Good evening. Welcome to this Resolution Foundation event. My name is David Willis. I'm president of the Resolution Foundation. And it also is a great pleasure to be in Birmingham because I was born in Birmingham and it is always great to be back. And what we're going to do this evening is we're going to have a serious conversation about the state of Birmingham and its economy. The screen is not in change to show the football. Sorry about that, but you are hardcore people who are assembling to discuss this crucial subject even when there's just possibly a football match being played in 2022 and five minutes. We at Resolution are doing an economic inquiry into Britain, the state of the British economy and how we can raise our game in partnership with the School of Economics and funded by the Northfield Foundation. But we're very aware that you can't just do this from London and we're very keen to properly take account of and consider the position in all the regions of the UK and all of our major cities. So this is both launching deeper us to present our interim kind of analysis for the results of the first year's work. But this second year that we're just in Birmingham on is to turn that into detailed policy proposal. You say this evening will help us develop our policy ideas in ways that I hope to not just national but rather than other challenges that Britain and particularly Birmingham faces. So you're going to hear first from Emily Fry, who is an economist at Resolution Foundation. We'll then hear from Deborah Cameron, of course Chief Executive of Birmingham Council, and then from Enriette Dracula, Chief Executive of the Greater Birmingham and so behind that. And ample time for you to put questions or just make comments and give suggestions to us, which we very appreciate. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.  Please take one for your friends or your colleagues. We have several here. I'm going to be talking to you today about the West Midlands role in the future of the economy. First up we have to talk about the energy challenge. We're facing some of the highest inflation that we've seen over the past several decades. It's now reached about 11.1%. And what's key about this inflation is that it's three percentage points higher for lower income people than for higher income people. It's really hitting people's pockets bad at the moment. And the reason behind this increased inflation is because we're importing a lot of our goods, in particular energy, which is caused by a third of this inflation. What this has done, this chart is showing that the OBR's disposable income forecast, this is fresh up the autumn budget from a couple of weeks ago. And if you focus on the red bars on the right-hand side of this chart, you'll see the income pools this year and next that are anticipated because of these huge increases in inflation. And so that's going to amount to about a 7% decline in incomes over just two years. This is historic levels and you really wouldn't expect to see this unless it was a really bad recession. So the context is we are having a really challenging time. But if we look a little bit further back, this is coming off the back of about 15 years of relative economic decline. We have inherited high inequality from the 1980s. This is showing the Gini coefficient, which is one measure of inequality that you can see. It rose quite rapidly over the 1980s and then has stayed relatively static since then. There are several measures that you can use for inequality. They all show a relatively same thing for the UK. And now we are the most unequal large country in Europe. But the worries about inequality didn't really exist in the 1980s. That's a recent phenomenon over the past 10 years or so. And you can see why this is if you look at the disposable income per capita on this chart, so the green line, which was growing very quickly up until the financial crisis and then has declined in terms of growth since then. And while some people might say that aggregate economic progress has a matter, you can see that the lack of wage growth over the last 15 years has really been because of this lack of GDP growth. So it's been this combination that has led to people not achieving wage growth. So what's the problem for modern Britain? High inequality and low growth is a toxic combination. If you look at this chart you can see in red are the poorest people in countries around Europe. In green are the highest income people, the richest people, and then the blue bars show the middle income people. And what you can see is in different European countries, so France, which is quite similar to our economy, the lowest income people have much higher incomes than they do in the UK. So they're about 30% higher for people in the UK, whereas the richest people have slightly lower incomes. You can see that countries like Germany, the richest people are also richer, and the poorest people are much richer as well than they are in the UK. On the other side of things, you've got Italy in Spain where the richest people are poorer, so are the poorest people. So it's got lower inequality, but also much lower GDP per capita. The combination of the two isn't great either, but we want lower inequality and high growth. It's wiped out by household's ability to absorb shop. So if you look at the top bar here, that's the lowest income people in the UK. In 2006, they were spending about 52% of their disposable income on essentials at things like food, energy. That's risen to about 59% in 2019, and with the energy crisis and with inflation, that's looking like it's going to be rising farther this year. So rebooting Britain, it means getting serious about growth. Services is an enduring strength for the UK. We are the largest economy, you can see us on the right-hand side in the blue bar here, to be specialised in services, and it has been consistent over the last several decades. So whilst manufacturing has maintained a prominent role in the Birmingham economy, it's about 15% of growth value added, our measure of output in Birmingham. Public admin and health are 25% of Birmingham's economy and finance is 21% of Birmingham's economy. So you can see the other sectors are also really important. This is looking at the performance of our second cities. Most people live in cities in the UK. You can see about 70% of people, but most of our major cities in the UK really lag in terms of productivity. This is showing you the productivity across various metro regions, with the size of the bubble representing the size of that region. And so you can see for the West Midlands urban area, we'd have to increase productivity by 50% to be about the same level as London. Obviously we have specific specialisms, as I mentioned, where a service is an economy, but it's far from inevitable. If you look at France, for example, which again is a similar service specialised economy, Paris has much higher productivity, but the inequality is really lessened by the fact that Lyon, Toulouse, some of their major cities also have relatively high productivity if you compare it to the UK. Germany has very distributed productivity because they're a manufacturing economy. We're not saying we have to be like Germany, but we are saying let's see a better version of the UK. So just to take you through a very quick thought experiment, what do we need to increase these productivity gaps in the West Midlands? We need three things. We need to increase capital per worker, things like physical capital, also things like intangibles, which include IT equipment, for example, and ROD. We need to increase that by 33%. We need to increase the graduate share. There's some world-leading universities in the West Midlands, but unfortunately people who've graduated are leaving. We need that to increase to about 39% for 30% today. We also need total employment increase across the West Midlands, which is a challenge because West Midlands has lagged the UK averages in terms of employment levels for the last several years. We also need to focus on the changes that matter. The West Midlands is highlighted in green here, but you can see that Brexit has caused a reduction, a permanent reduction in our real wages and our annual pay. So there's about a £500 reduction per worker per year because of Brexit and the effects of Brexit in the West Midlands. That's about average for the UK. So second to growth. We also really need to get serious about inequality. Good jobs have to be a goal for the next decade. We've seen worker power really pick up post-pandemic. We're seeing a lot of strikes at the moment, particularly by rail workers. And worker power has been declining for the last several decades. It doesn't just affect pay. It also affects well-being. The share of workers who are getting in the job training over the past decade has halved. So people aren't getting the benefits of having worker power. It's also about work intensity. There used to be a stress premium. So if you're in a low wage job, you would have lower stress on average. Whereas now that's increased. So the stress for workers in low wage jobs are relatively similar to workers in high wage jobs. We also need to focus on modern green jobs. There's about 84% of... The CCC thinks that by 2035 we need to implement all of the changes to net zero. We need 84% new technologies and they're going to be developed over the next decade. So we really need those workers to be in places like Birmingham creating those green jobs. We've got to make sure that net zero doesn't leave people behind. We have very few houses in the UK. Birmingham has very few houses. More than half of the poorest households in the West Midlands live in homes without wall insulation. But at the same time, it's very expensive. It costs about £90,000 to fully upgrade your house.  It's going to be spent on upgrading your house. It's not realistic. So how can we get people insulating their homes and also affording it? How are we going to pay for these new exciting things like home insulation? Better taxes need to be the talk of the town. You can see from this chart the red line shows the total net household wealth over since 1965, which has been increased from 300 times 300% of GDP to 800% of GDP. But you can see at the same time our wealth-related taxes stayed about flat for the last 50 years. Capital gains tax is taxed at lower rates than income tax, which has some very strange distorted incentives. And wealth tax typically don't harm growth. We also need to build security in the labour market. We ran some focus groups recently. This is a quote from one in Coventry. Everything's going up. Do you risk going into a new job, a new probation period? I can afford to lose my job right now, so you just stick with what you know. People don't switch jobs if they don't have unemployment insurance and they aren't able to take the risk to do extra training or go to a different type of job because they would risk losing their income because we have one of the lowest net replacement rates for unemployment in the OCD. So what's surprise? Gains which can really shape our society. We've taken an average of five countries which are relatively like the UK. We haven't taken the US, which is on the frontier of productivity. We haven't taken Norway, which is on the frontier of inequality. We've looked at Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and the Anglo-Saxon and European countries that we're quite like. So what would happen if, to our incomes, if you look at the left-hand side, the red bars show the poor of 20%, the green bars show the richer 20%, and again the blue bars show the middle 20% of people. And so if we raised our income levels so we were the same as these comparators, our incomes across the board would go up by 20%. We reduced inequality so we were the same in the middle section so that we were the same as these comparators. For the poor people, their income would go up by 20%. The richer people, their incomes would go back down by 10%. But Key, if you combine these two effects, if you reduce inequality and increase growth, you could see quite radical effects. So, you know, 45% increase for the lowest 20%, and still an increase for the richest 20% in society. We need to use this current cost of living crisis to really think about these two decades of stagnation. We can revitalise the UK economy, but we've got to build on our strengths in things like services, and we need to spread the gains across our regions with a significant investment. But it also needs to ensure change does not exacerbate our high levels of inequality. The price is potentially huge. So, we're hoping that we can achieve it and enjoy the discussion today on how we're going to get that. Now we're going to hear from Deborah Depp. Deborah, have a move to you. Thank you. There you go. There you go. So, I've been asked to do three things in response. You first need to talk about what role can economic strategies play in responding to the challenges that we're seeing in the UK. How will the changes come to affect the jobs we do, the places we live and the businesses we work for, and then finally, what are the prospects of the country rising to these challenges? Now, for those of you that know, you will know that I probably won't stick to those three, but in any event, I will probably start with the third, which is about, you know, it's a... So, I'll start with Deloitte's recent Crane Survey, which is quite interesting, because the verdict on the city says that Birmingham is being transformed and the pace of change is relentless. Now, I agree with this sentiment, but I want to get beyond the Crane's picture and unpick where we are. What are our challenges and where do we want to be? In short, I think we have amazing opportunities in the city, but we also have significant challenges. And I believe that bold city leadership will be essential for success. Now, I'm not just talking about bold leadership as Birmingham City Council, although I would suggest we have a significant role to play. That's bold leadership across all sectors and across all of the city. So, I'm going to address the third question that you've asked me, and what are the prospects for success, but also address the changes that come to affect the jobs we do, the places we live and the organisations we work for. Now, we make this incredibly complicated and I think it needs to be really simple. And I kind of talk to my people who work in Birmingham City Council and I remind them that the people who live and work here and invest here essentially want all things and we should address our response to that through full prisons. So, how do people want to live? What kind of homes do they want to live in? What kind of homes do they deserve? How do people want to gain the skills and the jobs? How do they want to work? And then, how do people travel? How do we connect them both in the city and around the city and outside the city, connecting them to the broader UK? And then, falsely, which is one I particularly love, is how do people love and connect into their place? And what I mean by that is what's their sense of connectedness? How do we feed their soul? How do we ensure that they gain all the benefits of culture and sport and leisure and green environment? So, I constantly challenge my organisation to view the world through those four prisons. So, let me start with... Let me start with what are the prospects for success and the answer, of course, is it depends. Success depends on us being smart, determined and I would argue, bold. And those of you that know Birmingham will see our straight line needs to be bold, be Birmingham. But equally, we need to be intentional about our interventions. I'm an economist, but I don't believe in trickle-down economics. Or, I certainly don't believe that trickle-down economics will address the challenges we've got in Birmingham in the time scale that we need them to. So, if I take the example of the Commonwealth Games, the largest multi-sport event held in England in 10 years, delivered in half the time that a host city normally has under budget and during the COVID pandemic. We were extraordinary. We were absolutely extraordinary. But the challenge now is to make that extraordinary the new ordinary for this city. And it led us to show this city in a way that has raised our national and international standing. We are now viewed as a global city. So, all of you that are responsible for other organisations and institutions and businesses. You know, we should be really applauding that, but equally, we should be taking advantage of the fact that Birmingham is now a global city. But it wasn't just about a one-off boost to the economy. It was also about building a significant legacy. And if you'll indulge me for a bit, I am going to share a quote, which I've used ruthlessly since the Commonwealth Games. And it was written by a journalist that said, he said, how did the host city do? Brilliantly. At best, it felt like a glimpse of Britain as it ought to be in the 21st century. Open, busy, witty, creative, colourful and multicultural. And I think that is a wonderful description of Birmingham in this place. And also, it set the scene for us to be in-house to a number of other mass participation events. I don't know whether we're privileged or happy to have landed the European Athletics in 2006, because I'm now looking at how much that's a goat of gold. But it is in 2026. It will be fine. So the Commonwealth Games also kind of allowed us to start thinking about the next 10 years. And we talk about it as a golden decade of opportunity. And we should end up with high-speed 2 arrival in the city. Now, what I will say about that, and I'll make no judgment about whether this is the brilliant national investment programme ever or not. I won't make a judgment about that. But what I would say is that it was a viewing platform. And I've taken lots of series of assignments and ministers and investors. And I've taken one of the viewing platform and I said, this is the brilliant kind of investment that we're seeing across the city. You can see on the horizon, you can see the cranes. And it really is fantastic. But then I turn them around to the blocks of flats. You can see less than half a mile away that exist in one of the most deprived places in this city. And that encapsulates the challenge that we've got. Of course we can't. We don't want to put a break on the economic investment and growth that we've seen in the city. But we've got to make sure that that growth is the right growth. We've got to make sure that growth is inclusive. And we've got to make sure that it helps us to notice that inequalities gap that we're seeing in Birmingham today. And I will start with an honest account of some of the inequalities that we're experiencing. And even before Covid, we had over 300,000 residents in absolute poverty, which included 100,000 children. And a statistic that I use all the time is that a third of our children who are under four and not school ready at this moment in time. Now for those of you that understand what that means, you will know that that is potentially a ticking time problem. And it is not good enough that a third of our children will be potentially disadvantaged throughout all of their education career and then they will appear in the workplace unable to read, write, their social skills are, you know, not where we would want them to be. So we've got to be thoughtful and we've got to be intentional about the intervention that we make in that part of our communities. Also, high inflation is making all of this so much worse and it's created a genuine cost of living crisis for many of our residents. Now the nations experience low unemployment. But in Birmingham, unemployment is much higher. The numbers of the last claim and count in October of this show was 60,800. And also, alongside this high unemployment level, 30% of Birmingham's population is economically inactive. Again, storing up massive issues around their ability to contribute to economic growth. And I believe that the research will make that worse. Again, if we do nothing, it will be coming from worse. So our intervention has to be intention. So the other challenge that we've got is balancing the real urgency now with long-term interventions. So we're taking immediate action on the cost of living. So we're increasing access to money advice because we know the most effective intervention we can make is about ensuring people have more money in their pockets. So we're investing a lot in increasing access to money advice and accessing more benefits. We're opening warm welcome spaces across the city and we're increasing support for food banks and energy-efficient measures. So trying to address the real urgency now with long-term intervention is not a zero-sum game economy. But to address the longer-term impacts, we're now accelerating our work, supporting more people into good employment. As well as advice and information, it is actually about giving people the opportunity to earn money and then recirculate it in the economy. And that's about creating conditions for inclusive growth. So if I now talk about development from the medium to longer-term, as a city council, we have a massive asset base and we're determined to get more public value from it. So if I say you all know that we're the largest council in Europe, but we also have the largest estate of any UK local authority. And we also, as a corollary to that, have the largest development program. But I am not allowed to use the asset base in a creative and different way. And I cannot tell you how much I hate the idea of constantly going to government as an informal money. So we have three opportunities to get money in the city. One is the government settlement. Two is about raising money locally through capital tax or business rates. And then the third opportunity is around attracting investment, either domestically or globally. Now, I would much rather use the assets we've got in creative way to put on the table as leverage to attract human investment into the city. So we're having interesting conversations with the Treasury at the moment about how we can do that and lessen our risk of the public purse. Now, for those of you that live in the city or have walked up from the station, you'll see it's really vibrant. We've got large financial institutions who have made this home to their headquarters. PWC, Goldman Sachs, HSB next door, Deutsche Bank. They've all set up shop here, which is phenomenal. But we've got to use our sites and this interest and this investment to underpin the future economy we want to secure. Now, partly this is about housing and creating places where people want to live. We are super diverse and the ONS statistics this week have now stated that 51% of our population are from black minority ethnic communities. And we're really proud of the fact that we're one of the most diverse cities in the UK and you could argue in Europe. And we have an exceptionally youthful population of 1.15 million. So we expect our population to grow by 150,000 by 2031. So we know that homes will have and we also know that homes have become ever less affordable relative to earnings. So we've got a problem here. You know, we've got more people. We've got the population is growing. We don't have houses that are fit for purpose in large ways of our estate that we have. And we also know that there will be more and more demand for affordable housing. Bed and breakfast numbers are increasing phenomenally alongside our homelessness numbers. So we've got to be more intentional in the way in which we create the conditions to grow and build more affordable housing. So we're also thinking in a very clear way about sources of good jobs. Now, we've got a real strong pedigree of making things with the city of a thousand trains and we're really proud of that. But we can't be unrealistic about the role the future role of manufacturing. And Torsten Bell came to talk to us and gave us a good telling off actually when he came to talk to us about, you know, you've just got to let go of this history of manufacturing and see that as the future because it isn't. So we've got to be different about that. We want to move up the value chain. We want to develop new opportunities such as low carbon technologies, harnessing regional expertise in hydrogen, a very light railway to support the transition to net zero. Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton have come together in three cities. Between us we have 165,000 social homes to retrofit. Now, if that isn't a market disruptor I don't know what is. So we're really excited about the potential of that, of developing the skills base, of developing the manufacturing base, of developing a new domestic and international supply chain, of attracting significant investment into this city and into this region. But interestingly, our largest sector is in fact health, and it employs 91,000 people. We have real strengths here, the 500 life science firms, world leading research institutions, the world's largest creation of clinical trial activity for drugs and medical devices. And the QE hospital has the largest critical care unit in Europe and is the national centre for trauma and defence medicine. And construction is now underway on the Health Innovation Compass in the city. But we also need to grow our role in professional services, finance, digital and design. And that means creating a physical and business environment that those firms need for success. We're also really proud to be the home of the BBC and their regional headquarters and the film sector is growing with independent studios as well in the area of Deepbus. You know, and we're really, really excited about what that can mean in supporting the UK's second largest concentration of the games industry where we have 130 firms and a quarter of games produced in the UK are produced in the West Midlands. So to grow our economy and track business and private sector investment, improve productivity and we require better connectivity. And that's about metro, it's about buses, it's about general mobility. And it's good to have such a, you know, great national and international connections but actually right now the transport options within our city are often pretty poor. And especially in areas like East Birmingham. And what we want is the freedom from government to invest in and grow our connectivity. And we've developed a detailed plan for that focused on East Birmingham. And for those of you that know East Birmingham know that that is the area from the first high speed two station in the international international station all the way through to Cursham Street. So that is going to be a really, really important part of the city for us to both foster and grow but also to support and enable those residents that really have part of the city as they see that high speed train cut through their communities know and feel that they have every right to capture the opportunities that are coming out of their businesses. So we also need to acknowledge our workforce as well and Emily spoke about graduates and the needs to keep our graduates safe. And I've got two of my graduate trainees sitting over there and I'm really proud to have them here with us today. And we really really value the role of graduates. People choosing to stay in the city once they've graduated from our institutions. We've got five degree awarding institutions and at those 80,000 graduates in the city we want to keep at least 39% of them. So Emily is about Birmingham being a place where graduates want to live, have a career and often to have a family and bring up their family. So we're very mindful of that.  It's also got to be about house. It's got to be about the environment. It's got to be about feeding their soul. So finally and I'm conscious that I've gone on but we did watch our Birmingham City Observatory with the University of Birmingham and many of you here today. It's online, freely accessible and it's a collaborative data platform. And it will publish city data and insight and that will also include data and insight for the private sector. We want to draw in all partners to obtain views and publish the best economic analysis in the country and by doing that we'll better understand our city will be able to predict the future well that's quite a piece but I believe it will enable us to understand what the future will look like. We'll marshal our resources, target interventions but more importantly it will drive the interventions with intent that we need to make. So I'll draw things to a close now David if I may but I did want to say we are officious and we're also bold but we're also very clear about this possibility of shaping Birmingham and its economy and its intention of the results. Thank you. Thank you. I'm also seeing if you can hear me without the microphone but when I stand here then you certainly will be able to hear me. It's also for the online participants have you been tiny bit closer to that? Online Birmingham City Council the local enterprise partnership might not be as well known and entity to all of you in the room. So I'm well I've got a thumbs up here for those of you who are online watching this so I thought it might just help before I go on to answer the three questions that you posted Deborah has gone into as well just to say a few words about the local enterprise partnership and particularly about the great Birmingham and Solinghold local enterprise partnership that I am proud to be the key executive of. Local enterprise partnerships were established in 2011 after the regional development agencies had been abolished and they were set up to drive inclusive and sustainable economic growth which is exactly what they've done and they were set up to do that at a super regional level and by bringing together the triple helix of the business community, private sector with private sector land but also very much involved the local authorities higher and further education institutions in the area and at the time we also wrote a strategic economic plan that governs the period or covers the period 2016 to 2030 although I think it is now gathering a bit of dust on quite a few shelves and I want to come back on that on that point so just want to give you a quick flavour in that decade or so that the levels have been going as to what it's done to drive that inclusive sustainable growth. So a lot of the capital investments that Deborah talked about, a lot of the fantastic things you will have seen on your way from New Street Station wherever you've gone from here I have had a bit of GSF involvement whether that's in TV Square whether that's in New Front of the Repertory Theatre there's simply all that's called more road than Magnificent Browning Hotel but also whether that's East Birmingham implies the energy part for example or indeed the health innovation campus over that decade we attracted over 800 million government funding and we also managed the enterprise on behalf of the Birmingham City Council so lots of money extracted we've made that money work hard and the first five or so years we've increasingly made that public money work in a way that means we can recycle and use it again so a lot of the grants we've awarded now include payback clauses which means when the grant has done what it was supposed to do and its sites have generated a profit for the recipients the recipients can start paying back so it re-enters the public person we can re-invest it and get it to work hard again and I won't highlight that because that's a lesson we've learned that we've become really rather good at but only in the last five years or so another strand of what we do is support and last year along we supported our the 1750 local SMEs we do things like help them secure access to finance we run leadership programs we do general diagnostics to help businesses understand what it is they might need to grow and prosper we do training need analysis to understand where workforce development might need to happen and right now we help businesses with the rising costs of energy and we run what's called a clean rise round program where we set aside 1 million pounds to award businesses around the book to 10,000 pounds to help invest in energy reducing measures and I can tell you all if you haven't changed all your lighting in your house yet for LED lighting do it frankly because when looking at return on investment that is by far the most impactful quick return on investment you can secure that certainly what we're doing with a lot of businesses and really helping them do something quick because we know outside they got through Brexit and they got through the pandemic in this area that are just feeling like this could be one crisis to fight for them we also work on skills for employment and it's not just skills and employment it's really posing on those higher level skills where we still got a deficit compared to the UK average but also those skills that then create a higher level good quality jobs that we need our people to have in this local area to make sure the quality of light is driven upwards as well really focus on apprenticeships because from our perspective apprenticeships can be such a tremendous road to employment for a lot of people and they still are very unjustly seen by many as a second option something you really can't get into university or something as an employee who can't retrieve people the conventional way when apprenticeships actually can be so valuable as well in terms of tailoring and getting the most out of people maybe aren't as academically inclined or as theoretically intellectually implied as some but you might have a fantastic visual created practical ability to be exploited and that's part of our commitment really to the younger people of this city region as well there's been an abundance of evidence to show that the pandemic has disproportionately affected younger people and even more so younger people were already facing challenges before the pandemic we managed the city council apprenticeship levy and we used that on state levy to support businesses and local people and we create apprenticeships and opportunities for younger people not just for money because our pockets aren't as deep as they once were but also being an enabler and getting people in the same room and looking where are the areas that we can work together and make the home more than the sum of the parts and before I move on to answering the questions after all that I do need to tell you that Lex are now integrating that they've got white paper and decided enterprise partnerships will integrate in local democratically elected institutions and in the case of the three lefts in this part of the world the black country left the country and the Great Birmingham and the Solomon that means integrating the western areas combined authority so what we're really focusing on now is to make sure that our functions and it's always a form for our function it's definitely not about form but it is about the functions being transferred in a way that protects all that learning that's been happening over a decade or more so the first question we were asked to focus on is what role can economic strategies national and local play in responding to challenges of the 2020s to secure higher growth and lower inequality and Deborah said so much already so I'm just going to pick out five elements that I think economic strategies have to have in order to be effective in responding to challenges they are prerequisites if you like the first is that both strategies are there for the longer term and that there's a consistency of purpose and a continuity of purpose and I think that's really important and it does feel at the moment that we're chasing the flavour of the month and then we put a hell of a lot of resources and getting our heads around the terminology and the requirements of that flavour of the month and then there's yet another strategy to focus on and I have a background much like Deborah in the Regional Development Agency and I remember when they closed it took a while for the leps to find their feet and there was a vacuum for probably about two years where a business didn't quite know where to go for their business support and it took a while to get going and then left and in my opinion when the IDA closed it was just at the point when they were getting really rather good at what they were doing and it feels like we're repeating a little bit with the leps as well and the important thing is now we definitely can't afford a vacuum and high ages of functions and we need to make sure businesses have that continuity of place where they can find services they know and trust so I think really important strategies are there for the longer term. Strategies need to be supported with funding whether that's just an incentive or in fact whether it's regularly reform a strategy that hasn't got a characteristic it's just good words that probably make a lot of sense that you need that to make things happen they need to be evident in space and I think it's great Deborah mentioned the observatory I think in so many other ways we are in uncharted territory one of our board members is from the world of banking and finance and he said in his company they now have webinars with colleagues from Argentina because they've got all the knowledge on how to operate in a double digit inflation economy that's the kind of we are in uncharted territory so we need to base ourselves on evidence and we can't afford to think we've always done it this way so surely it will if we do more of the same it will achieve what we want to achieve needs to be holistic we need to recognize that we can't look at the economy and productivity and isolation without realizing the direct impact of health of early childhood development of child poverty of fuel poverty of skills needs to be holistic and it needs to involve that triple healers or even quadruple healers and it's really important strategies are developed in isolation and actually have input from the very people who should benefit from them and maybe in the first instance have input from the people who currently feel they are not benefiting and they're left behind and that might make for some quite challenging and difficult listening in this magnificent city that haven't benefited from the Commonwealth Games and we're barely aware the Commonwealth Games were on and there's someone who can quite smile often face for the whole period of the Commonwealth Games I'd say to people isn't it fantastic and you do find people who think well I live a mile away but it's past me guy so from my perspective those are the five things that any person should have to be affected and I don't think that's necessarily what's always happening at the moment but the second question was how the changes to come will affect the jobs we do the places we live in the businesses we work for which is such a broad question and it's almost impossible to answer but the two things that jump back to me are climate adaptation and climate change it's accelerating Vancouver can have deep waves that the fact melts the tarmac if Germany can have their infrastructure wiped away by mudslides we'd be really really nice to think we're not going to face climate disasters at some point and that we shouldn't be prepared for those climate disasters and I think that will really affect the way we probably all are suddenly aware of how smart we are already to decide what's happening and how many prices I think it will really continue to change the way we live and work and it's more than net zero it's really about adapting to the climate change that's already happening and the jobs that will bring with it and potentially the opportunity to reduce inequalities could be something this region really could grab with both hands and a thick, tidy energy park is a really excellent example of something that could roll out further and then the other thing that I can see in the future is a different approach to work we've got this weird labour market disconnected at the moment with large numbers of unfilled vacancies coexisting with really stubborn economic inactivity and high unemployment so then some things got to change in the way we approach the world of work and we've got to make work paid for people there are too many people who wouldn't really want to work but the cost and the risk attached of starting a job or Emily talked about moving to a new job but it's not just moving to a new job it can be starting a job I was talking to some of the other days a young person who was offered the opportunity to pay £27,000 a good job said I can't do that because I still live with my mum and dad and if I start earning that money their benefits will be at risk and I can't do that to them there's something in the system that makes it very difficult for people to make work paid for them and then the final question is what are the prospects of this country rising to these challenges when we talk about this country I think it's really about this city reading and the devolution this should be about this city reading we can't afford to not rise to the challenge I've got so much confidence that we will as anyone who has been around these streets during the Commonwealth Games has seen the best of our our spirits in play we've got the graduates we've got the inherent strength of a really diverse and very young I think a young population will be a competitive advantage at the time of climate change because the young population will inevitably think further ahead than someone in their 20s thinks with a longer horizon than someone in their 50s or 60s and I think the trick will be to engage the young people to get them to be as excited and feel part of the golden decade of opportunity as they should feel and I think with that being the case not rising to the challenges simply not an option we are unfortunately now a little bit tight we're going to collect some interventions quickly and if you could give your name an organisation that would be fantastic and we are particularly interested in policy ideas and things you would do I've got a call from David I'm happy to give that my name is Andrew Andrew Edwards I come upon the train today although I work in Birmingham, London and even though my name is Elaine I'm still happy to be here so my observation is what are you not doing and what have you not mentioned during your conversation I was at the CPI last week at their conference there was a tourney party conference all held just here and we had a couple of games and as well when I was off the train the tourney party company Blackpool the first in their games was all welcome to Blackpool pack to tell you how good Blackpool was and that's what just happened you've got a fantastic airport alone a fantastic airport there and you've got a permanent baser that says welcome to Birmingham because that is where you get the contact given game details and everything like that and then finally you've got the trains and the locomotive routes into Birmingham you've got transport for Wales coming into New Zealand don't wait for HS2 you've got a great cross-country railway network here and my final one because I work for the Hanson Association is Tackleby Empty Homes Birmingham has got loads of empty homes that can be built that make the economy stronger and greater I want you to know it's been a pleasure to be here it's a whole floor of you for chance thank you so much but when I was a boy one of my treats was to be taken to the airport to look at the place that was on an age limit very old but it's next to me I had a job done at from Recreau Consulting which is an employer in recruitment solutions to business I was at the launch of this on a very hot day at the Westminster and what often happens at the I conference is people don't answer my question and that's not because it's being awkward but as was explained after on last board people don't understand the seriousness of what I am saying intent, I love it, one of my favourite words I've been trying to shift the intent in this city for more than a decade and it doesn't move the employability and skills system is broken and it's broken and it's been broken for years and nobody wants it and nobody really wants to do anything about it and I could sit here all week and list what's going on with that across the country, it's not specific up here but nobody wants it and I think the shift that we need to follow a metaphor that will be coming from the football because there's just a sacrifice in this place there's just a sacrifice in this place we've got to start putting some challenges in we've got to start standing up we've backed off the opposition to call and act by tall departments for example, for turbo I sat through a long engagement with AWP this morning it was excruciating they've got no idea it's a very specific thing we'd like to see to change give us one practice first thing, hey with this and this is not a provision for work but the day that I date you they have we're sure that when they run programs up here to get people into work we're the most effective in the government why are we not part of the furniture area and the reason why is that's right I haven't got one but it's their process or single opportunities etc it's shifting their intent because every job they can entitled to the best possible support or not and if they are everything else then that's the work backwards from that and then you have a cultural change in organisations such as DWP colleges, universities Trent, providers, charities the whole landscape and that's the entry point I think we've got a skills challenge and let's take two more interventions here let's keep on going I looked at this presentation I'm very interested in it I'm actually working on it and going to one of the areas we talked about is housing and the environmental challenge behind it I looked of course a person doesn't have to be in the night I don't want to get out of this spectrum but I hope that he's satisfied and he has some more that's fine but actually it's very cheap investment and I was thinking what else would you buy at night you could go buy a second-hand car you know and you pay off for a year you don't even think about meeting the people who are on the news they can do that and right here we've got this minus and it's hard to register very quickly but it's very expensive but it's how we pay and it is great I love that word get the money out of there get it back in I think if that's what you're looking for I'll be great and then hand the microphone across no attention Hi I'm Carice from WSB I think mine's more an observation rather than an intervention and it's really echoing my new friend which is around Birmingham and WSB kind of advertising aspect I think Birmingham far too often compares itself to London I think it needs to concentrate on itself as an amazing city and think about it's USBs because I don't think it needs to compare itself to London it has its own great areas at the same points really so yeah I think that's all I have to say with regards to that it's a very interesting point I've very much heard about USBs and I think Birmingham has got a charm and if the sense of human is down to earth distinctive if I were to just draw what's already been said about some of the USBs I was thinking that first of all historically Birmingham was a kind of a cross race it was a junction it isn't here because there's a pool or even because there's a cold field it's here because lots of different routes, canals and roads intersected and I think that as a distribution and transport there's an opportunity I think what I think this whole issue that degrades of being minority majority now officially in the statistics out today and youthful is distinctive one of the reasons why it's a great place for medical trials is that often drug companies first group of people want them to test the drug actually the ethnic diverse is a massive advantage but attracting some types of business and for medicine and medical research it's incredibly important it's a good base for being vulnerable in biosciences and then the universities got on the worlds as historic as it's been teaching hospital for so long it's got cancer tissue going back to the 1930s it's got some amazing health research resources tied in with being so youthful I think that energy and what's going on in the hydrogen I don't know the ties in the department but Birmingham has for the gallery is in Gastry and was financed partly by funding from the municipal town gas company and for Birmingham I think to be a lead in hydrogen which is one of the areas of research where it's leading and thinking about infrastructure you need to function hydrogen hydrogen I think is really exciting I think for economic activity and inactivity there are some very distinct cultural challenges and showing that Birmingham went back to your point on the skills but some of the areas where let's face it for culture and other reasons some groups that have particularly high rates of economic inactivity showing that Birmingham can understand that and in a sensitive way tackle it I think would be something for the rest of the country and other countries could learn from helping Muslim women to work for example so I think to the young dynamic open-minded and diverse city trying to take account of its USP and doing things with that is very exciting other interventions and yes gentlemen here I am Joe Gayton from the Luma Society I wanted to pick up on the interim report which goes very hard on the national strategy being about the trade or services the expense of manufacturing and I've heard now from Deborah you had a telling off from the things about too much manufacturing but from living in Birmingham for a year now I've learned it's a very spaced out place and you've probably got plenty of room in the centre for services to really expand and multiply but loads of manufacturing jobs out on the periphery could be a good way of getting people into work and my challenge I suppose would be both and don't we need a lot more manufacturing for a net zero obligation anyway and come here both that's a very fair challenge and that's very and Emily was very diplomatic there because if you think about comparative if Birmingham's GDP is 15% manufacturing against 10% for the country's whole you can interpret that two ways there's two instance interpretation which we've got in swimming services Birmingham has a USP manufacturing speaking from a family of large numbers of Birmingham artisans and craftsmen and power makers we used to have all those trains thank you very much for the presentation I'm representing the Federation of Small Businesses and one of the most important things for us is to create the creativity for our young people to drive their own businesses get their own ideas but also to have the places where they can run their businesses most businesses small businesses at the moment are still home based and they need support but we need those businesses to grow and there are very few places where people can get affordable business premises but either services or the small manufacturing and that's the real big focus because if they've got places to grow their business and it's not out of their pocket then they can grow their services because the creativity is there and the desire is there we just haven't got the infrastructure to help that right, very interesting point thank you very much I'm afraid I'm a journalist I work for a magazine called Financial World I wanted to ask a little bit about apprenticeships and your point about investing in your own all the reasons I look I don't think I know is because I'm worried that a child boy will come along and patch the place going to be apprenticeships and creating people to be really excellent at building receive houses and upgrading people's homes showing that we're creating some jobs and people then can feel secure about investing that way right, yes and there's a big debate behind all that and what that would mean and we're going to talk about pandas in the end but definitely if there's any more interventions and suggestions, the gentleman there again just to look up on the point that he made about Muslim women for example, we run two programs specifically for them with Jess Phillips and David U.P. Gardley went fantastically well on what happened since and that this was in the second business only report and basically it got top dead and it wasn't exactly honest now when you've got an organization that's be here like that, they're not only are they not looking for a solution, they have purpose before they begin to get in the time and that's the extent to things moving in the address I look with experts I don't think that's a big part I think there are large numbers of very potential organizations doing that by the students of social sciences and we're here to message and take a view from that so I think we work on the basis of assuming good work and commitment to learning and we want to learn from that gentleman here and Carl Harris from Psychologist against austerity I thought the presentation covered just about all the bases you're going to cover but I think it was early time in first half before climate change but it's for the ball so we've heard about the vision we've got an idea of looking at people in the city who potentially have that as one of their imperatives for the kind of work they want to do and place them to be the kind of jobs they want to do I'm assuming that we've got a very good representation that we actually can help to make that vision a reality and the other question is are we looking through the right lens have we got the right economic model to actually address these concerns right we've certainly got a green climate challenge and we need to reshape the economy to respond to it any other alternative I turn to our panelists to summer any other personal suggestions on the next stage of our report we've got a classic kind of agenda it's very useful I've got to talk about it I thought if I kept this room on we'd get another intervention thank you so much I'm from the University of Birmingham I've appreciated very much what you've had to say today you've said a lot about young people and I think they're very important but also as people who aren't young people let's remember them as well and also I think there's something about if people are born today they might live for a hundred years so let's think about these things as you've said in the long term through that life course perspective and think about jobs and skills in that perspective as well so it's not just about apprenticeships as we start off let's think about how we attacked through time and through that hundred years so there's a lot of people here that's really only in the first half and there's a lot of people here who are in the second half and have a lot of that second half still to go so let's think about it in a life course perspective as well but thank you very much thank you, that's a good reminder but we need to turn to our panelists for their final observations that's the University of Edinburgh do you want to set the ball up? Yes, and some really good points made I want to start by saying I'm an adopted Romney and I couldn't be proud of to be an adopted Romney and I think one of the beautiful things about Birmingham is some places feel like you have to earn the right to call yourself a local in Birmingham the welcoming culture is such that if you feel you belong you definitely may to feel like well we're really glad you want to be along here and that's a fantastic culture that you have and I'm from the Netherlands originally so I'm one of those five countries that looks so really good compared to the UK on your side and I couldn't be proud to choose to be in this part of the world and I think we do knock ourselves unnecessarily sometimes in the rest of the world so I want to just put that out there and I wanted to say one thing in response to the point about apprentices and the importance of maybe apprentices in the area of retrofits and all of the work that is needed on housing and I think the work that Birmingham are doing in East Birmingham with the retrofits plans of course social housing creates demands but it's really needed to enable training providers and then train up the apprentices and put on the courses because in the absence of regulation and legislation around retrofit you need to create that demand otherwise you're training up the people and there isn't a drop at the end of air and apprentices can be any age as well so it's definitely not just for young people Thank you Deborah Thank you there are lots here that I want to respond to but I'll try to focus I think you're right the two of us in Birmingham was really good it was really good everyone in Birmingham was certainly right and to just say that we who are in volunteers there are brilliant people that welcomed everyone in the city so you will see them again but you're absolutely right I'm really disappointed that I didn't take the opportunity to convene to you that we are absolutely looking through the way in which we develop the rural area economy through that lens and I want to talk about retrofitting at home at least I wouldn't say arguments but the debate is 65,000 homes that we've decided before can we afford to do it when you look at the contribution to CO2 emissions from our homes that we have in the decision we've got it here and I think it needs to be far more vigorous than it is because it hasn't been needed to so there's a different conversation to be had with the residents and businesses in the city about is this a way of solution should we go with modern and faster repair in solving problems coming into across the city and then we have an emergency and we have the target of achievement in 2013 now that's really ambitious and whether we achieve it or not is almost irrelevant what we've done is give ourselves a target so we have to put in place a sense now it won't just have anything that we've achieved in our time here but I'm sorry you didn't hear that but absolutely we are committed to initiating a new place and let's not forget the power of green so we are investing in huge amounts of money creating this city and open spaces and we are using our planning powers to be far more intentional about the types of practices you know access to energy charging points but more importantly being absolutely clear about people on real time environments so in a sense it's not enough but we are being intentional about them and the campaigns under London we're different and we know the B and I don't think we should try to aspire to be like London but we do need to work with London when you think that you can get on the train you will go to get on the train in London and arrive in London in 45 minutes so we've got to be thoughtful about what that means suppose if our economy is really in it doesn't need to be a zero to some gain you know people will lose so we are such an intention in the conversations in London as well so I'll pass Thank you very much, yes Emily So I'm trying to cover a couple of the questions that haven't been covered on I guess well first off on the point of kind of client machines obviously the fact that gas prices European gas prices have gone up nine times right now if you didn't rely on gas for our heating and for our electricity then it wouldn't be hurting so hard so it's a really cool economic problem that we are facing and it's kind of between through a lot of the work that kind of focus and analysis that people are doing and I think has been a really important part of the possibility of crisis at the moment in terms of the insulation points which I think were really interesting as well thinking about building up why people aren't actually insulating their homes and a lot of the reasons that you mentioned are in fact that people don't know what to do people don't know how to do their walls or the ceilings or you know there is an information barrier that exists and that's often a key reason rather than necessarily the cost but for some people the cost is really important and we can't forget that so we kind of accept people who have incomes that cost the same amount as insulating their homes to be paying for that but we kind of expect people to be paying for insulation so thinking about smart policy ideas not to pay for paper but we do have one coming out in a couple of weeks on insulation that's going to look at the politics around it in terms of the manufacturing and the question as well which I think is really interesting you relate it to employment levels and even though Birmingham has 15% of its output in terms of manufacturing actually only 10% of employment in the manufacturing so you actually have kind of lower levels of employment in the manufacturing than that said manufacturing is still key to the Birmingham economy and there are real comparative advantages but Birmingham has the same and things like gaming which I've already discussed are obviously key and I will leave it there Well thank you very much and it's been a really interesting session we haven't missed anything half the time it's nearly no longer so this is the definitely the right decision so and it's given us a lot of food for thought we've got to go back in our own some debates within our resolution and in fact being an example of comparative advantage or pick a retro or activity we've got we've got a sense of Birmingham having a young and diverse population and that's been actually a fantastic opportunity for this city and also the excitement of the further investment of transport and the powerful messages of energy and the green challenge so thank you all very much indeed particularly thanks to our panellists and thanks to the audience the commitment that they've got here has to further investing in supporting and boosting the performance of Birmingham's economy thank you very much


The Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project has again served the island well. This after the village of Denry withstood the heavy rains associated with a trough on 12th April 2021. More in this report. With more than 114 millimetres of rain within a six-hour period, residents of Denry have come to expect flooded drains, impossible streets, overflowing bridges and a significant impact on commercial activity. The unusual downpour of April 12th tested the engineering designs of the Denry flood mitigation works, which has been a work in progress in the face of this perennial challenge. There's a central drain that goes through Denry from the Green Mountain area that brings in a tremendous amount of water on its way to the sea. There's a moor river as well that carries water from the internal part of the country, from the centre of the island. And all that goes through Denry and goes into the sea. So, and coupled with the fact that Denry is below sea level. The Denry South flood mitigation contract was awarded through a competitive bidding process to triple L construction company and has been undertaken in multiple phases. The project entails the construction of the central drain, improvement to the Chualu drain as the drain is further north, the large one, the construction of two retention ponds and a pumping station and an outlet into the river. We've constructed the central drain, most of it, the outlet into the river and the ponds are coming up next and then after that we'll follow the pumps. We are at what stage? We are at the central drain stage practically 90%. The April deluge was a dress rehearsal for this flood mitigation engineering feats. I'm impressed with what we've done and the performance. I did not expect at this stage for it to be performing so well. What we can expect to see now is further improvements with the network. When it's completed, the idea is that in the extreme events you will see flooding. You cannot eliminate flooding, let's get that right. You can't anywhere but we can design for flood events that are reasonable, that comes every one in 20 years. For the DVRP we use one in 25 years. The comprehensive re-engineering of the drainage system within Denry South forms part of the disaster vulnerability reduction project for Saint-Douche which aims to increase long-term climate resilience by addressing the multifaceted risk associated with rain events. The project consists of five components. The first one being the risk reduction and adaptation measures. This component would support structural and non-structural flood and landslide risk reduction interventions and climate adaptation measures to improve Saint-Douche's resilience against current and future climate shocks. Denry South's re-engineered flood mitigation system is a testament to the mandate of the DVRP. From the Government Information Service, Lisa Joseph reports in.


Hello, and welcome to DevConf 2022. My name is Moes Shabee, and I'm the moderator of this session. Next up, we have Timothy Upnell speaking about what's new and ahead in the Ansible community. Timothy Upnell is a senior product manager in the Ansible team at Red Hat. Now I'm going to give the floor to Timothy. Thanks, Moes. Hello, everyone. Glad to have you here to talk about what we've been doing with Ansible, particularly in the community area. I'm going to do a quick overview of the different projects that we have going on that have happened in the last, particularly in the last year or two, and some of the things that we're working on in the community level going forward from there. One thing I want to impress upon everyone is that Ansible isn't just the command line tool that it's known for and that the project began as. It's grown to be a lot more. There's a lot more in the ecosystem that's available to the community and as opportunities to contribute and get involved in the project. So I hope I can show you those things and get you interested in being a contributor or even just beginning to use all this work that the community's been doing. So with that, moving right along. Oops, sorry. Okay, what I always like to begin with when I talk about Ansible or the principles that Ansible was based on from the very beginning, just as a reminder and to set some context to what we're talking about, why things happen the way that they do. And those principles that have been there from the very beginning, I was a contributor to version 0.5, I think it was, and have been using it ever since then and these have remained the same is that Ansible's about being simple but allowing you to do powerful things in a simple way and remaining agentless so that you don't have to have all that preset up and things of that nature that you have to manage so that it adds to the simplicity of how it works. So one of the things that's happened though over the many years that Ansible's been around is that it's seen tremendous amount of growth, growth in terms of its user base, some of its code base but also in the use cases of how people are using Ansible and what they are automating with it. And with that growth has come, modules, I think when I first started getting involved with Ansible, like I said, it was like 0.5. I think there's only like 50 or 60 modules that was less than a hundred. At one point, we reached almost 4,000. It was growing at a huge pace because of all the different things that people were using Ansible for in all the different ways in all the different use cases. So that was causing some side effects. That type of growth and that type of success caused us to have to look at how Ansible was being managed, architected, distributed, the whole thing. So things worked great in the beginning but with that growth, it started to break down. It started to cause problems. There were side effects to that growth. And the ways that we saw it, and I'll just touch on this a little bit because this is a community event, but we were getting from the customers, the people that were using Ansible through Red Hat were getting very confused to what to do about when they had issues. They wanted this stability of longer life cycles because of the nature and the scope of the work they were doing, but at the same time, they needed the latest features and enhancements that they needed that quickly. On the developer side and more on the community side, we had like in the Ansible project itself, we reached over 4,300 open issues. We had pull requests or 2,000. You know, an interesting thing that went on then is we were measuring how quickly our team were closing those things and they were closing them as fast as they ever had been before, but the amount of issues and the amount of PRs that were rolling in were rolling in even faster than the ones that they could go through and process. So that was becoming an issue. The other thing that we were seeing is that with all these different use cases, people using it for networking, for security, for Windows, for Linux, for cloud, one size didn't fit all. You know, the single batteries included distribution just was having trouble meeting the needs of all these different use cases. And then another thing we were seeing and this goes to the open issues and PR thing, but even the work that our team was doing to enhance the application to the project was that some things went in quickly and other things didn't. So there was a fair bit of frustration to what was getting done, when it was getting done in certain parts of the community and the user base. So these were all things that we looked at and said, okay, we need to make some changes here. We need to adapt to this growth and the success and the evolution of Ansible. So what that led us to is to say, all right, in order to do this, Ansible has always been known for shipping a batteries included distro.  But that had now become a liability. So the first thing, the first step we had to do was separate the Ansible content from the core engine, the runtime itself. So in version 2.9, that was the last one where we had that all inclusive batteries included type of distro. And then we separated out the content from the core engine itself. So this is a very important thing that had a lot of effects that rolled out of that, that came out of that decision that changed to do that thing. And you're gonna see this in the next slides and also in how we version different things. And so I'll get through all of this. So in order, when we, in separating the content, we needed a way to bundle up and provide the content that was now living separately from the core engine itself. And in doing that, we came up with what is called Ansible content collections. And these are a new standard way of distributing, maintaining and consuming Ansible automation. So they're standardized way that you can organize and package things like roles, modules, utility libraries, plugins and documentation into one portable bundle that you can distribute separately from the Ansible engine itself. Each of these collections are independently versioned. They can work on their own timeline within their own sub-communities, within the Ansible community. It just gave a lot more flexibility and freedom in order to ship this new innovation when it was ready instead of tying it down to the engine itself. So what happens now today, when we create a distribution, I'll explain these version numbers here on the screen in a bit. I know this is a source of some confusion for people that haven't been watching the Ansible community closely for the last couple months. But we have, when we now do a community package build, we take a, we pull in all the different content collections that have been, that are being included and take the latest stable version of the Ansible core engine and they're bundled all up into one package and then put out into Pi Pi for your use to do a PIP install Ansible. So, just to review, what was happening before we had collections in older versions of Ansible, like for example here, Ansible 2.5, is that we would release 2.5 and then four to six months would pass, in which case there would be bug improvements to modules, new people, people in the community would introduce new modules, new functionality enhancements to those modules they would get merged in, but you couldn't use them until we would get around to version 2.6 after that four to six months would go by. So during that time, as an end user, you did not have access to that functionality. So what happened then after collections, we can ship a distribution, but then bug improvements for modules be introduced, but then using the collections mechanism, end users could install new versions of the collections, updated version of the collections, collections with bug fixes with new enhancements as soon as they were available, that by the time in 5.0 rolled around, let's say the next release of the Ansible package, they were already making use of these enhancements that were done on the content level before we shipped the next major release. So this is what we saw as an advantage and the best compromise, if you will, to dealing with this growth issue of both use cases and just the user base and the needs of end users. So talk a little bit about the community package in explaining this big change that happened in the Ansible space about two years ago, roughly. We were working on it for longer than that, but that's when things started to be released for use. What came out of this was the Ansible community package. And what this is, is an open source batteries included distribution of Ansible, similar to the one that existed before collections were introduced. So it tries to simulate that same, you just do a pip install Ansible and you get a ton of content that you're ready to go with and use just like you did before, despite all the changes that we made and how we developed Ansible. So inside of the each of Ansible community package release is the latest Ansible core engine and then the modules and plugins which are considered core that are so essential to using Ansible, you just can't use Ansible without those. So that's part of the core collection. But then on top of that is we've bundled thousands of, well, it's actually hundreds of community supported Ansible collections which contain thousands of modules and plugins. And these are all selected based on the Ansible community inclusion policy. There's a whole system and policy that I'll talk about a little bit later to how we pick the ones that go into the community package itself. And like I said, this is just to give end users the ability to use these, to have a distribution that they can install very easily like they did before, but it doesn't stop them from going out and getting other collections that we may not have included in the community package or creating their own for their own use and bringing them into using with the Ansible engine. So one thing I wanna point about the Ansible community package is that it has a different versioning scheme than the Ansible core engine. I know this came up yesterday, we had an Ansible community meetup and this was one of the questions that was asked of us was that there was confusion on, oh, I heard there's Ansible 210, 211, 212, but then I'm seeing, 4.0, 5.0, 5.2. That's because there are now, in this case, two distinct different projects going on with their own independent versioning. So the core engine, the runtime of Ansible that things started off as, they began, those continue to have releases like 2.11, 2.12 right now is the latest stable there. The community package is using a semantic versioning system so that it leapt to a 3.00 about six months later, there was a 4.00 and another about six months later, there was a 5.00 and they've since done a 5.1 and 5.2 and I understand a 5.3 is due out shortly. So something to keep in mind and hopefully that explains some of the version numbers you saw in my earlier slides when I was talking about the separation of content inside of Ansible. So moving right along, one other thing to note is that these releases as community packages goes into PiPi, they are picked up by other distribution repositories and system, but PiPi is where this goes first and is sort of the official place that it gets published to. If you have more questions about how this whole system works, it was a great blog post written, it's about 18 months ago that I've linked to here that covers frequently asked questions and goes into a lot more detail to how the Ansible community package comes together and works and some of the differences with the core engine. One of the other things that we've added and if you take, one of the few things you take away from this is to sign up for the Bullhorn. The Bullhorn is a, currently it's a bi-weekly newsletter that goes out with all the activity and news about the community distribution and the Ansible community in general of all the different collections that are being published, things like contributor conferences or any type of activity. I really love reading the Bullhorn when it hits my inbox. I always like looking at it because there's so much going on, even myself as working inside of Red Hat as an Ansible product manager have trouble keeping up with all the activity and the Bullhorn does a really great job of summarizing all that and letting you know what you need to know. If you wanna look back there at all the archives, I think they're on their 44th release, there's a link to the archive. You can look back on what's been coming up. I really, really encourage you to subscribe to the Bullhorn to keep up with the Ansible community. Okay, so that covers the main things that happened inside of the engine and with the Ansible distribution that everyone is used to being able to work with out there. We've begun introducing a lot of other projects around the Ansible ecosystem. While this one isn't necessarily a project, it's something that it's getting a lot of attention that we've gone out and done, mostly in response to organizations that were using Ansible at huge scale with a great deal of sophistication and both scale in the number of nodes that they were managing, the number of people that were using it, the geographic disbursement of those people using Ansible Automation and it's something called execution environments that you might hear of out there. It doesn't directly impact the community package or the core engine, but it is getting a lot of interest in the community and what it does is like I said, it addresses the Ansible dependencies. This is really tied to our AWX project where you had to have virtual environments to run different Ansible automation jobs and that wasn't very portable. It was difficult to maintain if you were running in a cluster, you had to keep those in sync. So this is what the execution environments were designed to address and what they do is that they package up all the components needed for automation in a portable cloud native way. So it's bundling together all the collections that your automation will need, any type of additional binary RPMs, PIP dependencies, but it also includes a minimal Ansible core release and puts it in one container that then can be moved around and utilized wherever it's needed. So this diagram here shows you what goes into an execution environment where it's the collection, the libraries and the Ansible core getting combined up and it's based on a rel UBI image. So you have that baseline really solid Linux services in the container itself that forms the execution environment. Now out of that with creating these execution environments, like I said, the execution environment itself is not a project, a standalone project itself was more of a concept and that's being built into other Ansible tools. In creating these execution environments, we've had to create some new tooling. So we have here, I'm gonna go over these in a little more detail, Ansible Builder which lets you create these execution environments very easily, Ansible Navigator which lets you do development and it's a dev tool that for working with these execution environments and testing and developing automation against them and then a whole host of other Ansible content tools that aid in the creation and testing of your Ansible content. So Ansible Builder, briefly stated is like I was saying is a tool for creating your execution environment. It allows you to, we as Red Hat are creating some that are ready to use, ready to go of different flavors but if you have your own need, a very specific need that you wanna do, what this is a Python application that will let you, it'll produce a build context and then you create a YAML file saying what needs to go into the execution environment itself and then you run the tool against it and it builds the container for you, it builds the execution environment in a way that other Ansible systems can then utilize it in order to do portable automation, executions wherever it goes. Another tool, Ansible Navigator that I was mentioning is the idea here was to create a more cohesive, consistent top level developer experience for the content that was going to be run in an execution environment. So this is when you're creating a playbook that you can test it against the actual execution environment that it's gonna run on top of. This is really a CLI and it is based on a lot of CLI conventions of people that are used to VIM will be right at home inside of Ansible Navigator. It's a text-based user interface. So it's not a command-line tool, but it's also not a GUI tool. So it gives you, I believe it's based on end curses, it gives you different windows to show what's happening as you're running your playbooks against the execution environments and the lookup documentation right in the window itself and a whole lot of other VIM-like commands that it recognizes and just provides a better developer experience in particular for working with these execution environments. So what this all looks like is a general workflow is that you use Ansible Builder to create an execution environment and then to develop your automation user, Ansible Navigator, which then executes against a playbook along with that execution environment. As I mentioned, there's also more Ansible Content Tools. I have Ansible Navigator here on the list because that is part of this family, but that one deserved a special call-out. But other projects that we have that we're developing out there in the community is an Ansible Language Server just enhancing the development, development tools. Ansible Lint was something that was created in the community and adopted by Red Hat for giving you best practice tips and pointing out things that might be an issue within your playbook. Ansible Test, which just came out of the core project for testing, doing the type of unit testing against modules and plugins of that nature. Molecule is another project that came started off in the community we brought in. This is for doing like integration testing of how will my module, how will my roles work together and doing that level of testing there.  We also have a lot of work going on in Ansible Galaxy. Right now there's working through some things. There's been the community version at Galaxy which has been around for many, many years. They added collection support to that a couple of years ago and it also handled standalone roles, excuse me. We needed also to create something else for Galaxy. Well, for what we were doing on the product level, that code base we've now referred to as Galaxy NG. We couldn't, with the way the community version code was written was not going to allow us to do what we needed to there so that we had to create our own a new code base which was Galaxy NG. And that's the upstream to a component in the Ansible platform called Automation Hub. The one thing that didn't happen during NG development was the support of standalone roles. So it only supports collections right now but there's plans to add support for standalone roles in this code base. And the reason that we're doing that is that we're looking to move to a unified code base meaning that what's being used on Galaxy, sorry, Ansible, sorry, I have the URL wrong here. It should be galaxy.ansible.com. That is using the same code base as what we're using for the upstream of Automation Hub. And the reason of that is not only just consistency but also the ability right now we're managing two code bases and this way everything will get more timely updates and more attention and things like that. So look for that to come or come join in on that work. A couple other quick things. I know I'm running out of time here happening out in the community. This is one that I work on directly and often it's the Ansible operator SDK. If you're working in Kubernetes there's this concept of operators which run on your cluster itself to help you manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes services and applications. The operator SDK has an Ansible plug-in to it or that it's actually part of the operator SDK that lets you write Ansible content to manage things right on the cluster itself. So I won't be able to go into a lot of depth. I usually give this one slide as a whole separate 30, 50 minute presentation but definitely be aware of that and check that out if you're doing Kubernetes work. And then the last thing I wanted to mention being that this is Dev Comp is a Python library that's being used. We've developed and use extensively in a few different projects and that's called Ansible Runner. And what it is is it's a stable and consistent interface to Ansible itself. We've seen people try to use and wrap around what is happening in Ansible Playbook. And then that's prone to breaks. Ansible Runner is a solution to that you could write code against and that it will remain stable so that your code doesn't break over time. That was never the intent of Ansible Playbook and some of the things in Ansible Core. So you can use that to run Ansible Core directly or as part of another system. And it just enables the potential for embedding Ansible services, Ansible functionality into other systems rather than try to manage the complexities of the Ansible Core moving around. We use this ourselves. Ansible Runner is used with execution environments inside of AWX. And it's also a part of the Ansible operator SDK is using Ansible Runner itself. And that's just a few of the ways that we've already seen this particular library use. So if you're a developer, you might wanna check this out. It's out there on PyPy. Okay, a couple of quick- Sorry, Timothy. For the interrupt, your time is over. Could you please conclude or... Yeah, so I was just gonna do. This is, these are the links to a whole bunch of community resources. I'll be posting the slides right after this so you can get the links from there. Lot of great resources out there. Bullhorn Matrix is like an IRC, a better version of IRC. And then there's a lot of ways you can contribute and learn Ansible, self-paced training guides. Sorry, I didn't get to talk about inclusion, policy and steering committee. And with that, I will end. Thank you very much, everyone for listening. I'm gonna pop over to that work adventure. Look for me in one of Tim A inside of one of the session rooms. And we can talk if you want. All right, thank you.