Now the next of the big conversations and is around youth employment and we are a major employer in our region. In Coventry as you know it's our headquarters we're proud of the fact that we don't just have you know, some functions here, we have every microcosm of everything we do at Severn Trent is based in this building or out at Finham. We've got a training Academy also based in the area out at Finham. We employ about 7000 people over the whole company directly, but 2000 of those 7000 are based in Coventry. It is a huge, huge base for us and we’re super proud to be based in the area.

Now, we believe that businesses can come together, they can be a force for good. And that's why we've announced these four things over the last year. And again, you might not have noticed them if you're not a Severn Trent obsessive like ourselves, so I want to share them with you. The first thing is we know that lots of people could have a better job than they've currently got. Maybe they're not in employment or maybe they have a job, but it's not using all their skills.

Well, maybe they just had a tricky start to life. They left school at 16 and they never got educational things, gaps that never got solved. So we've committed to do 100,000 hours worth of free employability training over the course of 18 months. It's available to anybody who's a customer of ours. So anybody in our region can access either physical face to face training for free at the academy or online training for free. And it covers so many topics from digital skills through to confidence. And certainly coming out of pandemic, lots of people have struggled with confidence and things like that. We do a whole course on that. We'll do a practice interview with you. If you've got an interview coming up, we'll practice the interview and help you get your best person ready. We do a huge amount in that space.

We also want to help with levelling up, so we don't want it to be a situation that there is a postcode lottery in the world. We hate that. We can't fix that across the piece, but we can make a difference in our region. And whilst we have right now a third of all the UK's most deprived areas in the Severn Trent Patch, so we’re passionate to make sure that the people that we recruit come ideally from some of the most socially deprived areas.

We recruit a few hundred people every year. We deliberately over-index into socially deprived areas, and we've been recognised across the world actually for this. But certainly the UK social mobility index, we are the fifth place company, we’re the only utility to ever consistently be that or actually one of the only corporates typically professional services organisations like KPMG and PWCs because the rank well it's very rare to have an industrial to come highly in that area. We work so hard to help rebalance that postcode lottery.

Every company in the FTSE100 gets ranked every six months and you get ranked 1 to 100. It's a public thing and it's about do you actually walk the walk on all the things that are linked to social purpose? So you talk the talk really easily. Do you demonstrably deliver against it? And again, it's not, which are huge efforts in the company to do the extras, all the things that make a difference. Now, we don't make a big deal of it because again, it's about walking the walk, not talking the talk. But we probably do way more than you realise actually in your society and community for the good of the whole area.

And we also try to do an awful lot in terms of supporting people that maybe, maybe have got an ambition. And in this case, the Andy Duff bursery scheme is a good example of one scheme we run where you've got children that have got university places they definitely want to go. But actually the cost of living, not now, the cost of fees, it becomes the last moments where they begin to get really nervous. And what they really need is a bit of mentoring, a bit of belief and some extra cash and the Andy Duff bursary scheme, what it does is we actually give some cash each and every year for that degree programme. We give them a mentor internally and we'll give them paid work experience if they want it. They don't have the stress of worrying “Am I going to get a local job for the summer?”. We guarantee that for that period of time so they can gain skills, but it actually is the mentoring that's been the biggest thing. They've loved the fact we give a few thousand pounds, which gets them the laptop they need for college, the schoolbooks, the need, the travel bursary for their needs. But having the mentor to help them connected to the area of their degree gives them the confidence that they're going to succeed in that degree qualification. We do that to really great effect for 25 live students right now. And we take them through the Academy and help them with various trainings.

Now, in terms of jobs and skills, another big issue in our region, we fully embrace the fact that actually you need to find people that aren't right now the NEETs, I guess they’re called, not in education, not employment, and not formally in training and trying to identify who are the young people who we could change the lives of. We embraced the Kickstart scheme. The Kickstart scheme, as you know, is people unemployed at the time where they were going to Jobcentre and was struggling to find work.

And we actually didn't just embrace a little bit. We offered 500 places on Kickstarters and we believed that if we could get people into work experience, if we could show them what work was like, a lot of these young people, they’d never got into work. Then actually they might get quite inspired by it and it really works. In the first three months after they're with us already, 40% had gone on to other employment - quite a few with us. A few had gone back into education, whereas there was something they wanted to do. They had an aspiration or decided there was something else they could achieve, and it started to go back into more training. So a real success and obviously it was a one off scheme straight out of COVID, but it gives you an insight into the fact that we are going to literally seize the day to help the children in our region with any form of qualification.

We’ve also taken our biggest ever apprentice and graduate programmes. I mean, it comes good later on, but it is a gift society is taking apprentices and grads and people sometimes say, “oh, yeah, it suits you.” It doesn't really suit you. I mean, it is just the right thing for a large employer to do. It keeps us fresh. The best thing it does is keeps us young as an organisation. But we genuinely believe if every company did a fraction of this, it would transform that NEET generation across the Midlands. So 120 jobs this year and we've also actually been certified by Ofsted to our own in-house apprenticeships because what we didn't want to end up is often you can't take apprentices because you can't actually get the limited number of people that can qualify your apprentices. We decided to get over that and invest. We invested £10 million in our Academy at Finham and we can now self-certify, self-qualify all of our own people on the basis we've invested quite a lot of our own money. That's not money that was customers, but it was investor’s money into this belief that technical expertise is the future.

We've also signed up to help schools. We offer every primary school over the course of a five year journey, the chance for us to go in and take over the schools education for the day. So we'll go over, we'll take the assembly, we'll do the classes, we take in these brilliant battle busses they’re fantastic and cover 3D activities on one, will teach children about the scarcity of water, about what should and shouldn't go down the toilet about generation on net zero activities of that nature and we know as a real difference of teachers give them then a full on curriculum they can follow. It's a change of scene for most primary schools, you are the only person that child sees every day consistently. It just gives the teachers a break and it gives different topics into it.

We do also inspire in lots of senior schools for STEM subjects, and we also signed up to 10,000 black interns. So the 10,000 black interns idea is that between now and 2030, 10,000 young black people that would normally have had an internship get a paid internship at a company. We signed up to 100 in the first year, we would get the largest sign up and they were wonderful quality and they were with us all summer, which was amazing.

Now communities, the first thing is we have just done the Commonwealth Games and the reason we chose to be involved in the Commonwealth Games, we couldn't give cash, it would be totally inappropriate for us to give hard cash to anything right? That’s not right, but we could give something else. We knew the Commonwealth Games was struggling with the idea of how they would become the most sustainable games. We have a very good service team were recognised globally, so we are considered world class in this kind of sustainability space and we knew that we could get somebody in to run sustainability for the Commonwealth Games. I think it's helped them identify what could they do to be the best sustainable games ever. And we committed, as you know, probably to not only be involved it, but actually that the only way to offset the carbon that was being created will be to set up long term tree planting. And we're creating a Commonwealth forest that's an amenity legacy, that's a wonderful change for the West Midlands and areas around as well. But it gives a real opportunity and in order to do that it's quite a lot of tonnes of carbon the games used. So we have to plant 2022 acres worth of forest. We've done kind of like, or we’re meant to have done the first ten percent, then the next fifty percent then thirty percent and then the final ten and more broadly following that track but it's a massive massive thing.

We also planted 72 tiny forests, one for each number of the flags of people who come and compete. It went really, really well. And I think people definitely saw us there and as well as that we also avoided half a million bottles of water being refilled by having the water bars at every single stadium. There won’t be a Severn Trenter in the room that didn’t spend their life literally saying, step up, madam, please let me help you, sir. So we literally stood there for days on end, filling up people's refillable water bottles to save people buying plastics during the games.

So we put 1% of our profits every year into charities in our region. We don't choose who gets the money because then effectively we almost have too much control over it. We take the money and we give it to customers. So a customer community panel chooses where the money should go and we literally just pay the cheques. We've helped hundreds of companies and hundreds of charities join the cause the last four years. And on the basis for lots of companies, actually, charitable giving has plummeted pre and post COVID. This is hugely important. We’ve done so many amazing schemes, you'll probably know people the charities they've gained if you donate them they will actually have gained.