41. The new poverty line: How working professionals are being pushed into hardship and what to do about it | Mark Game

0:00Welcome to All About Business with me, James Reed, the podcast that covers everything about business, management and leadership.

0:17Rising costs of living are forcing skilled workers towards poverty. So what can you do to support professionals struggling to put food on the table? On today's episode of All About Business, I have the great pleasure of welcoming Mark Gain, co-founder of The Bread and Butter Thing, a wonderful organisation that has given themselves the mission to unleash the power of food and ignite long-lasting change in struggling neighbourhoods across the UK. The Bread and Butter Thing also helps people upskill to make sustainable long-term changes to their situations. today on all about business i'm really delighted to welcome mark game to our studio mark has come from manchester today and he is the founder and the ceo of the bread and butter thing an award winning charity that helps make life more affordable for people by redistributing surplus food through community-led food clubs this is a subject that i'm really interested mark in learning more about you know what is the situation why are you doing this and also your own journey to become a leader of a charity that obviously is doing really important work i understand that you supply a quarter of a million meals a week to people principally in the north of england what is the issue here what what is going on in the uk that has made this charity such an important provider of support for people what's happening the stark truth is that wages don't pay as much as they did things are cost a hell of a lot more than they used to and working families that are doing all the right things that government and society would want of them still can't make things stretch so we have best part of 15 million people in poverty but poverty is a really difficult thing to wrap your head around because it's not just a physical manifestation it's emotional as well and when you have people that don't they're doing 50 hour weeks so i i do a podcast as you know james and i meet a lot of our members that we support and i see working families all the time.

2:39Last week, I met a data analyst for the Ministry of Justice. His wife is a full-time payroll clerk, and they use bread and butter because at the end of last year, they came out of a fixed-term mortgage, and their mortgage quadrupled overnight. I see. So this is because interest rates have gone up. Interest rates have gone up. Suddenly, they've got to pay a lot more. Absolutely. So quadrupled. Quadrupled. So that's tipped them into what you would call poverty what would you call poverty because between i'm not sure that's what i want to understand you said 15 million people so so yeah so agree what what do you call it so that that's kind of defined by kind of looking at 60 of the kind of average salaries sort of thing but i see poverty differently i think poverty in itself is you take david that i just mentioned to you he's not looking at an average salary he's a data analyst and his wife's a professional as well I know what data analysts are, and it's quite a lot.

3:37Yeah. So it's his outgoings that have caused this problem. It's his outgoings that have crippled him. So would you say he's in poverty? Well, he wouldn't be a government statistic, but he's struggling to get by. Bloody hell, yeah. Right. Your principal customers or audience, what do you call the people who participate? Members. Members. We call them our members. A bit like co-op. Right. So your members, they're typically people with jobs. Yeah, so half of our members are working families. Yeah, absolutely. The other half, yes, there will be people on benefits or there will be retired people or people with disabilities.

4:13Right. So let's start with the people in jobs. So this sort of in-work poverty phenomenon, you said work doesn't pay as it used to. It was the sort of implication. When did this start becoming apparent to you and what are the causes of it? I think it started really to become apparent to us probably a year or so before COVID. Right. So just before COVID, prices were putting the pressure on. Obviously, austerity had come in with 2008, and that was hitting a lot of things. You were starting to see cutbacks in public sector. We were seeing a lot of people being made redundant and thousands of people from the public sector losing their jobs, right?

4:53But actually, jobs went up during the coalition. I have to say that. Which is fascinating. Because I was there and I remember there were more vacancies and more people ended up employed at the end of the coalition than at the beginning. And that's really interesting because that could be a separate podcast in itself, couldn't it? Well, something's going on here, though, that's different from just unemployment, which is awful, I agree. It is. And it's looking at the inflation costs, et cetera. The really interesting graph where you can see from the 80s to 2025, where you can actually see the graph of the salaries, the average salaries going up and up and up, and they kind of plateau in the noughties.

5:30Yeah, real wages stopped rising. Real wages did stop rising. And that's the productivity of people stopped rising. But CPI and RPI didn't stop rising. Prices? Yes. You mean, yeah. Absolutely. So wages stopped? Well, that's why real wages didn't keep going, because prices kept going faster. That's the conundrum here. That is absolutely the challenge. When you start to look at the cost of product, the cost of living going up and up, but your wages don't, that has to be acknowledged. And I don't think it is sufficiently. I don't think there's enough support that is out there to help working families.

6:05So one of the reasons I was keen to talk to you, Mark, is that I'm concerned that this is going to become a bigger issue with new technologies, potentially consuming jobs. And more people are finding themselves in this difficult situation. So is that a worry of yours? Do you feel that the demand for your service is going to get, how are you going to fulfill it? How are we going to prepare for this? What do we do as a society and you as an organization? I think it's really interesting, James, that I would say from my perspective and what I see every day, that we're already in a problem. because whether they lose their jobs or not, people can't afford to get by.

6:46I would say there's a vast majority of people already in low-paid work, gig economy type stuff that frankly isn't meeting the day-to-day needs. So we already have people that need support that are working. And I don't know where the kind of AI revolution is going to go and whether we're going to look at universal basic income, et cetera, but that's going to cost billions that nobody wants to pay either. No, I think that's the rub of it. That seems to be the problem. I agree. But at the same time, the dichotomy that we see is you have citizens of the UK doing everything that is expected of them, and yet they cannot afford to get by.

7:26And the help that government gives them, I don't think there's any way of kind of dressing this up. I think it's hidden. So if you think about a working family, the person that goes to work, they don't engage with the benefits system. So where do they find the information about what is available for them for free dentistry or free optometry, etc.? There is no marketing out there. There is no central resource for them to find this help and support. So we say hidden help isn't help. It's just not there. and there are billions literally over 20 billion every year of unclaimed benefits that should be out there really yeah that seems to me that could be solved by some sort of very well-designed hub digital hub or resource yeah but that's not there at the moment that's not there right now i'm sure that people listening there will be people screaming oh well there's citizens advice there is but they are completely oversubscribed and really struggling to do the great job they do already.

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9:13You founded the bread and butter thing. I did, yeah. In 2015, as I understand. What motivated you to do that at that particular time? And I have to ask, because I'm always intrigued by this, why did you call it the bread and butter thing? Ah, right. Okay. So my other half, Jane, started this with me. I guess you could say she's the brains in the back of house and i'm the front of house right and so where does the bread and butter thing come from bread and butter is your everyday essentials so my dad always used to say that's the bread and butter of things and why is it a thing i call it a thing because i saw it as a movement put it in a sentence it's becoming a thing the bread and butter thing is becoming a thing so it's more of a conceptual thing to become a movement recognising the need for such provisions.

10:00Okay. Convocated, I know. But your dad used to say this. Yeah, he used to say it's the bread and butter. That's my bread and butter. That's what I do every day. That's my bread and butter. Right. So that's what, and then you work with your wife, Jane. How do you divide up responsibilities? Why are you laughing? That's a tricky one, isn't it? Well, she's not here to ask as well. Do you know what? We're both accountants by trade. So you're both accountants. Now this is interesting. So, but Jane's a far better one than I am. Right. So she puts you in front of house and she does the books. I would say she's more forensic and more compliance.

10:32Forensic accountant. She's much more forensic than I would ever be. And I would say I'm more of the corporate financier. So that's the way we roll. But that means that I can go out and do the deals, whereas she'll make sure that we're making everybody count. When you say go out and do the deals. Yeah. What do you mean? I mean, what deals? Grants. We've got to find funding to set up. So we... So you're getting grants from donations. Yeah. That's the deal. Or do you get food as deals as well? Yeah, absolutely. So you're dealing with it. Yeah. So talk me through a couple of deals you've done recently.

11:04Okay. So we've had to look at local authorities are a good example. Yeah. Local authorities invite us in to come and open our bread and butter food clubs in their area. When they do, what happens is we will ask them for the first year's costs and the capital cost to set up. So the way we work is we set up a man in a van almost. But you ask them to finance the first year's cost. We do, yeah. You wouldn't have thought of that if you weren't an accountant. I mean, I was inspired. Go on, so then what happens? I'm going to ask this question. Well, this is a spin, James, because what we do is give us your first year of funding.

11:44And I know we're a charity, but you'll never have to fund us again because it's financially sustainable in your area then because the costs, the money that we charge our members for their food covers the running costs for that area. So once it's established. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can run it. So we can go into three and five-year deals comfortably on one-year funding. Right. So I can see the appeal for the local authority. Yeah. So like every good deal is good for both parties. Absolutely. So how many local authorities have you got signed up? Wow. It's around 30, I guess. and if there are any local authorities listening how do they find you mark well because i think they should i think they should too i mean it sounds like a good thing so i mean it's cost them one year to get it set up yep and then you can run for three or five years at no cost to them yeah where'd they find what's your url our easiest one is breadandbutterthing.org so that's the website get in touch by all means and you have the capacity to keep growing do we do so So what we find as, so what's our barrier to growth?

12:48It's the food. So it's unlocking more surplus food. So we are the largest B2C food redistribution charity in the UK. So you said quite a lot in that comment. I did, didn't I? In that sense. B2C, explain. Business to consumer. Business to customer. So we basically take it end to end. So you'll take it from a supermarket? We'll take it from a supermarket, a farmer, a manufacturer. And depending on what time of day we pick it up, it could be in the hands of the consumer that day. And you do that? We do that. Right. And you said you're the biggest in the country. Yeah. So we have 140 ,000 families registered with us.

13:23We operate through 145 food clubs across England. So as south as Maidstone and as north as Northumbria. And how many food suppliers do you have? Probably about 100. You said some of them are farmers. Yeah. So they would send you potatoes direct or whatever. Yeah. So a lot of outgrades. so far you've seen a two kilo parsnip maybe i'm trying to think what's it yeah why particularly they're just huge or people don't want to buy them is that you can shop them up and eat they're either too big or too small i see yeah actually it doesn't matter it doesn't wish i could grow one of them in the garden i don't think we've achieved that that would win a prize wouldn't it so you get all those off cut yeah exactly we get the outgrades and they call them outgrades yeah So they're either too big or too small.

14:11Or again, if there are things that are still on the tree, so top fruits like apples, we will do a deal with a farmer. Again, more deals where we'll try and make it cost neutral. So if they carry on picking. So sometimes, particularly post-Brexit, farmers will keep hold of their laborers and they won't always have something to do. So they've got a bit of surplus labor. So then we'll kind of subsidize that and say we'll pay you some towards that labor, but give us the fruit, get them picking again for the kind of class twos or what isn't going to go to your mainstream customers. Right. So you've got farmers, then you've had two other categories.

14:52So manufacturers. Yeah. So what happens there? What are they giving you? Let's just say there's a quality rejection from a retailer. So I don't know, there's been a problem with calibrating the labels so it doesn't look pretty. So a whole lot of tins have the labels on. Or there's salt missing or an ingredient missing out of something. So there's lots of different reasons. But the main one tends to be around forecasting and having food that's not got long enough life left to go on the shelf of a supermarket. because if you think about it, let's just say for argument's sake, the manufacturer makes it with seven days life on it.

15:31Then it's got to go to a distribution center and it's got to have a minimum shelf life on it to get into a distribution center. And then the distribution center has got to get it to the supermarket itself. Yeah, I'm thinking about that, but how the hell are you doing this? Because you've got to do all of that too to get it to your members. We do, but we're far more agile. So what do you do, put it in a van and drive? How does it work? How do you make yourself more agile? Three warehouses, but we also partner with a logistics. Where are they? So one in Stoke, one in Manchester, one in Durham. A big shed?

16:00Sorry, four. Four, actually, because there's one in Spalding as well. Right. And they're not big sheds. They're about 20 ,000 square foot, each one of them. And they've got about 15 vans at each one of them. And what we do is get partnered with third-party logistics. They bring the food into us from the manufacturers, farmers, et cetera. and then we'll look at making from whatever's inbound that day the best possible offer for our members to go out on our vans so you create a parcel yeah is that what you do is that how it works just to describe people listening yeah so we understand so what our offer is to the kind of member the end user is three bags of food for 8.50 so a bag of chilled or frozen food three bags of food for 850 yeah so a bag of chilled or frozen food a bag of fruit and veg and a bag of cupboard goods right typically about 35 to 40 quid's worth of food in there right so what that's depending on you getting enough of each to come into your warehouses that's why we kind of do it that way again accountancy is that portfolio approach right so you have enough suppliers you get enough variety because each supplier doesn't plan for surplus because a surplus is a mistake effectively isn't it so you have to have enough people going up and down in your supply chain so that you've got an underlying constant feed so is that quite labor intensive for you to package them all up like that well what we do is we put it on the vans and then we go out to the each community project that we partner with to open our food clubs once a week yeah and the community come and volunteer so that's done locally so that's how we keep it our cup so each van has enough in it to do three packages and then we get community volunteers to come and help pack the bags so if you want to volunteer to work with you go to the same place say it again breadandbutterthing.org very good well that sounds like a great thing to do and you said that you got how many of these community so we've got 145 across the country right and and you're trying to grow more yeah assuming so what we're trying to the first one moss side in manchester moss side yeah is that where you so i was introduced to michelle and elaine that ran the food bank there compassion food bank and shebner who worked in the back taught me how to pack bags and she was fierce i had three months of training with shebner and did a lot of thinking in there and i saw you were volunteering then yourself yeah yeah what a great story so then you thought i'm going to do this you've done it slightly differently to a food bank though from the sound of what you've described so do you want to make just make clear what the difference yeah so what's the difference mainly well a you don't refer to us anybody in the communities can come along so we scrutinize the community and the area rather than the individual because everybody gets a bit tired and bored and fed up of being having to demonstrate that they're poor well see whether they qualify so to speak yeah yeah i can imagine that's yeah so so you just say we're here yeah if you want to come come and say 50 for three yeah yeah and then it's one of those so if you go back far enough so i used i used to run a company called company shop and which did commercial kind of boot rooms staff shops selling cheap food to the food industry and whilst there kind of developed the first social supermarket in the uk as a subsidiary of it and the first social super what is that so that was a that was means tested if If you're on universal credit, we had to show.

19:32Yeah, exactly. You could come in. But that just got me thinking. And that showed me how you can go beyond simply calories with such a model, because everybody talks about food with this, James. But actually, there's so much more because the community piece is huge. The fact that the volunteers come from the community and they feel like they're doing it for themselves gives them a pride. They feel ownership. And the members come along and they all get to know each other. They get to know their community. And then we have service providers that do come along like welfare rights or public health or citizens advice.

20:11And they will also come along and piggyback our service. And that was almost accidental at first because they just noticed that there was a cluster of people in one place at one time, predictably every week. So they started to shape their services around us. And then we started to recognise that and started to do more curation around it to see what each community needs. These hubs are open one day a week. Is that right? But everyone knows when it is. Everybody knows when it is. And again, it's on the website. We've got like a store. They're all listed on the website. Yeah. There's a store locator on there.

20:46So put me postcode in and you'll be able to see if we're near you. Thebreadandbutterthing.org. You got it. Good. No, I think it's good that we spread the word. Indeed. It's a big part of my desire to talk to you today, to understand this better and give other people the opportunity to learn about it because it's a great initiative. So this word dignity, I've heard you use it, and I see and recognize it myself, the importance that work has in giving people dignity and purpose in life. You've obviously come to that from a different angle in a sense because you're sort of looking at it from how you run your community hubs rather than providing jobs.

21:33Do you think that's becoming more of an issue in society generally, that it's harder for people to hold on to their dignity? I think you found the other word that's hard as well, purpose. Yes. I'm worried about this. Yeah. I've here, I mean, I'm down in London with you today. We're going to Westminster after this. And there are people in Westminster that say community is lost. And I frankly don't believe that at all. Well, you don't believe it because you see it in your senses. Exactly, yeah. You're there with the people. And I think people need to get out of Westminster more, frankly. Could not agree more.

22:11Sit in businesses, sit in organizations like yours, talk to people and see actually what's going on. Because, I mean, they don't seem to be particularly well-tuned in, do they? No, they don't. Being an example. Yeah, it's a great example. And we see it every day. And that's what we celebrate on our podcast. Celebrating community. Yeah. And everyday people. Yeah. Just some unbelievable people that are doing unbelievable things despite their hardships. Yeah. Well, that's inspiring, isn't it? Yeah. And it feels like a privilege to be able to just go and chat to them. you said you said to me earlier and i hope i'm not putting you on the spot that you you had a sort of mischievous youth or if that's the right word and then and then i'm interested because then you became an accountant yeah yeah and now you're running this i would say remarkable organization that's bringing people together and doing good work for the community can you just tell me a little bit about your own journey because i'm intrigued mark and you're laughing i want to know more and i think there's a story to be had here yeah okay irish catholic family born in preston on a council estate uh youngest of four lads right we were pretty feral as kids right um did your parents work yeah dad worked full-time um back in the day at danish bacon right um but so he was making bacon yeah and i you know um mum didn't work when when she got all four of us because obviously I was the last one around.

23:46She wasn't working by that point. Four brothers. Four brothers. You were the youngest of four. So you must be pretty tough. I got shouty. I don't know what your big brothers are like, but you must be pretty resilient. Yeah. So, yeah, we had a bit of fun, but yeah. So, yeah, the reason I was saying a bit of a rogue, we did do some stuff, and I did end up with some juvenile convictions, et cetera. Right. So I was caught joyriding, took a lamppost off a street corner at doing 16. How old were you when you were doing that? 15. So 15. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I was lucky. I was very lucky. You could have killed yourself or other people.

24:28Well, yeah. I was going to say I was lucky I didn't serve time for it. Well, that too. Well, yeah. So luckily none of those things came to pass. Exactly. And again, time was lost. There's a lot of luck involved in life though, isn't there? You look back on that and you think. I couldn't agree more because if you think about it, James, if I'd have done it post-16, I'd have probably had a criminal record that would have affected me and would not have allowed me to become an accountant and qualify, etc. So how did you go from joyriding in Preston to becoming an accountant? I mean, that's the next step that I'm interested in.

25:00Did your mother say you sought yourself out or did someone else? No, it's funny. There was like a little voice in my head, stop screwing around sort of thing, in my early 20s, I think. One of your personalities told you, don't do that anymore. Do something else. Is that what happened? Get a grip. That's interesting. Gain of age, you know. What age are you then? Probably 22-ish. Right. And I think a lot of young men grow up in their early 20s. I think so. I do think that there's a truth to that. But I think school wasn't great. Mum and dad weren't educated, so they didn't really understand the value of education either.

25:40so they didn't necessarily support. So youngest of four lads going to the same kind of Catholic comp. As I get through the door, first words from the form teacher, God, not another game. All right. It just didn't go well. That's not fair, is it? I mean, reputation's been made by your older brothers. That's not fair, is it? But anyway, okay. But your name is good for, oh, God, not another game. That makes it a good quote. yeah so all right so that's not a good start it didn't help really did it so so i you know i i came out of school with that with very few levels very how many of them i have four four and one of them was a c right so um i think the only thing i like is the fact that i did um i actually got um a b in physics o level without studying whatsoever i just liked physics did you get level in mathematics i did so that helps for the accounting and then i went on to get an a and a level maths at night school and then realized that i like maths and i like understanding numbers and started to think you went to night school after you left school so this is that further so this is really important so what so this is this voice prompted you what 22 to do yeah yeah because no no i went out to get a job at 16 and just spend money burn money go and enjoy life and that's what you did and that's what i did and yeah so what so what so what age do you go to night school well it's that it's that little guy at 22 or whatever just come on time it's time and then i so what sort of jobs were you doing between 16 and 22 um so so dad had a business dad had a frozen food business oh so that's interesting yeah yeah connection yeah um it's a difficult one because he actually had two businesses and they both failed and they you you can look at it and wonder whether or not that's something that drove me into accountancy as well because i could actually see what was happening in there right but you can also look at market conditions because he was definitely in the 80s when the supermarkets were really coming into their own and the high street stores were somewhat oppressed by them um and that that change in market he didn't adapt to right and i i think that's what's hard to see though it's hard to watch yeah it is because he suffered with that and he had a lot of kind of stress and heart conditions in and out of hospital during that time so it's a tough watch but um yeah so that's kind of where i was but frankly took the mickey when i was working for him because i could right he didn't fire you though No, he should have.

28:23Okay, well, we'll leave it there. You've got a nice dad. So then you did the accounting. So what I did with the accounting, I went on to the ACCA route. And because I was like over 22 at this time, they had a mature student route. So I took that, but then got a job with an accountancy firm when I'd done the foundation stage of ACCA, recognized how far I was behind others. so decided i was just going to do them every six months so it suddenly became very driven right i went right i'm going to leapfrog some of these people that are younger than me that are doing the same exams because actually i need to play catch-up now right so and you managed to do that and then and then what did you do when you qualified so qualified did a bit of audit did a bit of uh corporate finance but still impressed at no no yeah lancashire lancashire and then started to do business planning so i found that um one of the partners where i was working was doing consultancy uh for helping people to develop their smes in a in a preparation for exit sale flow whatever um and i i found i was really quite capable at that and and started to help develop management teams for exits and sales um and then went on from there to do it with a couple of others we set up our own practice and one of my first building management teams building management teams grooming businesses for sales this is this is an unexpected turn of events but i want to ask you what was the couple of key things you want to do to build a management team if you want to sell a business because this is an added bonus yeah well i i guess for me the key thing that we always talked about is um making sure that the management know which buttons to press to actually deliver because so many teams say we need a budget and the budget just means numbers and a budget to me always means you need an operational gantt chart to go with it what are going to be the triggers to actually make that happen when you say it's going to happen and i don't know why but so many times that's a blind spot it's like we're not reaching budget well explain why oh well we haven't thought about this this and this yeah and the operations and actions that need to go with it don't seem to get documented as they they ought everyone thinks oh well if we just kind of do that and we go for three percent or whatever and we put a marketing plan behind it useful no it's got to have it sounds like you're applying that knowledge in what you're doing now yeah very much yeah yeah yeah because i mean you're running a real logistics operation here yeah sounds complex and impressive you're laughing it must be quite hard there's a lot of plates to spin yeah but there's a good team there and and i think that's the secret sauce there's a good team there yeah so depends what you what do you look for in your team that positive self-starting can do philosophy you can train anybody to do most things i think if they've got the right attitude and the right determination, then you get the right team.

31:38Can do positive self-starting philosophy, regardless of the role. You're looking for that in the people who join you. Yep. Because they're people who get stuff done, I guess. Got it in one. Right. Well, that's good advice for anyone listening. You can imagine, Jane and I, we run it lean. So we don't have – You have to, don't you? Yeah. And everybody that comes, even within senior positions, it's like we expect you to roll your sleeves up and crack on don't expect your team to do it and we we've kind of got this thing we're like the pony express we have never ever missed opening a food club ever and if that means i've got to be on the vans a day that's fine we'll do that and everybody is expected to do that so we all dig in when needed right when's your next opening next opening of a hub yeah so we are opening well i i'm focusing on um whitby at the moment we're opening in the seaside town of whitby yeah so that should be early september i mean we've got a couple of others that we're kind of infilling around um our regions at the moment so in greater manchester and places but how do you choose so you've chosen whitby as the next one yeah What do you look for?

32:56How do you do that? Funding can drive it. The local authority. Yeah, exactly. So if a local authority or a private kind of philanthropist or whatever wants to get involved and do some legacy piece. How much did it cost to set one up then? How much you got? Yeah, good negotiator. I'm not going to fall for it. Do you not want to say or is it? It varies. It varies regionally because it depends on how far away we are from distribution centers, whether we have to do contracts with third-party logistics to actually come to your area, etc. Yeah. So I'll give you a ballpark. It's anywhere between 150 and 250.

33:37Hundreds of thousands. Yeah. So up to a quarter of a million. Yeah. But once it's set up, it runs. That's it. It runs. So if anyone listening wants to set up and support one of these. Yeah, definitely. Please do. 150 to 250 ,000. I know it sounds a lot. But lots of businesses are located in neighborhoods where they could usefully do this, actually. I mean, if companies got behind this, that would be great, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it? I think so. Yeah. Okay. So you also mentioned, Mark, that you work with people out of work, unemployed people, or if that's the right way of describing it. And I think you do some work around skills and helping people support people into work, which is something we do as well at Reed.

34:18I'm just interested in what you're doing and how you get on with it. So a number, quite a lot of people that come to us that are unemployed are quite away from employment, I would say. So we do work with them on things like confidence. And so, for example, today, again, we've got something that's called a living library. So what we've got is a theatre company that has been working with a dozen of our members to give them the confidence to be able to stand up in Westminster today and tell their story. Wow. So you're going to stand up in Parliament and tell your story. I mean, that's quite a big boost.

35:02I mean, I think many of us would find that challenging. Yeah. Yeah, and don't get me wrong, we're not standing them on a podium and just saying, listen to me. What we've got is we've got one of the rooms in Westminster and it will be like a networking event. But they're going to share their experiences. Exactly. And it gives them confidence to go and network, introduce themselves. And these are skills that they will need to be able to get to interview, et cetera. Sure. so we we think that that when when you look at um people that are unemployed a lot of the time people miss the trick that actually they're so far away from employment that they need a lot of training and development to actually get to that point to be ready to be employed so when you say far away from is that because they've never worked or they have other issues so i'll go back to the kind of social supermarket so we we did it we we did a pilot and it was in barnsley where we did we tried to train up 20 people to get jobs we had a local employer that said i've got enough jobs to employ all of them so it was a large employer what sort of business it was in the food industry right so it was it was a nice link and um so we started with 20 and And we went through the process of getting them to interview.

36:25And the day of the interview, half of them turned up. And then six of them got offers. And on the day that they should have been starting work, and we were in touch with them all the time. So you started with 20, 10 got to the interview, and then six got offers. Two turned up on the first day. Right. And one walked out that day. So you had a 5 % success rate. Yeah. Yeah. That's quite – so how did you compute that? So what did you do with that? That's quite hard, isn't it? Yeah, you've got to reflect. Yeah, so what did you do with that information? Well, we learned from failures. So what was the lesson?

37:04And this is why we are where we are now, James, with looking at this and looking at those confidence levels first. We went too fast too soon. These were people that had generational unemployment, didn't even have a clock in the house. yeah so don't work to a rhythm school was what regulated their household so it's you have to start understanding that there are basic life admin and skills that sometimes people need support with to help them feel confident with alternative rhythms well i mean some people listening might think well these people didn't want a job in the first place really you know And you're just trying to make me swear.

37:51This is a widely held view. Yeah. So what? Say that again? It's bollocks. Why? It's bollocks. I've never met somebody like that. You've never met someone in a way? No. So what's the issue then? Why did you go from 20 to one? So I'll give you another example. How do we get 20 to 20? I keep saying it's the confidence. And this is why we invest in these theater companies and such things. So that people can build their skills and confidence because we think everybody is ready to be employed and they're not. What's happened to the confidence of people? That I could not explain. Do you think it's gone down?