful framework to aid and understanding and ensuring the aspects of what we currently have in terms of existing law and good practice are adequately captured and but ensuring that consultation is genuinely meaningful and I think that's that's really important for us as part of this conversation of how we use technology and for unions themselves and that we are making the most of those opportunities and and TUC colleagues is in the room and Andrew will make you put your hand up again but there's loads of good work that's being done by unions to make sure we are doing that so I would take it so sort of that two-point approach from the workers themselves to actually unions and how we're responding thank you Kate um Anna yeah the majority of technology in the caregiving space is B2B so it's sold into home care organizations which means that the user requirements are led by the management and the owners nothing wrong with that so when we started designing um we asked the question of each feature is there is there a legal reason for us to not be able to do this thing that is usually in the province of the manager so managers can assign shifts managers can determine pay managers can choose where you go over the course of the day is it illegal to allow the worker to be in control of that no so what why is someone else doing it um and actually if you kind of look at the features that are built into technologies and particularly permission structures that are built into technologies which again are led by business owners management people who require oversight people who need to chase people to do stuff that they're not doing or are doing or people who need to surveil others in some way shape or form um then you can start to I guess unwind the systems of power that have been ratcheted in to the majority of the technology products that we use in our lives or which we are subject to um the NHS is a rich and enduring basket of examples so as long as co-design is also working well with ownership and doesn't just fall back into consultation as long as you're thinking about who can do what who can see what who can change what in this technology thing that is being built who can define an entity who can define a relationship then that I believe is the key to beginning to unlock the sorts of power mechanisms that after all technology is only there to reproduce in the existing structures that we already have the vast majority of the time I'm gonna stop there thank you that that was a great analysis of how technology is just effectively a mirror of the hierarchical structures of an organization that were built a very long time ago that we still seem to subscribe to despite all of these innovations and new ways of working and talk about new ways of working actually we work in the in the old way through technology um Hannah um yeah just to echo lots of what's already been said I mean I think that in terms of how tech can kind of help work a power there are kind of two sides of it and one is on the collector side which Kate has already covered a lot of and I think that that near the ways that help that tech can help um workers kind of organizing kind of carry out collective bargaining is is all the more important one workplaces are becoming less and less the kind of quote unquote traditional kind of everyone in one place the same hours in a day when people have different shifts and they're not always crossing paths it's harder to kind of you know come together to collectively and bargain collectively with an employer in that way so I think tech can be really useful there and then the other side which um G guys already touched on is the kind of knowing telling workers what their options are so whether it's kind of knowing that their you know their pay is not as good as the employer down the road so maybe they need to start asking for a pay rise or thinking about looking elsewhere whether it's kind of just being aware of like what other options are out there that gives them kind of more power in the workplace and and kind of not just you know what options kind of in terms of like the number of jobs that are out there but also like knowing that actually there are these jobs that fit my personal circumstances whether it's someone who has caring responsibilities you know we've heard a lot in in focus groups that we've done that people with you know people who need certain types of flexible working to fit around child care for example or working kind of trying to manage a health condition alongside work are often really worried about not being able to find another job that kind of suits their preferences so being able to show workers what's out there is really really important and that can kind of have important consequences for kind of people's working and you know whether they're they're getting a good deal in the workplace and then I think we've kind of had a panel earlier about skills and I think you know more visibility around what skills people what skills employers are looking for and helping put workers in touch with the kind of training opportunities is also kind of a really important role of tech but I won't kind of go into that because lots of people will have been here for for the morning session but yeah I think there's kind of lots of opportunities out there it's just kind of making sure that they are the right kinds of tech and not the kind of surveillance tech that people are so worried about. Loads of to unpack there talked about structures of organisations the role of data impact on labour rights how do we ensure collective bargaining and do new contexts are there any questions from the audience before I ask any more questions that we have pre-prepared or is everybody very quiet and digesting all of the information after lunch I think there is a question over there and you can introduce yourself and and say whether you your question is for a particular member of the panel or for everybody. Yes my name is Nusin yeah it's been suggested that self-employed earn less than the employed so how could we because we have a big population of self-employed people how could we make sure that self-employed are earned as much as the employed people. On on balance the people who are self-employed with us and about the same or more in many cases so I'm probably not the best person to ask this question because that's not the it doesn't have to be that way basically but it's very it's more dependent on this kind of the steadier flow of work and that again is one of the responsibilities of the employment provider work provider. Thank you for the question and we have a lot of members who are obviously self-employed in the union they are on the lower paired sort of side of the spectrum and I guess that's just sort of the nature of them joining a union so it's kind of a unique selection of self-employed workers and I think there are some yeah anomalies in terms of self-employed again I'm not sure the full statistics will have to look up in some sectors that's the case but on the whole I don't think that's sort of that every single sector that the diverse self-employed community working and but from just conversations and experiences from our membership and I guess what frustrates them quite often is the fact that they just have to accept a job sometimes they can't go back and sort of bargain over the different rates because it's very easy for clients or whoever they're working with to go find another freelancer or self-employed worker that might be starting out and sort of looking to build up their experience and might accept a job for a lower rate and that is obviously quite challenging when you are sort of competing that environment and I think for for us obviously that transparency is quite key and you know what is the rate in certain sectors that people can I guess in a way bargain around obviously they don't have collective bargaining rights at the moment and and it's sort of then opens the door to what the gender pay gap might be in self-employment there's very little information around that and so I think we have to have that further information and insight as to actually what's going on in in pay across the different sectors that they're very diverse self-employed and workforce operating but in addition to that action around late payments loads of our members don't get paid on time and we as a union try and help chase those payments to get that money back into their pockets that obviously impacts massively if you are lower paid and you're waiting for that paycheck to come in whilst you're still trying to get sort of jobs and more work but then on top of that there's not that safety net that obviously employees are entitled to around sick pay and in particular which was sort of top priority for our members and was exacerbated during the pandemic when actually they realize if they don't have any work then they don't have any money and they can't pay their bills so for us at community that's a real priority for our self-employed and freelance membership providing that safety net and so you know when times do get tough they do have something to rely on it should be for us a basic no matter what employment status you're operating and so I guess there's yeah a number of those things it's that power to really bargain for that higher rate the transparency but securing that safety net and and good quality work good quality self-employment no matter what your status might be you should have that good quality and work so this year I ran just stuff I think that creates that that issue for some some workers and in the self-employed and freelance section of the economy yeah and I think in our uh I go a lot of what Kate just said and what I said earlier and a lot of our recommendations around a minimum set of worker rights a lot of the that would apply regardless of employment status and uh if you're just engaged in work but a lot of the benefits for the self-employed so for example ensuring minimum wage national living wage applies to the self-employed which it doesn't that might be complicated to actually do in practice but we think it's a principle that should be pursued as I said earlier ensuring the self-employed can form part of bargaining units so they can have collective bargaining where they seem they they they think it's necessary also the access to data I said earlier would I think empower self-employed workers and put give them more put them more in the driving seat rather than platforms employers or the people intermediating work and then the last thing potentially to come back to worker tech is to think about worker tech as a platform for other services so if you do have a platform again like like radio I'm sure others are available that is collecting data about what's happening with atypical workers that is a service to the self-employed to the workers themselves but it also could be a potential platform for other services to those individuals providing access to pension payments where again the self-employed have uh you know weaker kind of pension provision or access to kind of collective things around sick pay or saving collective savings mechanisms so I think there are and also training opportunities that could be provided through the platform so I think thinking not just about what can we do in terms of access to data for workers but also once you've got this platform what can you do on top of it that supports the self-employed to um take whatever step they want to next that's great um over there and but let's let's take a couple of questions together so thank you so this is a question directed towards Emma and Giga as well but Emma you spoke about how we can use platforms to enable more power for for workers and the question that I have is what stakeholders what stakeholders have to be involved at what level and to what degree before we can see a material change in the workers conditions and can individual organization make a sizable change in work culture are realistic is that shall I just wire away so um my questions around um so these come organizations that provide labor are also like a way to create assets and future value and I'm going to ask like a kind of healthy sounds in the person what you see around uh my question uh the people who are like participating daily maybe not long term like daily performance providing value here and now gig workers or short term they also like create the future value of the company but generally they are the ones who don't have access and um so we are trying to build in this space where people who don't have like they participate to the future value but has not been offered at all so it's I'm talking about ownership maybe not like governance ownership but at least the financial future value of the company thank you really good question so I'll hand over to Emma first on the first question about which stakeholders need to be involved and can one organization change the system oh please but we're not alone like we're not the only one um uh yeah we we have a special flavor of what we're doing but we're definitely not alone in this work um the I think there has to be a success story just to this first question there has to be a really big success story and I don't think that is in the UK yet I think there are quite a few in other countries elsewhere but I don't think that there's one here um to actually start making an impact at kind of policy level to drive investment to really bring the kind of money that this sector needs and doesn't have access to at the moment for all sorts of different reasons so yes and no there's a really woolly response um the in so far as people need to be all I mean every level like you can't you can't do it without working with people who are very close to the okay this thing happened when I went to a care visit and the person who's responsible for helping the team with the rotors then changed my shift and I didn't know that that was possible to do and I have an issue with that so I'm going to talk to the software engineer and have a real massive moan about that and I can talk directly to the software engineer and tell him how pissed off I am about this feature so there's that kind of direct access thing um and then there's representation so obviously like there's a co-production around kind of board level so that's sort of built into our rules but more significantly rather than that sort of very you know six-weekly eight-weekly kind of contact there has to be the the daily the weekly um yeah I can't it's really complicated way of doing it but I can't really see any other way so yeah what that means in practice is members and owners of the organization taking on roles that are usually specialized so recruitment numbers assessments all the all of the other bits and pieces of work associated with running an organization and being able to package that up to spread it out and to make it kind of manageable to do alongside the the care yeah um just very briefly on the future value question um as a co-operative you can distribute your profits to share to your owners I'm really looking forward to the day when we're able to do that um because we're still looking for investment and to be able to grow so we're not making a profit but that's kind of built into the business model to be able to participate in that future value um and yeah for other kind of governance forms like company there's a mutual good form of company and there's sort of others others like with the golden share and um CIC kind of arrangements that allow that uh yeah and I I'll stop there anybody else wants to comment on the future value Anna um I can I say a little bit about kind of the value of having workers kind of have a voice in company given that they're kind of obviously driving lots of the value I mean it's definitely um something that that we've kind of um thought about in the context of our wider work the the role of um workers having a voice in company boards um not not even just for kind of um about kind of pay and and kind of um remuneration but also to encourage investment in the right things that the company needs to be that kind of you know machinery or training or whatever it might be um and then I think kind of more widely like there's definitely a valuable role especially when we've kind of seen you know the kind of longer term decline in kind of worker voice coming through things like the trade union movement to kind of make sure that that's being captured in in some way even if it's kind of in a slightly different way and one thing we've looked at is kind of um less formal kind of committees within organizations I think our view is kind of it's not it's not really a substitute for kind of formal kind of trade union voice or in other ways but it's kind of you know it's that there could be other mechanisms that the business could think about be it kind of access to boards albeit elsewhere to make sure that in some way the voice of workers is being captured because it's kind of very much you know that workers on the ground will know best what the problems are and that could you know not only be the problems that are affecting the workers but also things that are going to affect business's growth in the long term so um yeah definitely lots of interesting ideas. Just going quickly and I touched on a lot of things I was going to mention but just to look at sort of the broader picture on your question and I think we have to really change the culture um of how businesses sort of engage with workers and unions in the UK I think a lot of that starts from the top and I think the government has to lead by example in that respect and sort of set that best practice of how we want to see a social partnership in the UK where you know workers are seen as a really key stakeholder that they are engaged in sort of um future value and ownership and sort of the financial future value the company that you refer to as a particular example but I really think that's sort of a wider culture change that we'd want to see from a government level that you know really speaks to businesses in that way and where there is more of an open door for worker representatives and for unions to be involved in those conversations and it's not just a tick box exercise it's something that's really meaningful and valuable um which is obviously a whole other issue that I can't solve and but one we'd want to see that wider change in culture I think that would make a huge difference so it completely depends on the government and but that's really important I think I'll just come in as well just maybe try to address both questions at once actually from a business perspective no business wants to have to compete in a race on you know lower wages and lower worker standards they don't want to do that because it's a race that no one can win and it just leads to really bad practices that they just don't want to have to do that every most businesses and I'm going to you know really high percentage all they want to do is compete on customer service by quality high value um and it's one of the reasons why we've all opted for a raising the floor on minimum worker on worker rights with this you know minimum set of worker rights is because the higher you can raise that floor it means businesses can be freed up to compete on other business models create other ways of of engaging with the workers they can they can be consultative and they can be collaborative with workers they can have new business models where they can share profits rather than be it being kind of a zero sum game between the two um and and to kind of echo Kay's point that then comes back to the role of government to say okay no we can have labor market flexibility we can have a competitive labor market a healthy labor market but that looks like you know high floor on worker rights and standards it means we're going to enforce the rights that we put in place and you know maybe tech can help with that as well um and and I think that's when you open up uh a slightly different conversation there are things on sharing data that the government can do today that it's just choosing not to or or being passive about so I think there's a lot of things that start with the kind of the mentality of from government that says actually the way we create a high wage economy is by um encouraging you know competition on value customer service not on low wages no worker standards and on death note I'm afraid we'll have to close the discussion in the panel uh so thank you Jigar, Emma, Hannah and Kate and I'll hand over to Emma to introduce the next section. Thank you Clara and um the panel really interesting to hear such different perspectives on worker power um so on that note we're now going to head up into our second breakout sessions of the day um so the first one is going to be on better labor platforms with Adam and Thunder from Fair Work who are the organization that rate gig platforms across the world and the other session is going to be on worker choice and worker power with Dharma Sadianathan from Bethany Green Ventures a long-term advocate and investor in tech for good so I'll invite you to uh head upstairs um the team will be kind of on their way showing you where to go. Yeah everybody just comes in thank you very much get your biscuits um I think you know I'm Gavin Kelly chair of the resolution foundation um welcome to our final panel session today uh where we are going to sort of take a broader lens and look at the future of good work um and I hope we can pull together some of the threads across the day uh because we're going to hear a bit like we did at the start of the day we're going to return to we're going to hear from a kind of a social investment impact investment perspective we're going to hear uh from the world of policy uh and we're going to hear um from real experts on on on the kind of the challenges of putting tech to into into work in the workplace in a progressive way rather than a progressive way so um I'm going to introduce the three speakers I think the way we'll try and do this is that we'll get each of our speakers to introduce kind of themselves and how their organization what they do relates to the topic of this panel but then we'll sort of take a step back and sort of try and explore some areas that they would like to see developed in terms of innovation to improve work and then hopefully we can at the end finish with a really big picture what would you really like to see to put the world to put the world right and send us send us on our way with a spring and a step I do hope um if people I know it's been a long day but I hope if you've got questions you will be marshalling them and we'll um we'll make a bit of space to to come to you so please do uh rouse yourself with some questions to put to our panel um and we'll make sure we finish on time because I do appreciate the the time that people have been here it's been a great day um so uh I'm gonna introduce our first speaker who is uh on my left I should say by the way I feel like I've got a Bunsen burner behind me this screen is uh I hate to think what the what the carbon emission from this uh I've never known a heat like it so if we if we're all in shirts and you're all in jumpers you're impressed by this it won't be there in an hour I'll tell you it's protective it's protective yeah it's very very hot um so our first speaker is Paul Kishack I imagine Paul be known to many of you um Paul runs the Joseph Ramsey Foundation uh and has thought hard about these issues he's also Paul has done it was at the top of Whitehall for a very long time so he also brings kind of deep policy governmental insight to these questions um but that's who we'll hear from first then we're going to hear from Daniel Satter who's the chief executive of Big Issue Investor probably the most I think important social impact investor social investor uh we have around um uh and someone and a friend of the resolution foundation so we're really delighted to have uh Danielle's expertise here and then we're going to hear on my right from Anna Thomas who's the co-founder and director all things at the Institute for the Future of Work who is a great organization they've really carved out a role for themselves in a in a in a crowded landscape but they've kind of made this question about technology and how it impacts on the workplace and what you can do about it to mold it for the better their own in a really impressive way in the recent years so I'm looking forward to hearing from Anna too but let me turn to Paul to kick off thank you thanks very much um I don't think oh sorry I don't think most of you will know me so I'll just boy of introduction um as Kevin says I'm the chief executive of the Joseph Ramsey Foundation and Jareff is an anti-poverty social change organization um and if you're if you're wondering what a social change organization is then maybe we'll get a bit into that through the conversation because it is a deliberately um roared slash confused kind of title to give to an organization reflecting the fact that we do many different things um and I spend a lot of my time wondering are we doing the right things are we doing too many too few are the right balance etc and um maybe we'll get into that a bit later on when we think about how to have the biggest impact on on good work um but just to start with this sort of obvious point like why is Jareff interested in good work and this is the sort of um the the negative bit if you like um uh it's but not a surprising bit which is that um there is a lot of in-work poverty um and in many respects in-work poverty is something that has been getting worse um certainly during my policy lifetimes you go back to the mid-1990s onwards it's basically been getting worse in various ways since then um you know roughly speaking about one in ten workers in the UK will be in poverty I'm saying roughly partly because the figures are a bit all over the place because the pandemic at the moment I think on the eve of the pandemic was about 13 percent of all workers were in poverty um another way of looking at that and seeing the change is that if you um if you look at the the working age households who are in poverty today um roughly two-thirds of those a bit more than two-thirds of those at the eve of the pandemic had somebody who was actually in work and despite being in work they were in poverty you go back to 1997 um which is actually when the the I think the data was first collected that was 50 percent so what that tells us is that I mean it is still the case that work is the best way out of poverty and we should never be at a depth of that for those people who can work of course and many people can't um but for those who can work is the best way to out of poverty but it is in some regards becoming less effective at taking people out of poverty than it used to um and just for you will understand where I'm talking about poverty there I'm using the standard sort of 60 percent of the median line which sometimes gets people saying well that's not real poverty is it I mean I doubt it is of course but like um um uh we well at GRF we look at deeper forms of poverty as well so recently we've done quite a lot of work around very deep poverty which is when you go from 60 percent of the median to 40 percent of the median so there's a much lower level of income and there's been a very significant growth over about 20 year period of the number of people in very deep poverty and around about half of those are actually in working households and then if you go to our very very deepest form of poverty that we analyze which we call destitution and we had quite a big report out in a couple of weeks ago about very very rapidly rising levels of destitution which is quite worrying and even at that level you go right down to that level you can find people who are actually receiving income from paid work about one in ten of the people who are destitute are um are in work so um that's that's the sort of long answer why do we actually care about good work just in terms of our core mission around poverty at GRF and it's the that's the sort of depressing bit if you like and I'll try and keep it a bit more upbeat as we're coming towards the end of the show yes um so uh one of the questions is like what's going on here because actually and then here's a bit of um light I hope is that one of the great success stories in British policymaking are over the last sort of 10 20 years and I would argue that it's actually a relatively short list um but one of the things is the national living wage and actually we're now at a point where I think the national living wage is close to two-thirds of median wage that's an extraordinary achievement um and you know if we want to leave here this evening with a sort of sense of hope in the art of the possible then you know just imagine what it would have been like 20 years ago even thinking about introducing um you know a living wage that would um you know get to that point we now know we need to keep going with that there are all sorts of challenges with it particularly around enforcement but it's a huge success story actually in this country that we have a national living wage which is actually one of the highest in the world I think um so this is not principally a problem with um hourly wage um but it is a problem with the way in which jobs are constructed um and so when we look at those people who are in very deep poverty and in work you know how do people escape from very deep poverty through work it's not just getting into work if you're not in work it's also those transitions from part time to full time so it's the number of hours which is absolutely critical um it's around job security so moving from temporary work to permanent work it's moving from unsaluried work to salaried work so you know the root out of poverty is not just no work to work it is those aspects of the nature of work um which is where we start getting these questions of you know what is good work um alongside that day you know that that's it for the numbers that's it for the quant you'll be pleased to hear the other the other way in which we look at poverty within the foundation is as as an experience you know to some degree an emotional relational experience that people have you know what is it like to be in poverty um and I think that's where you really get into the heart of what good work is about or perhaps more obviously what bad work is about as experienced by people on on low incomes I think I'm right in saying that if you go back about 20 years ish there used to be a sort of premium a well-being premium for being on low pay so it was almost like the compensation for being on low pay is you you were generally happier uh actually than people who are further up the income spectrum but more stressed out um I don't think that's reversed but it's definitely been um significantly taken out you know it's gone isn't there's yeah there's basically no difference yeah so so there is you've lost the compensation for being on low pay and actually what you have a lot of low paid workers who are feeling the stresses the insecurities the precariousness of the nature of work at the moment and we talk a lot in the foundation about dignity and respect um so we talk a lot in quite moral language about what people are owed in this country and sometimes that is about money but a lot of the time it's about dignity and respect and how do you create workplaces which um afford people greater dignity and respect often I think that comes to questions of security we maybe come back to you know what it is about security and we have I think very low levels of security in certain sectors in particular in this in this country and it can be about autonomy and voice in the sense of power I think there have been sessions previously about and you know collective voice which is really critical it can be about a sense of progression and training and not feeling stuck to all of these things come together as important aspects of the nature of um of good work um just to finish off and just loop back a little bit to um you know what is jrf doing about this um to take up going into conversation later so so we uh we are a policy think tank to some degree um we don't call ourselves a think tank and for some reason whatever I say we're a think tank in the organization people frown at me but we sort of are a think tank or at least we have a think tank element we do thinking I hope and we do research analysis and we produce policy um documentation and recommendations um but we are also a campaigning organization um you know principally at the moment we are campaigning around operating benefits and the basic rates of universal credit our big campaign with Trussell Trust but we do campaign in other areas we've been very supportive uh to of the living living wage campaign um and very much part of that and that journey and we also focus on movement building um so within this context then obviously union power is a critical element of it but we would um we we fund grassroots organizations we fund people who are in low pay to you know shape their own policy agenda and and give voice to their own uh approaches to tackling these uh these issues and we're also an investor so we are a social investor so around about um five percent of our endowment is a ring fence for social investments which is about 20 million pounds at the moment and and we invest through work attack but we also invest in housing social investments and other things so we are a social investor but it's very much one of the tools in our toolkit um and then the other bit which it sometimes underestimate I think foundations tend to underestimate is that the lion's share of our money the bit that we're not spending or we're not actually putting into social investment as defined we are nevertheless putting into investments um and it you know I have a sense there's no such thing as a no impact investment if you're investing in something you are having an impact to making a choice you're you're making a choice you're having an impact you might not be thinking about the impact you're making but you you are making an impact and I think one of the big challenges for sort of financially well-informed foundations at the moment and that and quite a lot of foundations are going through this this process thinking about it is that this model where you don't think very much about the 96 percent of your wealth because it's just sitting growing and then you're absolutely relentlessly focused on the impact you're having with your four percent annually and I'm not saying you shouldn't be relentlessly focused on the four percent but what on earth are you doing with the 96 percent and part of the journey we're going on as a foundation at the moment is thinking more about the way in which we're doing our mainstream investments and and certainly during 2024 that's going to be a big theme for our conversations with trustees so so we're very fortunate in the fact we have lots of tools in the toolkit you know I think the lead to my question laid back to me frequently by my own trustees is why are we doing so many different things can't you just make your mind up and specialize and there might be a case for that but actually an area like good work I think lends itself to exactly that kind of mixed approach and you know we're not going to solve it through mainstream policy and genteel conversations with my old friends in Whitehall nor are we going to solve it all through social investment frankly but the right combination of different things tackling different problems solves that the prospects are making some progress. Great thank you very much Paul fantastic and I want to come back to this kind of balance balanced approach and how you get it right and how to think about it because it's it's something we grapple with at the resolution foundation and I think it's across the debate on sort of better work good work there is just uh how much of our effort should be focused on the law how much of it should be focused on employers trying out new stuff which no one's done before so let's come back to that and just on the optimistic note because it's important I'm old enough to remember that in 2014 we published a report saying their minimum wage as it then was should go up to we should set an aspiration of reaching 60 percent of the median by 2020 which much to our surprise the government completely accepted and when we did that the FT the economist and the times and just about anyone else you get to mention all used different words like insane reckless uh you know yada yada about us and it was a whole it was a real thing for us I mean we got really really done over for being so wild um so I don't take any pleasure at all and reminding any of those people but it does show you uh how the world does change and all those people now say oh it's of course you know it's a very conceptual thing and it was a very reasonable thing to do and quite understood that they do say that but uh the world has changed and it actually that wasn't that long ago so optimism uh Daniel talk to us about so you know from a social investment perspective what how does this topic today relate to what you do and uh how should we how would you like us to think about what social investment can offer this this question no thank you um I am uh and what you've said Paul really resonates especially the kind of the focus prioritized I actually have a hand gestures this is like focus prioritized that's what the the management consultants tell us to do and we kind of say it's it's more complicated than than that uh but the big issue invest a little bit about about big issue invest and and the big issue uh 1991 uh Gordon Roddick and John Byrd set up uh the big issue and the idea was to give people a way to work their way out of poverty uh I think in truth it's a way of working out of destitution and into poverty uh but I think saying I'm working towards poverty is is probably not not the right kind of branding uh that that they should have and and at the time what could you do if you uh if you were on the street um if you wanted to sell something and I'm talking about material things that you can sell uh you can sell cigarettes uh and you can sell newspapers uh I'm very grateful that John Byrd and uh Gordon Roddick chose to sell newspapers rather than cigarettes you can imagine a issue brand to this day um a brand with I think it's 78 percent uh brand recognition in households it's quite an extraordinary thing um they they created but the idea was providing a way for people to earn an income and that's absolutely true today our vendors buy the magazine from us for £2.50 sorry they buy it for they buy it for £2 and they sell it for £4 it changes around Christmas we always boost the price up around Christmas um a quarter of the copies get sold at Christmas so please buy your your big issue but they right from that very beginning they realized that it's really hard getting ventures going and they uh in 2005 Nigel Kershaw and John Byrd set up Big Issue Invest to invest in organizations like the Big Issue so at the moment we invest in 140 different organizations um in the portfolio we've got about 45 million uh under management and it's everything from startup uh what I call kind of bread and butter finance you know you want to convert a few units above a shop into uh refuge accommodation for women fleeing domestic violence well 150 grand to East Durham Community Initiative um you want to turn your uh your books by diverse publishers into audiobooks to raise more money well there's 45 grand to hire two people for six months to try that out um all the way through to our growth money where do you get money for growth so when be caring um it's a care organization but it's a worker co-op how could they get finance uh I think Emma was here earlier today and in that space um so that's where we step into all these places where regular means mainstream finance should be there but doesn't quite get there uh and nowadays equity um how do you put equity into the full profit social purpose space into the co-op space so we have a small equity fund that we're running so we both do direct lending I'm also um authorized and regulated by the fca uh because we have um four or five of these fca regulated funds so I have um unlimited liability for the conduct to the business uh post financial crisis nobody gets to walk away uh and I think that's a very good thing I will regret saying it's a very good thing it goes horribly wrong so why are we um interested in where does the overlap with good work happen and I think it happens all across the portfolio it's there in the big issue because right now Paul Chihl who runs the big issue side of the big issue group he's set up big issue e-bikes to say well our vendors can sell magazines what other things can people like our vendors do um so we have an e-bikes joint venture we have a clothing upcycling joint venture we have big issue recruit where we look to place our vendors into mainstream um employment so within the big issue we're still pushing out that work piece and then we invest across the portfolio all the places where people struggle to get into the workforce we invest in prisoner education um to maintain education both in prison to outside of prison so you get your qualification you're less likely to fall into into unemployment so good work just falls across everything we do and I think in truth selling the big issue is not good work it's it's a really tough thing to do really tough and I think there's also an incredible bravery in our vendors because when you when you look around this um uh this platform or or amongst the room you never know what story lies behind our faces but when you see a big issue vendor you will think there's a reason why that person is a big issue vendor something must have happened to them that they hit a point in their life and they're now on their way up and they've come to sell the magazine so I think that's an incredibly brave thing uh that are that our vendors do out there when they when they sell the magazine that's a kind of bit of a bit of overview stuff for for social investment in this space you know our whole job we're like the plumbers uh of of the economy um we take uh there are pools of money there are people that need money as a social investment organization we just put the pipe work in that connects the money from where it is to where it's to where it's needed and I I really the the statement all investments have impact we're just choosing to count it I think is one bit and the second thing I'd say is um why do we only have to make money out of the bad stuff it's like why why is it oil and gas and coal um why can't we make some money out of the good stuff and I think that's what we get to do in uh in social investment Daniel thank you so much everybody needs a good plumber that's uh so um we will come back and I want to come back to you I think on just where where where where we should be taking social investment what's basically how would you like to see this pan out of the next five years what's what's a plausible scale of ambition in the sort of space we're in uh both for growing kind of the the work at space but just more widely for social investment doing good so we'll come we'll come back to that but um but let's let's let's go on to Anna Anna talk to us about what you do at your place and and take us back to the issue which we started off on this morning which is really kind of technology is a huge powerful force but to some degree it's a malleable force it's kind of subject to social sort of social power and we can sort of kind of affect how it plays out in the workplace in all sorts of ways for good and for real and that's something which I know you focus on so so give us your perspective on that um thank you very much um for having me thank you um uh and a huge thank you to louise too and to resolution ventures um which is a fantastic um uh venture uh that we've been following um and supporting um and hope to continue to do that we um are the Institute for the Future of Work our research and development institute um examining the impacts of technology on work and working lives you said um Gavin at the beginning that you were very small at resolution but compared to us you were enormous we were really very small but um we do have a fantastic network of patrons partners research fellows um many of you in this room um we run also the all-party parliamentary group on the Future of Work um we partner with Digit for example the ESRC um funded Future of Work Center um we are going to be um uh co-chairing oh sorry oh um but this is this is the boring bit so sorry but the um we're going to co-chair the Future of Work group of the new responsible AI program from the government um and we also host and run the PIS readers review um generously funded by the Napier Foundation examining the impacts of technology and work and well-being um so uh what we do we do actually have a framework people are always saying what is good work and we have got a framework called a good work charter which isn't a prescriptive um framework but is a very broad sort of organising framework that's been used um in different ways by different stakeholders um researchers policymakers even investors to some extent um and it's useful um although I won't go to it for this um this audience um as um because it captures principles of good work which interestingly do fit very well with AI and tech principles we've sort of done a matching exercise and they work really well together um it captures rights so um nationally and internationally um soft and hard law um and it also operates as a kind of checklist of impacts of technology at work so of course we need much more research on that we're all working on that um but it's a fantastic base we're finding to start to start to start from so uh we organise our work around three core challenges changing work whether challenges um but the risks and rewards of technology are not evenly spread um shifting power that technology is driving big shifts in power and challenging traditional mechanisms for governance and accountability um and three prioritising people where people um uh with lived experience and human values as well are not brought into this conversation at different levels and that's particularly important because the future of work um is such it is um as we've heard today very fragmented very fragmented and fragmented in terms of the topics fragmented in terms of the stakeholders and fragmented in terms of the policy response too so that's the background so um what do we what do we what do we do um I thought um I would give some examples of that but pulling out things that perhaps we've talked about less throughout the day um so as not to duplicate that um focusing on risks um automation impacts and thinking in a joined up way through the tech lifecycle so and in each of those I'll give an example of what we think's happening in a big sense what we're doing and what we're doing about it so first of all risks so we've heard a huge amount of the potential of technology and that's right we're also techno optimists um but um and in particular it has huge potential to understand past patterns of behavior and resource and identify new intervention points um and direct um its capabilities towards solving some of the huge problems that we're facing across the country um but also because of the capabilities because of the way machine learning in particular learns from past patterns um of behavior it picks up assumptions and it picks up stereotypes um and it can um multiply those um at pace and at speed uh it these things will be projected into the future um unless there is positive intervention and there's also much more data um and the fusion of data as we've seen with chat gpt among other things um and the and less information about exactly how that's being used which feeds growing uh uh information symptoms in the workplace um and is particular tricky particularly tricky when you're looking at not just as protected characteristics that are currently covered by the quality acts um but other ones too um and you're thinking about thousands and thousands of data points that may change as well continually as decisions are made so if so we think that that needs to be understood and interrogated in order to be able to maximize the opportunities too and things that we've done on it um are um a quality impact assessment so moving beyond technical audits and analyzing auditing tools and finding how very deficient they often are and how nobody's using them consistently and now and really understands what's happening um and um and we're developing a model for a good work algorithmic impact assessment which thinks about impacts not just on equality not just on bias not just technically but on social conditions and social impacts that includes quality and work um and doing guidance for employers and trade use it trade unions too um uh the next thing we're doing is thinking about automation impacts so um in the pizdez readers review we're thinking about automation impacts um and archetypes of automation in different ways and that's important we think because it structures risks and impacts differently um and and it leads to different outcomes for different groups and different people and again unless we sort of get into the surface of that it's it's hard to respond in a way that will really um address the risks and maximize the opportunities um the automation archetypes that we are um that we're that we're looking at are substitution that's the one everyone talks about robots taking your jobs and a new firm level survey that um we've done with warwick business school um and has just come out finds that 79 percent of firms across the country are using AI and automation technologies to to automate both cognitive and manual tasks and with SMA is doing it at the same rate for cognitive tasks as manual tasks so it's happening at a very fast pace um but and it's hugely important but it's not the only archetype there's also augmentation um as an archetype so that so where these technologies can either augment and increase the discretion that you use um for example helping you do your job a radiologist for diagnosis or it can do the opposite of that um and often it can do the same things concurrently and they have to be weighed up um and the perhaps an example of where it's where it's low discretion is when a driver is instructed in a very close way exactly how to um to perform his duties and I think I'm running out of time so I better hurry up but the other ones are intensification telepresence so that you can either be freed up for home working or you could be surveilled um and surveyed and matching so an automated matching of individuals to tasks and jobs which again can work very well or can perpetuate stereotypes um uh what we're doing with that um among other things is a fantastic survey on capabilities which hasn't yet come up but we've got the researcher here um Magda Magdalena Sofia who's uh done it um and uh through that survey which puts together the capabilities approach with technology um and focus groups um we are informing our model for an preemptive uh impact assessment much more closely um it's also broadening the skills debate from thinking of something that is done to you after the damage is done to um really identifying positive options and choices as early as possible um in the ways when decisions are taken um and also informing our work on on rights and information rights um that uh are needed to allow this to um to to to to to resonate well thank you and that's a huge amount of work that you're doing at your place it's fantastic and I want to come back to some of I want to get you hear your voice on where you'd like to see us if you like trying to try things out trying to find new ventures because that's a wide set of issues and problems and challenges um so I want so to hear you on where we should be trying to deploy our resources um on which um Paul let me come to you um to start with uh I guess one of the things we struggle with and lots of people in the space struggle with is like what you know where should where should we deploy our effort um and we've got our places I sort of mentioned earlier lots of big policy asks um but we've also got this venture's work um and I think wherever you go you can always see the critique of what you're doing rightly so we can spend our whole time writing policy reports and it feels often like they fall on deaf ears so is that the best use of time we could spend our whole time doing investing and that you know it's hugely exciting and impactful but you you you've been worried that you're kind of investing in very small organizations dealing with relatively small numbers of people haven't you seen the scale of the challenge out there um Jarrah I mean you know you've got that exactly that challenge I think but you've got on a bigger scale your bigger endowment if you like a bigger organization how do you you have to reach a view particularly when you look at the world of work and the problems we face like how what's your way of navigating that challenge and and where you spend your your pound if you like of effort um yeah so you it's absolutely right that that is a a question we face every day as an organization and I'm not just in work but in lots of other areas of policy that we're interested in housing etc and I'm not going to pretend that we have a sort of clear formula for how we reach a view on the marginal pound we don't and I mean my trustees would love it if we did um we don't um and to some degree it's you know there's an art rather than a science in this I mean one thing we do look at is who else is operating in this space you know frankly there are policy areas we're really interested in and we might not do work on because resolution foundation is doing work on them or other organizations what's the point in duplicating and the same would be across across other aspects and I think I mean thinking about work and the different sort of I mean I was just sort of jostling down with in my head there are sort of five types of work that all need doing and some of which DRF is involved in and and some less so it's absolutely the case we need national policy work and I would argue that we need national legislative interventions and a lot of people will say you know legislation is a sort of sledgehammer well actually sledgehammers are pretty useful for some things certainly if you want to drive a stake into the ground you use a sledgehammer and actually it's been a long time since we've driven some new stakes in the ground in this kind of area and we've had repeated promises from the government and we've got promises from a potential future government so it's a really really important part of the architecture if you like policy architecture for good work so yes DRF would absolutely have an interest in that we have people who are focused on policy and you know government policy making a secondary for me is around unions and union power and actually it's a policy angle to that as well in terms of the ability for unions to grow their membership and get their message across in different workplaces and I think there is a campaigning bit which I mean we're quite quiet on or rather we're sort of in the background on but you know the real living wage has been a campaign living hours and is a campaign we're very proud to be part of that but we tend to sort of stand behind those people who are doing it rather than you know at the front of the queue I think there is a real question around sector approach and matching I know this scenario that you and resolution have done a lot of work and then a lot of thinking about we are not really doing anything in that space except that we have a particular interest at the moment in outsourced workers which isn't a sector as such but is one of those thematic approaches because you know the things that a national policy framework can't do is get into all the differences between different sectors or different types of work I don't think is effectively as sort of more targeted approaches and then the final is sort of social R&D if you like and experimentation and social investment and if I think we do you know DRF is sort of playing a role across all five of those areas and but we're definitely sort of you know more at the front of the pack in some than others and I think what we haven't been as good at as we should be and I think I hope we're getting better at is actually linking between them so I think when I arrived and looked at our social investment portfolio as a foundation I struggled to find very clear connections between a set of social investments we were doing which were driven by a very good social investment team in the finance I think we're getting better now at happen come so so we have you know a principal policy advisor and immersed in questions around the care market yeah talking with our social investment team about well these are the issues I am finding these the policy asks that we're coming up with you know what could we do in the social investment space that would actually allow us to demonstrate you know ways forward so I don't think we're great at that but I think we're getting slightly better at it and just one fun things one thing I try not to worry about which you mentioned was scaling I think partly because I spent 10 years as a treasury official where you know the way you killed good ideas was to ask is it scalable because you knew it wasn't and you knew that would be a way of killing it and so I'm very very resistant to asking the scalability question because partly because you take the boy out of the treasury that bit you have taken out of me so I try not to ask the is it going to be scalable because actually what we need more than anything is glimmers of hope and I'll take a glimmer of hope even if it doesn't feel immediately scalable over you know killing an idea at a two earlier stage so I'm very much in the kind of you know let flowers bloom at this stage let's worry about scalability at a later point we need to have things to point to which actually give people a sense of forward momentum rather than worrying too much about that sort of well how does that then translate back to the national policy framework great that's really helpful and it takes me directly on to Daniel I wanted to kind of get you to help us get a kind of read on the sort of scale of impact that social investment can have in solving social problems that we care about in this sort of space like work but it could be the poverty premium or some other issue because you know what Paul Paul just made the case for don't worry about scale it will kind of take care of itself in the long run just kind of get some good things going which I've got lots of you know getting good things going has a lot to be said for it but we do need to justify spending money on this rather than other stuff and there are different ways in which social investment can actually lead to why the system changed over and above the behavior of one particular venture in one particular market this is your space so kind of walk us through how social investment can lead to wider change and sort of how that happens and how failure can lead to wider change as well as success I've spent much of my career working for strong women and Dawn Ostwick was one of them who worked for the National Lottery's Community Fund but I worked for Dawn at Esmue Favon Foundation I think no no one is perfect Dawn certainly wasn't but one of the things that Dawn said that really stuck with me was the power of financial language it's very hard to argue against you know the model says it works or it doesn't and and there's there's a kind of power there which I think we can harness and we we should never give up our power so the power of money comes from there is some scale and I I think the point about scale it was this is what I call Travis Hollingsworth moment of despair he was a management consultant from a very prestigious firm who became the strategy guy at Big Society Capital and he had to grapple with just this thing where where should social investment go so he asked 72 people in the sector and he got 72 different answers back so being a good management consultant he drew a four box grid and drew the 72 answers into the four box so there is a matrix there's a matrix this and this is what he came up with so he said first thing is we need scale and we need scale to solve the problems we have so 4.3 million homes in the private rented sector three quarters of a million of them I believe were classed as unfit for human habitation so if that's a hundred grand a pop to fix those up that's 75 billion that's a big watch of scale money that we need but then the hope is that there's about 60 billion about standing finance in the social housing sector from the private sector so scale is not impossible now it took from 1990 to the present day to get up to that 60 billion but it is possible to apply very large scale chunks of money from the private sector through a social lens to solve the social problem the second bit of Travis's four box grid was to say bread and butter small finance it's absolutely fine it was like a no contradiction message about some of the things the other two were about we're about innovation that scale isn't enough the problems are so big we must innovate to solve them so in the workspace we actually funded cornerstone in scotland to go to the dutch model of community care they provide care in 17 different local authorities across scotland and the and the model bad news managers is you sack the managers you replace them with coaches and you roster them through an it system that matching bit that you were talking about and you and you use the savings to employ better qualified staff so you raise the quality of care out at the end of the day so there was there was something there about an innovation solution and the final bit was mass participation you must get the involvement of the public in money and that echoes back to dawn's point about the the power of the language of finance that we have allowed ourselves to be disempowered by that financial language into believing it's something that we that we can't cope with ourselves when actually we can it's it's just money and it's and it's fundamentally it's our money 40 percent of the invested assets in the uk pension funds it is our money sitting there a one local authority i'll stop on this one one local authority they were very pleased they said we allocated 50 million to invest in our local area they were a city-based local authority pension fund we thought fantastic their definition of local was the european union so that sometimes you know we get wins we have a little way to go but i think if we can harness our own money to solve the problems we're experiencing not a bad thing thank you daniel and now i'm going to come to you in a sec but i i i see with horror that time is galloping on and i don't want to fail in my basic duties as chair so um i'm gonna we're gonna run about couple of minutes longer um i'm looking at louise who's ultimate the ultimate boss and is we're going to run a couple of minutes longer before louise comes up and wraps us up because i know people have got things to get to are there any burning questions out there from people um because if there are this is probably the time for you to start showing your your hands you may be you may be all talked out i don't know no yes we do so have we got a mic or yes we do brilliant there's a mic on its way anyone else for uh it's probably the time for piffy questions rather than um thank you set tell us who you are um hi i'm denay i'm the founder of vala we're a legal tech platform for workers um my questions about impact investment and the the state of the investment market overall i'm a vc back company i've you know seen other impact investors i think the stat that i saw showed that it roughly halved this year compared to like the normal as it was from there i mean do you think that's just because of the wider trend or just where do you think impact is investing is going to be going as investment in general is starting to dry up great okay thank you and so daniel is going to pick that up in his very piffy final remark on the future of where social investments going uh anyone else want to come in no before i come back to the panel bill free no okay ana i'm going to um ask you to sort of give give us your base on all the work you've done on technology and how it plays out the workforce how it can be done well and badly by employers what gives you all kind of to to sort of finish gives you a pitch about what you'd most like to see what what's the sort of practice that you would like to see in the sectors that you've looked at logistics retail and so on what would you like to see employers being willing to do to make sure that ai is the force that i've relatively been i'm forced rather than a more molecular sort that we worry about one of the sort of things that should be tried out i could answer that and on different on different and different levels i think that the um probably the most important thing luckily has been at the one of the servers that i mentioned is providing a way of business case for that so it's about participation it's about real real participation and new methods forums and infrastructure um to to make that happen which is so important in the tech um and not just ai but tech debate at the moment because it's just not there um so i think that's the most important thing and the survey did find by the way so the with work business school um i suppose that not by the way at all um it was one of the most important findings that high involvement practices um was a way of mediating perceptions and incentives in a way that was closely correlated with better outcomes in terms of good job creation and work quality now that's really really important um so uh collaborative infrastructure and participation um i also can't help but also chuck in um you know good work as a cross cutting practice and policy objective so right the way through the tech lifecycle and that'll be a way of pulling together the things and having the joined up um thinking that um paul um you know i don't know if it's so important and we just haven't been able to pull off having um and also practice so sandboxing so something that can be done both by responsible employers and investors now and but could work and inform the development of both policy and regulation if done really well so um watch this space thank you so much anna um daniel for you give us if we are having this we're reconvening in five years time uh we've invested in another 50 wonderful ventures huge impact uh and so on but give us a sense of where you think the social investment space could be should be might be depending on and what and what will help it get it to its best possible place uh particularly in relation to the world of work which is more generally like where is it headed and what can we do yeah and i should i should touch on on your by by chance this morning i got a report from wilson uh soncini uh they're a firm of lawyers who will know them in the tech space for those that don't and i i was one um they uh they did the original legal work on google and twitter uh and uh they got paid instead of cash they got paid in stock uh on the on the founding documents for those companies i think you know lawyers make a lot of money i think they really really made a lot of money but they they do the i was just looking at their uh their their update on the sector uh and it's like it's uh it's created uh it's essentially um stock markets were uh we're doing well uh invested made historically high commitments to funds uh markets are tanked a bit they're struggling to make their commitments on their on their previous funds so across the ball uh there is a real shortage of uh investors um out there so it's tough it's always been tough and it's just particularly tough right right now um for so what can we do to get more money um into this uh into this space um i think the first thing i would say is um uh something that one of our senior tai chi teachers told me uh in a class he was explaining uh some meditation that we were doing uh he's from new york and he's a builder uh he's also extraordinary at tai chi and he was going on this long thing about chinese philosophy and then he sighed and he said basically don't be a dick and you can imagine that in a new york um accent it works really really well but part of what we can do is stop discriminating in the investment marketplace um good news for women um private equity and venture capital investment has doubled from two percent to four percent uh it's just so just don't be a dick is like the good a really good start to this and uh invest uh on a more equal basis is a very good start i think the second thing is there is nothing like a bit of the legitimizing stamp of government to help money flow and give investors a bit of certainty so i would say two things um copy america because that's always easy and copy france which is extremely difficult even though it's 22 miles away rather than 3000 so the thing to copy from america is long i'm sure everybody asked for this absolutely everywhere but it's please give us long stable consistent policy support for social investment even the british business banks guarantee scheme switches on and off it's the major intervention to guarantee small business lending and it stops and it starts it's absolutely dreadful so long consistent stable policy number one big ask and that's what they have in america around social investment the second bit copy the french um which is which is tough for us 100 years of war and everything like that but in in france they have the the 9010 structure um fund solid air uh so what they said is if you are a business with more than 50 employees of course you must offer pension options all they said in france is one of those options must be a 9010 fund 90 invested in responsible investment mainstream markets but 10 in the solidarity economy um which in france includes workers co-ops as well as what we consider the social economy in the charitable sector here 13 billion euros is now in those solidarity funds 400 million or more euros gone into the solidarity economy um it's absolutely extraordinary that took time probably 15 years of that legislation has come into place but those kind of little tweaks can really help private sector money flow into the the social enterprise sector and and with choice because there was no compulsion to choose a 9010 fund it's just when people have a choice to do social good actually they really often choose to do just that thank you daniel um brilliant um sounds like a fascinating tai chi sorry i have to ask about that uh pool uh follow that um if that was the kind of where social investment should be going give us a send us on our way with a where we should be hoping expecting policy to take us and where a social change organization can play you know can get us to in five years time um gosh well i've never done tai chi so i feel that is a huge disadvantage i mean i think just um a couple of thought of reasons to be cheerful in a way and i don't quite know where we'll be in five years time i really know where we'll be in like five minutes but um one thing is um levels of ingenuity and levels of risk appetite i think we always risk underestimating both of those things i mean i suspect within this room there is a ton of ingenuity around the sort of issues that you've been talking about today and whilst you know overall rates of investment go up and down and i fully agree with the don't be a dick i mean just just on the point about diversity of investments um alongside gender i mean it you know those those who are looking to set up ventures who have come with black heritage or people of color they are an even bigger disadvantage actually when it comes to accessing social investment one of the things jrf is investing in at the moment is a new fund for exactly that and purpose and so there is there is ample opportunity to um to invest in new ways um and actually you know we as a foundation well we are not alone in in looking to invest more in the social impact space and impact investment space and we are not alone actually in saying we are deliberately ramping up our risk appetite so one of the six principles underpinning our um our new strategy is sort of take more risk um which is you know having been a civil servant for 20 years is uh you know deeply uncomfortable um but i'm doing my best so so i think you know that's a reason to be a cheerful in the ingenuity space there's lots of things we don't know how to sort yes and solve yet but there's lots of people trying and there's actually i think there is investment available there for for um for some of those um ventures but actually weirdly the other reason i think that's true some of this doesn't require ingenuity some of these are actually old problems that we've we've tackled before and sorted before and that's why i slightly boringly come back to you know sometimes legislation is the answer um you know look at statutory sick pay is a really good example the statutory sick pay in this country is so bad it's a reason to be cheerful because it can really only go in one direction from here you know if the effect of replacement rate is about 11 percent or something and i think in the ecd it's sort of 60 plus when when you're when your statutory sick pay is that crap okay it's going to go in one direction only i think you know if government takes action so you know to some to some degree we don't need to be world beating in these areas we just need to be a little bit better than crap which is where we are at some say that's a really weird way of being cheerful but it's one of the reasons why you know when i look at a lot of policy areas and this is one i do feel we're at a sort of turning point you know there is a breakdown in the current social and economic contract or large degree that's a sort of terrifying thing at one level but it also fills me with quite a lot of hope about what the next five ten twenty years bring in the policymaking space because you know i do have a sense that things things have kind of got to get better in some of these some of these areas yeah it's certainly time for a bit of progress um we have overrun uh but i think they were three fantastic speakers so i'm deeply indebted to them um let me just say to the audience it's been a fantastic audience too we're going to louise is going to rightly have the final words because this is her uh thing more than anyone's um but just saying from the resolution foundation for me uh i've i've really enjoyed the conversation and the nature of the conversation and the open ideas and the open way that our speakers and the audience have have sort of taken part today so thanks to all of you from me uh let's show appreciation to our speakers in the normal way and we're going to leave the stage and uh we're going to leave it to louise to wrap things up thank you thank you gavin and thank you for the panel for enduring the heat and for such thoughtful contributions thank you all for coming today and for saying it's been really lovely to have this group of i've said to a few people it's a room pool of problem solvers um we've acknowledged that there's lots of challenges but we're also this has been such an amazing day of people with lots of ideas and exchanging um information with other people about how to best to go out solving those ideas i think we the the the topic from that panel which really resonates is that we need lots of different approaches to solve these problems we need many different tools in the toolbox and we've talked a bit about there about the role of policy we've talked at different points about the role of unions and we know that the innovation is really important to this but we don't solve any of these problems alone they need multi multiple actors when i look at work attack i cut back quite often to an example that's in um james plunkett's book and state about how the two-day weekend was implemented when it was the norm to have one day off a week and work six days at some point there was a shift to we need to have two days off not one and that came about through a mixture of really progressive employers who wanted to offer something different a lot of them with a quaker background joseph rantry being one of them um it came back from politicians noticing this and putting in place legislation and from civil society groups saying actually this is what we want workers saying this is what we need we need more rest so these time changes don't come about by one piece of the puzzle acting alone they always come about with multiple stakeholders moving all things together so i really hope that we can spark some of that here today i hope you've made some connections i hope you've exchanged contact details with people if you've missed out on doing that please let us know we will glue people together um and i hope that you'll you'll give us your thoughts on on today and where worker texture go next we are always open to feedback please send it to us and if you want to spend time with the team we've always got a link on the website to book timing to speak to myself or to emma we would really love to involve you in the next phase we are planning to continue this work and to build a larger work tech fund to keep investing in this space so if you want to be involved in that please let us know in any capacity i do want to thank again our funders who have been such a big part of delivering today as well as the whole of the three-year program excenture joseph rantry foundation friends provident foundation trust for london and the uf i rock tech trust and also two better green ventures who have helped us to back so many of the ventures in the room today and who are now open for applications again for the next spring cohort so if you've maybe got an idea or maybe you've developed an idea in the conversation here today please go and look at the better green ventures website and put in an application to get support to develop your idea um and a final thank you to all of the resolution foundation team but especially to emma my right-hand woman on all things ventures and also to tara for masterminding all of the comms including the technical challenges that we've had please join us for drinks outside and please stay in touch i hope you've had a great day