Unemployment needs city-specific solutions

Centre for Cities launches Cities Outlook 2012 today, which shows how cities are fairing against the backdrop of a sluggish national economy. This year the report focuses on unemployment in our largest urban areas.

For this reason both the government and the work programme providers must take a varied response to the UK’s unemployment problem. The report, sponsored by IBM and the LGA, shows that not only is there a big difference in the number of job seekers between cities but the gap between them has also increased in recent years.

While the number of people in Cambridge claiming jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) is just 1.8 per cent of the total working age population, the number of people claiming JSA in Hull stands at 8.0 per cent.

And the gap between the two cities has more than doubled since the onset of the recession; it has widened from 3.1 percentage points in February 2008 to 6.2 percentage points in November 2011.

Similar patterns are seen for youth and long term job seekers. In Grimsby around one in 10 people aged under 25 claims JSA. This is in clear contrast to York where just one young person in 40 claims unemployment benefit.

Nick Clegg recently announced the ‘youth contract’ as a response to youth unemployment exceeding one million. Unfortunately the national approach of this policy does not account for the greater difficulty that a young person in Grimsby faces in finding a job than one in York (see Figure 9). And yet this is a key dimension of the unemployment problem and one that future policy will need to address.

Choosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from

via What’s right for Aberdeen isn’t for York; unemployment needs city-specific solutions | Left Foot Forward.