Belfast Stories Public Consultation November 2025

11. Making a difference

The development and delivery of Belfast Stories presents both opportunity and responsibility. The promise and benefits offered by Belfast Stories must be shared fairly across our city’s communities, ensuring that the prosperity it creates is felt by everyone - not just a few. Belfast Stories’ commitment to delivering sustainable and inclusive growth is about our care for current and future generations.

This requires a clear and coordinated approach that translates broad ambitions for fairness, sustainability, and productivity into practical actions. To deliver on this we will bring together all those involved in Belfast Stories to ensure sustainable and inclusive growth is a shared responsibility, evident in how we work and a natural by-product of the project.

We are currently developing our inclusive growth plan. We have identified a set of key levers to be applied across the work of Belfast Stories to help ensure that opportunities for inclusive growth and sustainability are not missed and are optimised.

Under each lever, support for priority groups will be designed based on local need to improve opportunities for skills and employment.

We want to get your feedback on what we are proposing and whether there are other areas or gaps that we could address. We welcome ideas and examples of what has worked well to deliver benefits as part of other investments.

Lever that will help deliver inclusive growth	What it means for Belfast Stories
1. Procurement and commissioning	Include social clauses, targeted recruitment, training, fair work standards, or SME/social-enterprise supply chain opportunities.
2. Employment, skills and workforce development	Ensure project creates or supports good jobs, accessible training, and progression routes especially for target groups. This could include: Offering paid apprenticeship roles, ringfenced entry level posts or pre-recruitment programmes. Enhancing focus on those under-represented, outreach, pre-engagement in schools. Providing work placements and employability/education support to those most in need.
3. Community engagement and co-design	Continue to involve communities meaningfully in shaping the project, building trust and shared ownership.
4. Fair work and inclusive employers	Promote quality employment — fair pay, job security, equality, diversity and wellbeing.
5. Place-making and regeneration	Develop Belfast Stories to be a vibrant, accessible and affordable place to visit and that acts as an attraction in the locality drawing visitors to it and other opportunities to the area.
6. Investment and economic development	Target investment towards sectors and places that yield social as well as economic returns, and ensure benefits are spread across local communities.
7. Accessibility and participation	Ensure equal access - physical, digital, cultural - for all groups, especially people with disabilities, older/younger residents, and minority communities. Support social mobility where possible. Encourage volunteering.
8. Sustainability and environmental resilience	Integrate climate action, resource efficiency, and environmental justice into the project - ensuring that green growth also benefits disadvantaged communities.
9. Monitoring, data and evaluation	Collect data on how to ensure accountability and the ability to act on data to make changes.

10. Building a home for our stories

12. Enabling future generations

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