This is genuinely interesting – I presume by “the number of vacancies in each Local Authority.” you have some method of working out where jobs are based when the advertiser wont release that information in their job adverts?

Or do you average them out based on working population density?

How are you factoring in the effects of the temping agency jobs or jobs offered by employers via internal processes without a public advertisement being placed?

“I presume by “the number of vacancies in each Local Authority.” you have some method of working out where jobs are based when the advertiser wont release that information in their job adverts?”

I suspect he’s got the data from NOMIS.

You are right though – 1 vacancy might be advertised in several areas and so appear on the stats several times. Or an agency might be advertising the same job in different ways to get CVs to their database. Plus you factor in comission only/sales type roles that are permanently advertised but aren’t actual vacancies (high staff turnover). Plus the data above doesn’t distinguish between part time and full time vacancies, whether there is a missmatch between skill levels (its largely pointless to use this data is all the vacancies are for doctors, and all the unemployed people have no medical training).

Further evidence of the statistical illliteracy of government ministers. They’ve been warned several times over it.

@IanVisits: As you say, exact vacancies in an area are impossible to find, but the DWP have numbers of all vacancies registered with Job Centres, and this can be broken down into the same areas for JSA claimant count. Obviously both numbers are to be taken with a pinch of salt (not all jobs get into Job Centre Plus figures and not everyone looking for work is claiming JSA), but the results show some worrying increases and are particularly useful for watching trends. You can see more of Anjum’s series here: http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/author/anjum-klair

I’m sure there is a shortage of jobs.

However the table above is ludicrous.
Are the residents of Lewisham, Haringey and Hackney forbidden to seek work in central London?

You can quibble all you like about how the figures are compiled, the point is the trend.

Back in the autum People Before Profit started a campaign in Lewisham to highlight the problem of unemployment.

We called it 20:1, because that was the ratio of job seekers to vacancies.

Since then, as the latest figures show, things have go a lot worse.

“Are the residents of Lewisham, Haringey and Hackney forbidden to seek work in central London?”

No, of course not. I believe that Lewisham has a higher proportion of employees who work outside their borough than anywhere else in London

The table is not “ludicrous”.

What it highlights is the destruction of local industry in London generally and Lewisham in particular.

Come to Lewisham and I will show you the sites of several viable local business that have been forced out and redeveloped as flats.

@ 4 cjcjc

Are the residents of Lewisham….forbidden to seek work in central London?

You make a good point.

In fact, 70% of the working population of Lewisham DO work outside the borough, mostly in Central London.

Not surprising really, given that there are hardly any large private sector businesses in Lewisham. The Council is the largest local employer, the NHS the second largest. Consequently, most local employment is in the public sector.

The minister for disabled people Maria Miller says : There are no shortages of jobs !

Well that is just a bare faced lie. Who is going to give a sick or disabled person a job when there is fit, able and over qualified people ready for work immediately without cause for concern over their health.

Also take a look at youth unemployment, people expected to work longer into old age and the list goes on.

Im am starting to think that these ministers think that the rest of society is deliriously deluded and believes any prevaricating lies that they vomit out.

In addition to this a vast majority of jobs that do arise are short term/temporary or part time. In many cases low paid and out of the area.

I live in Blaenau Gwent and your stats show how many more jobs as a proportion are available since the Labour government was thrown out.

http://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/news/gwentnews/4206864.Now_one_job_for_43_jobseekers_in_Blaenau_Gwent/

The figure you quote shows a dramatic improvement since Labour in 2009. It is still bad mind you but I have an easy fix though.

Stick to Gordon Brown’s idea of British Jobs for British Workers and chuck the foreigners out.

Sorted.

Anon E Mouse @ 9

Records also show that over One Hunred and Seventy Thousand people that came to the United Kingdom as tourist and students went onto claim unemployment benefits. These people should have been given a one way ticket and escorted to the aircraft. I am not against immigration but those that clearly had other intentions and knew loop holes should be removed from this or any other country. This would have saved money and jobs. Then this country would have had those financial resources to care for the sick and disabled without unfairly branding them as scroungers and other equally discriminating labels to justify their cutbacks. In other words target the real cheats.

On previous figures, half of those unemployed in Lewisham will be 16 to 24-year-olds.

Last year 5,100 of the 14,300 young people in the borough were unemployed: that is more than one in three. At 35.8 per cent it was the highest in the country.

As we know youth unemployment has got worse since then.

This is an urgent problem.

We need to create real jobs, especially for young people.

The best way to do this is to reestablish manufacturing industry.

Im also assuming that a majority of those people that come to the United Kingdom as tourist and students that go onto claiming unemployment benefits also work illegally. This has been proved when arrests have been carried out in restuarants, farms, small cothing industry and other companies for illegal workers. They had come as tourist and students and claimed unemployment benefits and also worked.

Our immigration and benefits system has been abused at the expense of all English people, especially that of the sick, disabled and vulnerable in British society. Everyone is being punished for the small number of abusers because this Government has made life harder for the innocent deserving because the few have given them an excuse.

@ 12 Mr James

“Im also assuming that a majority of those people that come to the United Kingdom as tourist and students that go onto claiming unemployment benefits also work illegally. This has been proved when arrests have been carried out in restuarants, farms, small cothing industry and other companies for illegal workers.”

How in hell is that proof?

“I live in Blaenau Gwent ”

There are probably about 3 people in Blaenau Gwent who were born abroad. So adopting a ‘throw the foreigners out’ policy you are advocating would lead to no additional vacancies in your area whatsover.

The reason BG has performed poorly over the last decade was because of the closure of the Ebbw Vale steelworks, and the only replacement being offered by Labour was the opening of the train station so people could commute to cardiff for non-existent call centre jobs.

14 – Planeshift

Being born in Manchester perhaps I should be called an immigrant and I notice you didn’t remark about how the numbers chasing jobs has dramatically reduced under this new government.

The train station would let people fill the jobs in Cardiff once the foreigners had been moved out. It’s common sense.

Perhaps throwing foreigners out elsewhere then would enable people here to “get on their bikes” and fill the vacancies that would become available.

It is daft to suggest that by preventing foreigners doing the jobs it wouldn’t free up an equal number of vacancies for locals.

If it is a proper job and needs doing then someone will be needed to do it.

“British Jobs for British Workers” was about the only credible comment the worst PM in this countries history (certainly unelected and the least popular ever) ever made…

@ cjcjc #4:

Are the residents of Lewisham, Haringey and Hackney forbidden to seek work in central London?

Firstly, there’s no excess of jobs in Central London – checking the data source linked, Westminster has 3.2 claimants for every job centre advert, Camden has 7.1. Admittedly, the City has a ratio of 0.3; but the 433 jobs total won’t go very far.

Again, the cost of transport doesn’t actually help; London fares went up an average of 7% in January this year – with the central London fare increase being loaded to relieve outer London commuters.

“and I notice you didn’t remark about how the numbers chasing jobs has dramatically reduced under this new government.

Ebbw Vale steelworks re-development, and a few other re-development schemes (innovation centre, job match) coming on stream that have had the effect of increasing employment. Besides, Carwyn would probably try take the credit for that. The other reason is young people moving further south for jobs meaning there are fewer working age people locally chasing the vacancies that occur

“It is daft to suggest that by preventing foreigners doing the jobs it wouldn’t free up an equal number of vacancies for locals.”

Lump of labour fallacy. Economic illiteracy at its worst here. Suppose we threw the foreigners out of cardiff – there would be an immediate creation of several hundred vacancies in the health service, including doctors and senior consultants. If you are seriously suggesting the long term unemployed in places like Tredegar are going to fill these posts then I suggest you’ve been in the olympia for too long.

#15. Blaming ‘foreigners’ for unemployment is just the time-honoured tactic of divide-and-rule. Get ordinary people will fight among themselves and hope that they will be too busy to notice that there a regular periods of mass unemployment across the world that occur quite independently of the numbers of uitlanders in any particular country.

If we are going to blame anyone then it should those who are really responsible for the financial economic crisis. That would be tycoons, bankers, the super-rich and the politicians they patronise.

Lewisham is quite cosmopolitan, so we have plenty of ‘foreigners’ including many recent arrivals from Eastern Europe. Why are they here? It’s not for the weather (England?) or the architecture (though personally I find Lewisham has its own charm). The reason is poverty and unemployment in their native lands.

As ordinary people, who have to get a job to make a living, we have a lot of common interests whatever country or city we may have been born (even Manchester).

@ 16 Robin Levett

Admittedly, the City has a ratio of 0.3; but the 433 jobs total won’t go very far.

That figure must be wrong.

The recruitment firm Astbury Marsden has identified almost ten times that number of vacancies in banking/financial services alone.

Some 4,050 jobs were up for grabs in the City of London last month, significantly higher than the 1,490 available in December last year..

Anon E mouse

You have to understand something, all the bleating in the World is changing nothing. There is simply no way the Government can or will force Non British people to leave the UK. All the ‘Ah, buts’ or ‘look here’ or whatever is not going to change a thing. Cardiff station is going to employ as many Eastern Europeans as it can for the foreseeable future. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is not really relevant.

You are going to have to create jobs and millions of them too, if you want cut unemployment by anything significant. Of course, even if you do create millions of jobs a good percentage of them will go to Eastern Europeans anyway.

So you need a plan to create millions of jobs that may actually have a chance of working.

20 Jim

No good asking Anon E Mouse to contribute positive solutions to a jobs crisis made ten times worse by Osborne’s cack-handed economic stewardship.

Backed into a corner, our mutual friend here will always retreat to the warm comforts of ignorant xenophobia.

That figure must be wrong.

The recruitment firm Astbury Marsden has identified almost ten times that number of vacancies in banking/financial services alone.

I doubt they’re advertised in job centres though, which seems to be the criterion for whether there’s a ‘vacancy’. The idea that there are only 433 jobs being advertised in the City of London as a whole is so ludicrous that it ought to be self-refuting.

@ 22 TimJ

I doubt they’re advertised in job centres though, which seems to be the criterion for whether there’s a ‘vacancy’.

Blimey. What a foolish criterion to use.

I must have met or worked with many thousand of people who have jobs. But I do not recall ever encountering a single one who got his/her job at a Jobcentre – and that includes cooks, bar staff, cleaners, secretaries, security guards etc.

@19 Would those 4000 odd jobs be likely to be appropriately filled by the long term unemployed of Tredegar?

Hmm. Interesting use of statistics.

On the face of it this statement from the downloaded analysis seems reasonable too:

please note that the Orkney Islands has been excluded from the data, as the data was to(sic) small for comparison

Although as a seven rows higher you happily compare the Isles of Scilly (6 unemployed, 3 vacancies apparently – I’m guessing the jobcentre there is not open 5 days a week), this leads to interesting questions of what ‘too small’ might actually mean.

Especially as a check of the jobseeker plus site reveals 249 vacancies in Orkney
(I’ve not gone through these, so some might be in northern Caithness to be fair): http://jobseekers.direct.gov.uk/listjob.aspx?sessionid=5b5055b9-a263-4677-b1e0-035fd90adb96&pid=1&sid=342695005&p=1&so=1.

Not sure on unemployment figures for Orkney, but this looks odd to me. Especially since the unemployment rate in Orkney is traditionally one of the lowest in Scotland (damning with faint praise?), so may well mean there are less than 249 claimants.

And when I find something like this, it makes me doubt the worth of the rest of the analysis, as it smacks of manipulation. Doesn’t mean your basic point is wrong (probably isn’t) but means that your figures look untrustworthy.

there’s a stock / flow distinction to be made here – having the number of vacancies (a flow) lower than the number of unemployed (a stock) does not mean there is a shortage of jobs.

ignore for the moment new flows into unemployment, and imagine there are 1m unemployed people. You look at the data and see that there are only 100,000 vacancies. Is there a shortage of jobs? Not really – say vacancies get filled on average within a month, and that vacancy number stays constant, implying that new vacancies are being created as old ones are filled, and you would have reduced unemployment to zero within 10 months.

to get an idea of how the relationship between unemployment and vacancies behaves, you want to look at the Beveridge Curve

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_curve

last time this topic came up, I vaguely recall looking a data and discovering that the quantity of vacancies relative to the the number of unemployed is actually relatively high at the moment, giving credence to the “there is no shortage of jobs” view, but I can’t find it again.

however, an increase in the quantity of vacancies relative to the the number of unemployed need not be good news. It can indicate deterioration in the job market, by which I mean how easily people are able to find jobs (if people can’t find jobs so easily for some reason, vacancies go unfilled, the number of vacancies rises – this stuff is hard to interpret)

see here

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/beveridge-worries/

@25 Well spotted Watchman. I believe the reason for the removal of the Orkneys is that the long list data was mainly used in trying to identify the ten worst areas to keep up the analysis of trends between them over the months, rather than used elsewhere in its entirety (but linked in in case others wanted to see more). With such a small overall sample size, there’s a lot of disproportionate statistical variation in the few tiny locations like this in the chart. For this month, the Orkneys would have oddly suddenly turned out the worst UK location for the unemployment ratio, so I think they got trimmed off as an extreme outlier, rather than lead the story that there was a worse overall problem there than in Lewisham. The particular wording used could be better tho – a good point to work on that for other months if the longer data is released too.

“But I do not recall ever encountering a single one who got his/her job at a Jobcentre – ”

I think that says it all about the usefulness of job centres.

Flowerpower @ 23

But I do not recall ever encountering a single one who got his/her job at a Jobcentre

But that doesn’t mean they were not advertised in he job centre though, does it?

@Flowerpower & TimJ:

I actually see a reasonable logic in using job centre-advertised vacancies as a criterion for the number of available jobs to compare with benefit claimants.The 4,050 jobs mentioned by Astbury Marsden in FP’s #19 are in practice probably (i) available only to those already in work (who is going to offer a job in financial services to someone not good enough already to have work?) and (ii) often currently filled by someone working out his/her notice before moving to one of the jobs that was advertsied by AM last month. They are part of a churn which cancels itself out.

John,

Thanks for that, which seems a viable suggestion as to why the mistake was made.

However, as the 11th highest ratio of vacancies to claimants was Middlesborough at 18.9, if we assume Orkney was actually 10th with no significant difference to Middlesborough (and thus with the same ratio), this would imply that there were 4706 benefit claimants in Orkney, out of a population of 20 000 or so. Which would definetly be worth the headline (especially as this is a Liberal Democrat constituency), but is probably not the case.

Robin,

All very well saying that, but I get my employment from non-job-centre advertised positions, but on the odd occasion I have been unemployed I still claim benefits from the job centre. So whilst you may be right about the posts in other forms of advertising being churn rather than new posts (albeit this is more difficult to argue in say the jobs section of a local paper), the figures for job centres do actually include those involved in the churn, but who are not long-term unemployed (or at least hopefully for them are not…).

@21 – BenM

You are ignoring the facts (again).

Where I live in Blaenau Gwent the number of people chasing jobs has dramatically reduced from the bad old days of Labour, the party that punished the poor and rewarded the rich.

The ratio is down to 19.3 from 43 according to the figures presented here.

Planeshift – I drive or get the train to work every day – my missus, a Social Worker, drives 57 miles to work. There is no reason why people in Tredegar should be any different from us two – I do a minimum wage job starting every morning at 0600 and they can do the same.

The mindset in this country needs a rapid reboot…

If I understand it correctly, the data in the table relate to the local claimant rate divided by the local vacancy rate.

However, I do wonder how relevant that is for the huge job market in London – and probably other large conurbations as well – where workers will often travel out of their home boroughs or districts to work and where the travel to work stats show mass inward commuting into central London every day from the outer boroughs. The stats presented bear no relationship to regular travel to work patterns.

This is not to say that I’m going along with dubious claims that there is no shortage of jobs – why else is the ILO unemployment rate rising? What is happening to regional employment rates is arguably a better indication of buoyancy in regional labour markets. It’s generally recognised that published vacancy stats usually understate the actual number of vacancies and we do have some persisting skill shortages – which explains reluctance of government and business for too tight a clamp down on inward migration.

@33

The ratio is down to 19.3 from 43 according to the figures presented here.

Actually looking at the figures presented in the larger blogpost linked in the OP, the data in fact shows an increase from 5.0 (2007) to 19.3 (2011) for Blaenau Gwent.

Of course a lot of those jobs may have been filled or they are for position which do not suit the disabled person, or anyone for that matter.

I’m disabled in Carmarthen, but to be honest I use a wheelchair, so when i was asked to do cold calling on the public for insurance I asked what happens if the houses have steps , they said can you not get out of your chair just to knock on the doors.

Then I was sent remember I’m in a wheelchair bricklaying I’m sixty and have never laid a brick in my life, then scafolding they said the employer has to change his method to accommodate you, no they do not

But in my area we have 12,456 people on unemployment and sickness and a total of 64 jobs four are for Dentist two working in the legal profession, and a number are for carers in fact that is the largest number.

5 years well over 2700 job application so far and not to many people bother answering, But now the council have closed the job club we use to use, saying the money can be betetr directed, cannot wait to see where.

Tim J @ 22

The idea that there are only 433 jobs being advertised in the City of London as a whole is so ludicrous that it ought to be self-refuting.

To be honest though, I doubt the type of jobs that ‘Astbury Marsden’ are recruiting for are typical of the jobs that the longer term unemployed and those bumped of incapacity benefit are likely to be applying for.

The problem nationwide is that when you see a job advertised locally for entry level and a few rungs upward, tens of people apply for those jobs. A supermarket opened recently about five miles from me and about two thousand people applied for around two hundred jobs. By common consent, we normally have an over subscription rate around the same for most entry-level jobs in the County. In some cases, that figure rises to twenty or thirty per vacancy.

There is nowhere round that, Tim, with the best will in the World, no-one can get all those millions of people nationwide a job. Giving people like a4e taxpayer’s cash to tart up a useless, empty CV and mock interview many of these people is an expensive joke.

There is a guy about four doors from my mother’s house. He was made redundant about ten years ago. Two years later, he had a minor stroke and has complications from angina; needless to say, he passed his ATOS test with flying colours (different thread). Now leaving aside the ATOS aspect, he has been signed up onto the books on a shower called ‘Ingeous’ the local rent seeking shysters in charge of finding him work. I work pretty close to them actually and I know a couple of them on nodding terms and the odd ‘bloody cold the morning, eh’ while in the queue of the sandwhich van. Of course, they have a plush office and the car park is stuffed solid with mid range cars, a few four by fours, a Saab and a few minis and the like. Fair enough. We are paying for these cars so we can drag a sixty two year old, semi mobile man, with an empty CV through hoops and content ourselves that we are ‘helping’ him back into work. The guy has no IT skills, yet they expect him to send out e-mails. They end up doing it all for him anyway because it is easier than explaining it to him.

This guy will be extremely unlikely to work again; who would employ him when there are a dozen guys out there eager to work and fit as a butcher’s dog and with relevant experience out there? Do you know how this mob make their money? No, not by helping the unskilled and clueless find non existent money, but by making sure that they share out blue chip candidates among each other. Who is looking at forty CVs and picks out the person least likely to do the work and give him a job.

There was a guy who came home from the Middle East in the place, he signed on to maintain his stamps and gave him some breathing room to get his stuff moved back into his home. Within three days, this guy had found work without any help from his advisor. A couple of CVs printed and bang. The taxpayer write a cheque for a guy who would have got a job anyway.

The thing is, there is a bit of value here. If we can get someone ‘on the turn’ an unemployed guy who has been unemployed for three months and losing touch with the labour force back into work befotre his CV becomes toilet paper, then we will have scored, but the guy who is getting a job anyway and the guy who is a waste of paperwork?

Why are we paying someone the cost of a Ford Focus to help a sixty year old man to look for work that simply isn’t there?

” I drive or get the train to work every day – my missus, a Social Worker, drives 57 miles to work. There is no reason why people in Tredegar should be any different from us two – I do a minimum wage job starting every morning at 0600 and they can do the same.”

No disagreement, if people can commute they should. But the key thing there is you both drive, and thus have access to cars. Not everyone does, which means relying on public transport.

Tredegar does not have a train station. Its bus service mean it is possible to commute to cardiff or newport for a normal office hour job. But not shift work, which given the skill levels of the population, means lack of public transport is an issue that comes up time and time again throughout the valleys. Also bear in mind BG has the lowest level of childcare provision in south wales….