Recent Unemployment Figures for Worcestershire

A slightly belated update on the February unemployment figures due to my catching up after having been off work as mentioned previously.

Unemployment inWorcestershire increased in February by 415 to 11,819.  This is on the unadjusted claimant count rather than the more widely nationally quoted basis of those available for work.  Worcestershire also measures its working population figures slightly differently to the ONS so the percentages below are not strictly comparable to nationally quoted figures.

The unemployment rate increased by 0.1% to 4.2%with an increase of 0.2% in the male rate to 5.2% compared to a 0.1% increase in the female rate to3.1%.  This is contrary to the national changes, which I shall discuss below.  Unemployment for claimants in the West Midlands as a whole stands at 7.0%.  By way of comparison, the national figure for JSA claimants is 1.61 million whilst the headline figure is 2.67 million.

The district with the highest unemployment rate is Worcester City (5.4%) and the lowest are Bromsgrove and Malvern, (both 3.2%).  In terms of urban centres, Kidderminster had the highest unemployment rate at 5.8% and the lowest was in Bewdley (2.4%).  The largest increases in the past month are in Wychavon, up 123 of which 78 are in Droitwich, Worcester, up by 113 and Redditch, up by 77.

Youth unemployment in the County continues to rise, reaching 3,600 JSA claimants aged 18-24 compared to 3,440 in January and 3,375 February last year.  Of the 3,600, 3,270 had been claiming for up to one year, which is 7.9% of the 18-24 population and an increase of 0.3 percent compared to January 2012. This remains marginally higher than the England average.  The worst affected ward remains Oldington and Foley Park in Kidderminster at 17.4% (though down from 19.4% last year).  The remaining ‘top ten’ change slightly from month to month but are sadly the places that feature in other indices of deprivation or highest need.  The tenth placed ward (Arley Kings) is at 12.3% - this still represents one in eight of their young people being without work or training.  In terms of the diocesan Commission for Social Responsibility’s deprived areas pilot study, Gorse Hill and Rainbow Hill in Worcester and Lodge Park and Greenlands in Redditch are in or adjacent to two of the pilot areas.

Worcester’s unemployment increase was against the national trend as the larger rise was in men as opposed to women.  However, the bald statistics at a national level don’t tell the full story as this BBC article shows.  It seems that men are still losing jobs more quickly, but that more women may be entering the workforce, though not all of them are able to get jobs.  This also adds complexity to the supposed loss of jobs (proportionately more of women) in the public sector and the increase in jobs in the private sector.  It also seems that once again more generally, there are increasing numbers of part-time jobs (+59,000) and falling numbers of full-time jobs (-50,000).  The number of people working part-time because they could not find a full-time job increased by 110,000 to its highest level since records began in 1992.      

The number of vacancies in Worcestershire was 4,439 in February 2012. This is 22.8% higher than in January, but January is generally lower after the rise in seasonal vacancies for Christmas. The jury remains out on whether we will have a technical double dip recession (two quarters of ‘negative growth’) or just bump along the bottom for some time to come.  Whichever happens, we are hopefully reaching near the bottom of the unemployment graph but as this is a ‘lagging indicator’ – it takes time for employers to decide things are getting sufficiently better to take people on – we are not likely to see much of an improvement for some time.  If, as many think, we are still unwinding private as well as public debt and there are relatively few policy levers that can be pulled (or that there is no willingness to look at anything other than Mr Osborne’s Plan A)then we could be in this situation for some time to come.  

Not Always Being in Control

I have not posted anything for a week or two because I unexpectedly found myself in hospital for a week following an accident.  In the realisation that suddenly, from ‘I don’t do being ill’ to having little choice about being kept in hospital I had moved from being in control of my life (so far as one balances free will with God’s engagement with our lives) to being at the mercy of others’ decisions, I was reminded of WH Vanstone’s book ‘The Stature of Waiting’ (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982 and 2004).

I first came across this book in trying to make sense of the struggles I faced when my older son was critically ill in hospital.  However, I don’t want to focus on medical illness, but rather to think about what Vanstone has to say that might help in making sense of those other times when we feel at a loss, like being made redundant; being unemployed, when all we want is for someone to ‘give us a job’, as one of the characters in ‘Boys from the Black Stuff’ would say; or perhaps being retired when we don’t want to be, and so on.  And I write this also as a reminder to those of us who are used to being ‘in control’ who may find it hard to understand how others feel when at the mercy of events or powers beyond their control.

In Chapter 3, ‘The Status of Patient’, Vanstone makes the point about the change, in similar circumstances to my accident, when someone who might be ordering and arranging their own affairs and perhaps those of others, creating their own immediate future and in control of their immediate destiny, suddenly passes into the hands of others and becomes dependant on their decisions and actions.  What happens, happens to them, what is done is done to them and hardly depends at all on their own efforts or decisions.

The person has become a patient, a word which is derived via the Latin from the Greek pascho.  This is significant in Vanstone’s thinking because the rest of the book is about the significance as he sees it of Christ’s Passion – it is as important as what follows in the Biblical account.  Christ hands himself over, he is passive, not in the negative sense of that word in today’s interpretation, but in the sense that he allows others to direct his destiny.  It is in exploring the meaning of this ‘waiting’ from which the title of the book derives.

Vanstone goes on to make the point about the many situations in which we feel less and less in control of our lives and destiny in our modern world.  He makes the point about retired people, particularly at the time when the book was written of those being offered early retirement, possibly at a time when they still had much to offer the working world.  He also identified the many that with increasing life expectancy might go on living lives of variable quality over which they had limited control for possibly a long time.

In our present situation, though, it happens frequently that someone who is in a job with responsibility, or simply one that gives their life meaning and purpose and allows them to provide for themselves, can suddenly find all of that undermined by the threat of redundancy.  And whilst I have recently received a booklet on the power of positive thinking and how to transform one’s situation when faced with redundancy, not everyone is in a situation where they are able to find new work simply by their own efforts.  The discouragement and sense of being at the mercy of others or of events can be only too real, and those of us who are used to being in control need to recognise where positive thinking can work and where circumstances would overcome even the most positive person.  Vanstone makes the point about longer term unemployment that (even if one were reasonably provided for materially) there is a difference to the sense of worth and being of a person who is dependant and receiving as compared with someone whose role in life is productive and who is thereby giving.

But, Vanstone says, even if much of life more widely is now such that we are carried along by forces beyond our control, there is a sense in which we must not be seen to acquiesce to this.  The disabled person is not offered help but ‘re-ablement’, the retired person is busier than ever, and the unemployed person must look for work and fill their time with activities that will enhance their CV.  In this he is raising the question of ‘whether the public and professed attitudes of today do not necessarily express the final truth about human worth and dignity or about the proper role and status of man in the world.’ (2004:50).

So as well as reminding those of us used to being ‘in control’ to be aware of what it is like for those who have lost that condition in life, he is also questioning whether control and activity are the only or the best way of being.  What Vanstone is doing in the rest of the book is pointing up that in his Passion Jesus accepts, receives, what is done to him and that this is not wholly negative as we might be inclined to view it today.  For that acceptance of waiting on what would happen is not without purpose or meaning.  It is a conscious act in which there is awareness of the world around and of what is happening.  The world, which bears the image of God, exists to supply our needs and offers the possibility and power of meaning.  So it may be that the values of control and independence and activity are part of God’s creativity in which we participate but might also be rooted more in the needs of the comparatively recent capitalist system, and that in fact the ‘special dignity of ‘man’ lies in the presence in him, marred but not effaced, of the image of God’ (2004:111).  If this is so, then receptivity and openness, even suffering in the older sense of the word, become as important as activity.  

LEPs - some further reflections

In my last post about Local Enterprise Partnerships I compared what I heard at the public meeting of my local LEP in Worcestershire with some of the research done by academics in a number of parts of the country and presented at Coventry Business School.

In reflecting on that some further questions have occurred to me.  From all that I've heard and read, it is clear that the purpose of the LEP is to stimulate enterprise, facilitate inward investment and encourage existing firms to stay and to help them expand, to help with infrastructure support and lastly in Worcestershire's vision and objectives to, 'Invest in the skills of our workforce ensuring that provision is responsive to business needs, and relevant to future growth and business opportunities.'

One of the speakers at the LEP conference was a local entrepreneur, who spoke impressively about economic growth and new jobs coming from new businesses and from entrepreneurship (though his business employs only four people in Worcester and presumably the production is outsourced, we know not where).  Concern was also expressed during a presentation on apprenticeships about unemployment amongst young people.  I guess my question is about the connection between the activity to encourage businesses and the number and type of jobs.

Worcestershire County Council's Economic Strategy, refreshed in June 2010 for the economic downturn, still speaks of delivering the priority in the County's Sustainable Community Strategy of "Economic success that is shared by all".  I am not criticising the LEP when I raise this question because I am not convinced that previous policies and bodies had made any greater connection between trying to help business growth and the types of jobs that might be secured.  Much play was made in previous West Midlands regional and the County economic strategies about high skill, high value added jobs, and I well recall being unpopular when raising the question of a former colleague about work for those who did or could not aspire to those types of jobs.  I do recall a later change of tone on this, particularly in relation to the refresh of the county's strategy.

There was talk at the LEP conference about attracting hi-tech, advanced manufacturing, professional firms, distribution and other quality employers.  One criticism from the study presented at Coventry University is that all LEPs are trying to attract hi-tech, advanced manufacturing and usually also bio-technology, nano-science and the like, and that clearly not everyone can go for the same things.  There does appear to be some differentiation in Worcestershire, and some play was made of the motorway network running through the County, both as a plus point for distribution and other firms needing good communications, and also as a way of promoting Worcestershire, which at present a large number of people drive through but are not told anything about it.

There is clearly a lot of work to be done on making the connections with the skills firms need, and the apprenticeship programme may help that.  There are also questions about the types of jobs that will be created and any influence there can be through the types of industries that may be encouraged.  Some of these questions about jobs being for people rather than people for jobs should not be forgotten even if much is also down to wider policy and macro-economic issues that are not within the power of those locally to influence.  


  

Local Enterprise Partnerships: local reality and critical study

I recently went to the first (possibly annual) public meeting of the Worcestershire Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP).  LEPs have been in existence for barely a year and replace the regional development agencies (RDAs), such as Advantage West Midlands.  They are not a direct replacement as they are generally more local and have substantially less money and little statutory power.  I had a couple of weeks previously been to a seminar about LEPs at Coventry Business School.  It was interesting to see the differences in the views expressed.

  

Much of Worcestershire’s first year has been spent getting board structures and governance in place.  One of the major differences with the RDAs is that the LEPs have no funding as such for themselves and almost no direct access to finance.  What they can do is to act as a broker and facilitator.  The LEP’s own website says:  ‘The LEP’s task is to shape the best business environment for the county, stimulate growth of the local economy, encourage inward investment, boost enterprise and job creation, and actively promote Worcestershire as a great place to invest and work.’  The board is required to be largely business people (though the RDAs boards were also business-led), but perhaps in the case of a small LEP such as Worcestershire’s, the sense is that the local business community feel they have greater ownership.  This seems to be part of a change of tone from Government towards a more business-oriented approach, rather than local and national government bodies and agencies, and is also part of the move towards localism.

There seemed to be energy and enthusiasm from those making presentations, though much of what I heard was fairly familiar.  The two memorable things were the stark way in which the loss of young people was expressed – 85 % of those who either leave Worcestershire to study never return, or who come to the University and other institutions leave the County at the end of their course; and the danger of complacency – reference was made to JK Galbraith’s book ‘The Culture of Contentment’ that warns it is those places that are neither particularly rich nor poor that face the greatest dangers.  That is because they are not poor enough to get grant aid of any size, nor so rich that they can create their own wealth – a scenario we are familiar with in Worcestershire.  It was also argued that there is greater disparity between rich and poor within a ‘middling’ area than poorer places where everyone is less well off or wealthier places where everyone is doing okay, with consequent social tensions.  I think I’d want further evidence about that claim.

Some very small pieces of funding for four development projects were announced but the overall impression was of the paucity of funding – even the three members of staff and office accommodation is largely from money or in kind found by local partners.  And the Worcestershire LEP, being really quite small compared with our neighbours and with the three northern districts riding two horses at the same time with Birmingham and Solihull, means that some funding is already modest and then has to be shared with our neighbouring LEP.

Part of the purpose of the LEP is to coordinate bids to the Regional Growth Fund, the third round of which has just been announced.  However, one of the criticisms of the seminar at Coventry Business School (that brought together ongoing research from Yorkshire, the North east and the West Midlands) was that in the first round there was a fundamental disconnect between the funds awarded and ‘sub-national strategic development priorities’ and also a lack of alignment with European funds.  The other fundamental criticism, which has been apparent from much of what I have already written, is the much diminished amount of money available.  The response of one politician to me that there is no money left (echoing Liam Byrne’s note at the Treasury on leaving office) suggests either we have no money for crucial economic regeneration and are really in a fix, that difficult choices would have to be made as against other government programmes, or that there is a judgement that has been made that we will do things in a different way that the critical academics haven’t bought.  The following quote in the research paper, from CLG, seems to bring together the first and third possibilities in saying that a new approach is needed to ensure that: ‘local economies prosper: that parts of the country previously over-reliant on public funding see a resurgence in private sector enterprise and employment; and that everyone gets to share in the resulting growth.’

The study does show that some of the bigger and more resourceful LEPs, largely in based on the conurbations, seem to be going ahead with a number of quite big and resourceful ideas and projects.  That seems to be because some of these LEPs are based on other previously existing arrangements such as city regions and can be classified as ‘refashioned existing partnerships’.  Others, of which I think Worcestershire is an example, could be classified as ‘new partnerships’, although Worcestershire is not really in a partnership with anyone (apart from the internal partnerships of existing private and public sector groups) save the overlap in the north.  It does seem, though, that it is anticipated, indeed it is in the government guidance, that LEPs will cooperate with each other and form partnerships for pieces of work.  There was some evidence of that at the Worcestershire meeting with talk of communication between LEPs

There appears to be limited opportunity for the voluntary sector to be involved.  The main board according to the Worcestershire LEP website appears to be made up of four reps from each of the private and public sectors, and the business board consists of 15 business reps and five people representing housing associations (2), a community interest company, the Central Technology Belt and the rural community council.

It would be easy to be critical of the lack of funding and the limited statutory powers, but these are not the LEPs’ fault.  Rather they represent a different way of doing things and this seems to be embraced by those leading the Worcestershire LEP at least.  One might also worry about the limitations of the size and lack of partnership with other areas inherent in the Worcestershire LEP.  However, this is a reflection of the county’s geographic and economic situation and there is little that can be done about this at present.  It does instead allow a degree of focus solely on the one area, accepting the divided loyalties of the northern districts.

So we wait to see how the LEP delivers against its mission statement: ‘Our Local Enterprise Partnership will drive business growth throughout the county and provide the essential leadership to stimulate local enterprise, jobs and skills.  It will build on the high levels of enterprise and home working across the county and maximise the value of our natural and economic assets in an environmentally sustainable way...  The Local Enterprise Partnership proposes to provide access to finance for businesses, engage in cluster development and locally tailored business support particularly to encourage the areas (sic) growth and traditional sectors, promote innovation, and encourage graduate retention.’  For more specific details about how the LEP intends to fulfil their mission it is worth looking at their Vision and Objectives.