Jobs, jobs, jobs, is the refrain that will echo through Westminster this week. The latest figures are out on Wednesday and unemployment, which currently stands at 2.57m (8.1 per cent), the highest level since 1994, is expected to rise again, while youth unemployment, which currently stands at 991,000, is expected to top a million. The danger of a lost generation is increasing every month.
To add to the gloom, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has warned that the labour market faces a “slow, painful, contraction” with firms delaying recruitment of more staff. Its quarterly poll of 1,000 private, public and voluntary organisations showed that employers in all three sectors intend to add fewer jobs in the coming months. CIPD public policy adviser Gerwyn Davies noted: “recruitment intentions are falling, which will make further rises in unemployment therefore seem inevitable given that public sector job losses are outpacing the predictions made by the Office for Budget Responsibility … There is no immediate sign of UK labour market conditions improving in the short or medium term.” Indeed, in the last quarter, the public sector shed 111,000 jobs, while the private sector created just 41,000.
Interviewed on the Today programme this morning, Mark Hoban, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, sounded alarmingly complacent. As is now traditional, he began by emphasising the damage the eurozone crisis has done to the British economy (“The crisis in the eurozone casts a long shadow over our economy”) ignoring the fact that the growth was falling and unemployment rising long before the current imbroglio. Asked how the government would stimulate growth, he could only point to long-term measures such as “better road networks, better energy infrastructure.” Ministers have not adopted one of the pro-growth policies proposed earlier this month in the New Statesman by nine of the world’s leading economists.
In times of economic crisis, the state has a duty to act as the employer of last resort but the CPID predicts that 610,000 public-sector jobs will be lost by 2016, 210,000 more than forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility. For this reason, the CIPD, hardly a hotbed of radicalism, has called for the government to halt its public sector job cuts until the private sector has recovered. But that’s a message to which George Osborne, besotted with austerity, remains tone deaf.
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