The Government’s aim is employment opportunity for all, the modern definition of full employment. In the dynamic, modern labour market, this cannot be delivered through jobs for life, but rather through ensuring job opportunities for all throughout their working lives. The last few years have seen a substantial improvement in Britain’s labour market. Since May 1997, the number of people in employment has increased by three quarters of a million. Claimant unemployment has fallen to its lowest level since March 1980, while the Labour Force Survey measure is at its lowest level since the series began in 1984. Alongside these falls in unemployment, the number of vacancies has risen to record levels. Whereas the recovery of the late 1980s was largely confined to the South of England, this time, every region in Britain has seen sharply falling unemployment and rising levels of vacancies.
Within regions, though, there remain pockets of high unemployment. A tail of around 15-20 local authority districts have not enjoyed the fruits of recovery seen throughout the rest of Britain. The majority of these areas are in inner cities, but seaside towns and former coal mining areas also feature. Often people from ethnic minorities, lone parents and people with disabilities are disproportionately concentrated within these small areas. They may suffer from poor housing, inadequate transport links and high crime rates, leading to social exclusion. Low employment rates are often both the cause and effect of these areas’ problems.
However, the problem of Britain’s most deprived areas is not necessarily a lack of jobs – in almost every case, these areas sit alongside, and within travelling distance of, labour markets with high levels of vacancies. People need to be equipped to take advantage of those opportunities. The Government therefore needs programmes to increase the employability of people in deprived areas, alongside those aimed at regenerating these communities, so that people from deprived areas can access and fill the vacancies that exist near to where they live.
In addition to ensuring job opportunities, making work pay and providing people with the scope to enhance their skills, there is a case for further measures, specifically targeted at helping people in the most deprived areas to be able to compete more effectively for jobs in nearby labour markets with high vacancy levels.
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