Agenda item - Chairs Communications

39.1      The Chair provided the following communications:

“463 employers in the city have now joined the Living Wage Campaign which means that over 3,100 wages have been raised since the campaign began 6 years ago.  The Brighton & Hove Living Wage Campaign has gone from strength to strength.  It is delivered by Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce and the Council has helped to support the campaign since it started.

New Living Wage rates were announced earlier this month during Living Wage week; the rate is now £9 per hour for the UK and £10.55 per hour for London.  The Living Wage is reviewed every year, independently calculated by the Resolution Foundation and represents a truer calculation of the real cost of living in the UK.

The Small Business Saturday Bus returned to Ship Street today between 10am – 2pm and marked 6 years since the campaign was launched.

The ‘Small Business Saturday Blue Sofa’ made an appearance again, where interviews and exclusive Q&A sessions with local small businesses and experts were streamed via Facebook Live.

There were mentoring sessions offering free support and advice and Inspire workshops that covered accountancy, social media and online marketing. A number of local small businesses were invited to have a stall alongside the bus.

Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Kelly Tolhurst MP attended and Tom Flyn, Small Business Saturday Tour Manager and Patrick Magee, acting CEO of The Start Up Loan Company (SULCO) Chief Commercial Officer for the British Business Bank greeted and hosted the MP.

It has been a busy 2 months working with over 541 City partners engaged in tourism.

Visit Brighton has hosted journalists from National Geographic, En Voyage in-flight magazine and one of the Netherlands largest newspapers – Volksrant.  Alongside this it has secured coverage in The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Vogue.  Regionally it has hosted or secured coverage in Kent Messenger, Shropshire Star, Belfast Telegraph and South Wales Argus.

There have been proposals submitted for 16 conference enquiries, which have the potential to generate £7m of economic benefit and confirmed events include Actively Political Studies Association Teaching & Learning Conference, Brighton University Graduation Ceremony, Brighton SEO, Entrepreneurs Bootcamp and the British Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition Conference.

A ‘Votes for Women’ display highlighting Brighton & Hove’s suffrage heritage has been installed in Brighton Museum’s Images of Brighton Gallery to celebrate this year centenary.

The RPM will host a trainee from the British Museum to support digital preservation work, and improving online access to its collections. The trainee will be a young person aged 18-24 and will be funded from the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Museum Futures programme, which aims to open up careers in museums to people from groups which are currently under-represented in the museum workforce.  As well as this the RPM is working with Brighton-based company Bright Interactive to experiment with using artificial intelligence to add searchable keywords to its online collections.

Four new brown tourist attraction signs have been installed to improve wayfinding towards Preston Manor.

The Council’s Seafront Team including the beach lifeguards have had a very busy season with one of the hottest summers on record drawing crowds to the beach and swimming in the sea.  The statistics for the summer have been collated and the team play a huge role in the safety of the Seafront by providing advice and dealing with incidents. The advisory role was such that on over 35,000 occasions safety advice was provided to help reduce the number of incidents. Unfortunately, incidents are inevitable and the Seafront Team were involved in over 150 incidents of a serious nature such as rescued swimmers. Furthermore, minor first aid treatment was provided to 230 casualties, over 200 people were reported missing and reunited, and action taken at 115 incidents of anti-social behaviour. The Seafront Team provide an excellent service in a challenging environment highlighted by the scale of the issues they address.

The Rainbow Fund which received a contribution of £180,000 from this year’s Pride has made a wide range of grants to support LGBT and HIV/Aids projects. The grants from the fund administered by the Sussex Community Foundation included:

£15,000 to The Brighton and Hove LGBT Community Safety Forum “Next Step” project  who work with those affected by hate crime, domestic abuse, bullying, and homelessness by supporting them back into education, training, volunteering or work.

£19,901 to Allsorts LGBT youth project who work to address isolation, invisibility and low self-esteem of LGBT children and young people, including Transformers a trans specific project.

£7,640 to The Sussex Beacon to support group work to empower people with HIV to live well.

In addition a number of smaller grants were also provided to a range of other organisations.

Writers, residents, health professionals, artists and entrepreneurs were among 150 delegates who met in Brighton last week - Monday 12 November 2018 - for a Cultural Summit to discuss art in public spaces. 

The Cultural Summit, hosted by the Arts & Creative Industries Commission, is one of a series of events for the cultural community and its stakeholders to meet and take forward ideas aligned with Brighton & Hove’s new cultural framework, ‘Daring to be Different’. 

The framework, ratified by the city council in September 2018, aims to build on the city’s cultural reputation, strengthen its creative economy, break down barriers, provoke debate and enable collaboration. 

The Cultural Summit programme explored a range of topics including, graffiti and street art, the role of art in the community and how art and urban design can contribute to the wellbeing of a place and its residents.

In the past week, I have also attended the Pride Summit, met the Shandog Tourism Development Commission and attended the unveiling of the blue plaque for Minnie Turner”.