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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

BACKGROUND

1. This report presents the findings from research carried out in 2005 to evaluate the first year of the Scottish Executive's Relocation Advisory Service ( RAS).

2. RAS was set up in October 2004 as part of the Fresh Talent initiative. RAS aims to provide a one-stop information and advisory service for people interested in moving to Scotland for work or study from other countries.

3. BMRB and DTZ Pieda Consulting used a variety of methods to gather evidence for this evaluation including:

• A desk research and benchmarking exercise
• Qualitative interviews with partner organisations ¹, the Head of the RAS and RAS customers
• Analysis of RAS management information data
• An e-mail survey of RAS customers - a sample of all customers who had contacted RAS up to May 2005 were surveyed, these customers were based in various countries throughout the world (including UK and Scotland).
• Mystery shopping of the RAS service

4. The key findings are presented below.

BENCHMARKING

5. Addressing the information needs of potential migrants is an important component in attracting Fresh Talent. The evaluation found that other countries including New Zealand, USA, Canada and Australia provide information and advice services similar to RAS for potential in migrants. In general, the main aim of all such services is to attract skilled workers.

6. Two main differences between services offered by other countries and RAS are:

• Other countries more explicitly target specific types of worker
• RAS delivers its services with fewer financial and staff resources.

PARTNERSHIP WORKING

7. Partnership working is a crucial component of a service like RAS. RAS's partners reported:

• That they were aware of RAS
• RAS had explored ways of working with them and was taking their comments into account. In some cases RAS was in the process of developing more formal partnership working arrangements with them, including identifying clear roles, targets and priorities, and assigning responsibilities
• That the size of RAS presented challenges. For example in its first year RAS's promotional work led to an increase in demand that RAS could not cope with within existing resources and which resulted in a backlog of work.
• The services offered by RAS were limited. For example some partners considered that RAS did not provide the detailed information that in migrants might need if they were to be encouraged to relocate to Scotland, eg information on employment opportunities, and they believed that RAS's remit allowed them to do this.
• On the whole, partners thought that RAS had the potential to help in migrants, in particular, gain employment in Scotland more quickly than they would otherwise, without duplicating service provision.

PROFILE OF RAS CUSTOMERS

8. In its first year of operation, just under 7,000 people contacted RAS. Two thirds of customers were male and relatively young, with an average age of thirty.

9. The most common reasons for contacting RAS were work related (such as help finding work opportunities or enquiries about work visas etc (66% of customers and 44% of customers respectively contacted RAS about these issues). A quarter of customers also contacted RAS about studying in Scotland.

10. Most customers contacted RAS by email (86% of customers contacted RAS this way).

11. In the first year of RAS, over one-quarter of customer enquiries were from people from India. This was directly related to Indian based promotional activity in December 2004. Another quarter of enquiries were received from people from Poland. Enquiries from Poland were more likely than average to focus on finding work or accommodation in Scotland and to enquire about recognition of qualifications.

CUSTOMER VIEWS ABOUT THE SERVICE OFFERED BY RAS

12. From an e-mail survey of customers who had used RAS (those surveyed were based throughout the world), most customers, generally, were satisfied with the service provided by RAS. Around eight in ten customers were satisfied or very satisfied with RAS overall.

13. Around four in ten (39%) customers received all the information they had requested from RAS and most other customers received 'some' of the information they requested. Students were more likely than those seeking employment to report that their request for information was fully met.

14. An emerging theme was that customers would welcome a service more tailored to their individual needs. Customers who were more highly skilled were more likely to suggest this.

15. Another theme was that RAS should, as a priority, reduce response times. In line with the rest of the Scottish Executive, RAS has a turnaround target of 20 days. However there were times during RAS's first year when this target was not met. RAS responded to almost 70% of enquiries within one month. However around 15% of customers waited longer than a month for a reply. The remainder said they did not know or did not remember receiving a response from RAS.

16. This evaluation has set some basic customer service benchmarks which can be used to review the quality of service in future years. For example, the following customer ratings from the survey could be used as a benchmark to measure progress:

• Customer satisfaction ("Overall, how satisfied were you with the service that you received from the Relocation Advisory Service?" Very satisfied, fairly satisfied, fairly dissatisfied, don't know)
• Speed of response time ("How long did you have to wait before the Relocation Advisory Service responded to your message?" Up to a day, 2-3 days, a week, two weeks, longer than this, don't know)
• Usefulness of RAS response ("How useful was the Relocation Advisory Service's letter/email/fax in terms of helping you to answer your query?" Very useful, fairly useful, not very useful, not at all useful, don't know)
• Whether RAS has altered thinking about relocation to Scotland ("Taking everything into account, what influence has the Relocation Advisory Service had on your decision to move to/ remain in Scotland?" A lot of influence, quite a lot of influence, not a lot of influence, no influence at all, don't know.)

IMPACT OF RAS

17. Most customers agreed that Scotland offered them opportunities to study and opportunities to work (with 84% and 65% agreeing with these statements respectively).

18. Contact with RAS had some influence on RAS's customers' thinking about relocation to Scotland. 77% of customers agreed that RAS had some kind of positive influence on their decision about moving to Scotland (16% said that RAS had influenced them a lot, 34% said it had influenced them 'quite a lot' and 27% said it had influenced them 'not a lot').

19. At the time of the survey, over one third of customers said that they had already acted in some way on the advice received from RAS. For some customers personal circumstances did not allow them to take action - this included awaiting the outcome of visa applications, job offers, financial constraints, or commitments to family or studies.

20. The total costs of RAS in its first year were just under £521,000. A lot of these costs were one-off consultancy costs involved in setting up the service. Budgeted staff costs for 2006/07 are £260,000 and make up 50% of total costs.

21. Letter and email have the lowest unit costs for communicating with customers (£1 and £5 respectively). Telephone and face to face have considerably higher costs (both over £25).

22. In terms of very broad comparisons with similar services, such as Careers Scotland and Jobcentre Plus, RAS compares favourably on unit cost per enquiry.

CONCLUSIONS

23. In its first year of operations:

• RAS has started to build relations with key partners.
• its promotional work has been successful in attracting interest from its target audiences
• the majority of RAS customers are satisfied with the services they received
• contact with RAS had a positive influence on customers' decisions about moving to Scotland

24. Areas for possible development have also been identified. In particular both partners and customers considered there was room for improvement in two key area:

• providing a service more tailored to individual needs. Amongst customers, higher skilled customers most often noted this view.
• Reducing response times

RECOMMENDATIONS

25. We recommend that the Executive considers different scenarios for the development of RAS, including the further tailoring of the services and/or targeting of customers. Any consideration of scenarios should take into account resource implications.

26. This evaluation is the first attempt to baseline RAS's service provision. Future evaluations can therefore use this data to measure the progress of the service. It appears, at the moment, that RAS is largely delivering according to initial expectations, but the real measure of impact will depend on the extent to which potential migrants are encouraged to move to Scotland. Due to the infancy of the service, there is little information on the number of people moving to Scotland after using RAS. Future research and evaluation work could therefore target and track people who use RAS to see the impact that the service is having, particularly on those who subsequently move to Scotland.

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