Mr. John Pollock:

This is something we feel passionate about. We have begun engaging with the community and the regeneration groups in the area. We made a visit to the NHS hospital in Glasgow, where they seem to have been very successful in particular in delivering on the community gain. One of the people there, Mark McAllister, came over to meet with the community groups and ourselves - not just the development board but also the group board, which will be running this hospital. Yes, we absolutely must deliver on the community gain. To date we have been looking at the model that was delivered in Glasgow, which places emphasis on being proactive right from the off, in terms of engaging with social protection as regards who are the unemployed in the area, finding out their skillsets and getting their CVs. We have not done this yet, but the plan is to upgrade their CVs, to give them training so that when a contractor comes on board, one will be able to go to the contractor and tell them who is available in the area and what the skillsets are, whether they are carpentry or steel-fixing, so that they start to procure people. One makes the contractor's life easy, because we cannot compel the contractor to give jobs to locals, but we can make things easy for it.

We must start gathering a database of local suppliers - whether it is someone who supplies doorknobs, meals, or joinery - one creates that database. That seems to have been quite successful in Glasgow. We must set hard targets for the contractor. That is the lesson we learned in Glasgow. They must not be soft targets, they must be real metrics - "You will deliver X% of jobs". We cannot guarantee them locally but we can craft the documents in the right way and make it user-friendly for the contractor to promote this. We met with the contractor in Glasgow, Brookfield Multiplex, which explained to us how it engages in that process and yes, it did provide apprenticeships and locally-delivered training schemes. It must go further so that when the hospital opens, the kids in the area have an ambition that they want to be a manager, a doctor, a nurse in this hospital.