UK and Worcestershire Unemployment in August 2012

Unemployment fell in the UK last month on both the broader headline figure and the claimant count.  The West Midlands region bucked the national trend with an increase in unemployment and so did Worcestershire.  The increases are not large but they point to the suspicion in the articles above that some of the national increase is attributable to London and the South East and to an Olympic Games effect.  It remains to be seen what will happen in coming months and how much temporary employment there is in the run-up to Christmas.

There still seems to be a discrepancy between recessionary GDP figures (even if slightly better in the recent revision to - 0.5% instead of - 0.7%) and employment growth.  The numbers of people in employment do seem to include quite high numbers of people working in temporary positions, part-time when they would rather work full-time and people who are self employed but who may not be getting a lot of work.  Nationally, there has been a slight increase in the number of women employed compared with a slight drop for men, but in Worcestershire there has been a slight increase in women’s unemployment (by 0.1%), though there is not enough detail in the figures to be able to say more.

Nationally, there has been an increase in the numbers employed in the private sector and a drop in the public sector, though this is masked to some extent by a recent change of classification of those working in FE from public to private and the speed of drop in numbers in the public sector has been slowing.  However, talking to those working in the public sector, the future depends very much on what the spending settlement for 2013 onwards looks like.

From Worcestershire County Council’s County EconomicSummary, the unadjusted Job Seeker’s Allowance unemployment total for Worcestershire was 10,607 in August 2012, an increase of 62 claimants from the previous month but down 680 (Redditch down 223, Worcester down 202) compared with a year ago. The county rate of 3.8% is unchanged from last month and compares with the West Midlands region (6.6%) and England and Wales (5.4%).  Across the county, the district with the highest unemployment rate is Worcester (4.8%) and the lowest is Malvern Hills, (2.9%).  In terms of urban centres, Kidderminster had the highest unemployment rate at 5.3% and the lowest was in Wythall (1.8%).

The male unemployment rate in Worcestershire is 4.6% (unchanged from last month), compared to the female rate of 2.9% (up by 0.1%).  There has been a small fall in the proportion of claimants claiming benefit for more than six months – 0.1% to 40.8% but those claiming over 12 months have increased by 0.6% to 22.6% between July 2012 and August 2012.  Last month 3,130 people aged 18-24 were claiming JSA benefit compared to 3,085 in July and 3,450 in August last year.  Of the August number 2,685 that had been claiming for up to one year. This is 6.5% of the 18-24 population, and is still higher than the England average.  There is considerable variation across the county, though the ten wards with the highest rates shown in the Economic Summary tend to be in the list most if not every month, but none the less, there does seem to have been a drop in numbers just recently.  Whether this will continue into the new academic year remains to be seen.

The number of notified vacancies in Worcestershire was 5,143 in July 2012. This is 28.4% higher than in July 2012.  This is significantly greater than the change month on month last year, but the figures do change quite significantly month on month so it is difficult to be sure of trends.