Unemployment soaring in most unexpected places
Mar 23 2009 by Jonathan Walker, Birmingham Post
For well-educated professionals and high-flying managers, a visit to the job centre may well be a new experience.
They may have changed employers in the past, and some will have done so frequently. But it will usually have been a voluntary move, not one forced on them by redundancy.
And even when businesses have made cuts, many white collar workers have a network of contacts able to help them find gainful employment.
The recession has changed all that, and job centres have been ordered by the Government to prepare themselves for a new breed of “client”, as they are known.
Tony McNulty, the employment minister, has stressed that every region of the country, and every sector of the economy, will be hit.
This is partly because the recession is a direct result of the inability of the banks to offer credit, which has hit everyone.
And it means that the recession is following a very different pattern to the downturn of the 1980s, when parts of the economy were almost unaffected while manufacturing, in particular, suffered.
As a result, some of the highest increases in unemployment over the past 12 months have occurred in surprising places.
Buckingham has seen the number of claimants increase by 200 per cent. In other words, the number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance has tripled.
South West Surrey is another constituency with a major increase, with the figure increasing by 186 per cent.
In the West Midlands, the constituency of Lichfield has experienced an increase of 160 per cent, while the number of claimants in Aldridge-Brownhills, one of the wealthiest parts of the Black Country, increased by 118 per cent, more than doubling.
It’s important to note than the total number out of work is still relatively low in the so-called leafy suburbs.
For example, Sutton Coldfield suffered a bigger increase in unemployment than any other part of Birmingham as a proportion of the total, with the number of claimants increasing from 833 to 1,660 – an increase of 99 per cent. But neighbouring Erdington, which includes a number of working class communities, saw claimant numbers rise from 3,341 to 4,880. This is an increase of 46 per cent, but it still leaves Erdington with far more people out of work.
One of the responses from Jobcentre Plus is the introduction of clubs modelled on the job clubs of the 1990s, which provide an chance for people to swap ideas and offer mutual support.
