Retail sales down, employment up, inflation unchanged; what are we to make of the latest economic indicators?
Good News?
The latest quarterly figures come as Vince Cable tells the GMB union that “a recovery has begun” and “The post-crisis repair of the UK economy is underway,” the IMF confirmed in its latest assessment of the UK economy albeit with fingers crossed in some areas.
The headline figures
The headline figure in the statistics was that in the three months to April this year, unemployment fell by 88,000 to 2.43m and, perhaps of greater significance given concerns about youth unemployment, much of this fall could be attributed to an improvement amongst 16-24 year olds. “The number of unemployed people in this age group fell by 79,000 over the quarter to reach 895,000, the lowest figure since the three months to April 2009.”
Trends among young people
According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) figures, the number of 16-24 year olds in full-time education, increased by 61,000, over the last quarter. This underlines the growing trend of young people staying on in General FE in many cases waiting for things to improve and hoping to pick up qualifications on the way.
Many people agree with Alison Wolf that English and Mathematics are essential requirements but beyond these, discussion continues about how best to build in skills needed for the workplace. The latest CBI Skills survey, amongst others, extol the virtues of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, also state that language skills and flexibility remains important.
Public and Private Sectors
Much of the growth in employment seems to have been fuelled by an increase in private sector jobs, an increase of 104,000 over the last quarter.
This is very much what the Government had hoped for and is part of its declared strategy yet in the public sector, things appear less rosy, a drop of 24,000 over the same period. That coupled with a further increase in the number of people working part-time, up to 1.21m, “the highest figure since comparable figures began in 1992,” suggest that a differential labour market is emerging. There’s one other disarming stat to note as well and that is that while the number of people out of work for less than a year fell, the number who have been out of work for more than two years or more actually increased.
The worrying expectation of the government is that all of us are to remain in employment until the age of 68. This would lead to lost employment opportunities for a generation. For example, whilst elderly teachers, construction workers, etc would be in employment the young newly qualified teachers, other graduates and fitter younger people, keen to enter the job market would be unemployed.
Acknowledgements
Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning
