Region's data masks local issues

By Richard Smith
Business Correspondent, Tunbridge Wells

Some coastal areas have particularly high unemployment

A few weeks ago I visited some friends in Lichfield near Birmingham.

Walking through the quiet, spotless and exceedingly leafy suburban streets it was hard to believe that this was the region with the highest unemployment benefit claimant rate in the UK.

Similarly, when seeing the large numbers of people walking in and out of Gravesend job centre the other day, it was strange to think I was in the region with the lowest unemployment rate in the country - the South East.

But that's because the large governmental regions which England is divided up into can mask the economic diversity of the counties, districts, towns and wards within it.

The South East England Development Agency's (Seeda) thorough and pretty blunt report on the economic state of the region makes these differences very clear.

Refreshingly it seems there is no attempt to gloss over the bad bits or paint an overly-optimistic vision of the near-future Richard Smith

And refreshingly it seems there is no attempt to gloss over the bad bits or paint an overly-optimistic vision of the near-future. Nor does it wallow in the misery of it all.

The stand-out fact from the regional perspective is that despite everything, the South East is doing OK in this recession - or at least, better than everyone else.

Unemployment rates are very low, and the lack of one dominating industry - such as car manufacture in the West Midlands - means the region is less vulnerable if one sector is hit hard.

But taking statistics from such disparate counties as Kent, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and East Sussex and grouping them together doesn't necessarily produce anything particularly meaningful.

'Prosperous South East'

Instead, it smoothes out the bumps - higher jobless figures in Kent and along much of the coast - with the soothingly low unemployment rates in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hampshire.

These counties might all have proximity to London in common, but the detail in the Seeda report serves to highlight the vast differences between places which are so often lumped together as "the prosperous South East".

The unemployed in the district of Gravesham, Kent - where there are 20 applicants for every job advertised - are unlikely to be heartened to know that in several other counties there are fewer than five people after each vacancy.

And the dangers of generalising don't end with geography. The people on the sharpest end of the recession - the ones losing their jobs - are far more varied in background than one might think.

I'm an economist, not a gardener Paul Lovejoy, Seeda executive director

It is months now since the images of sacked bankers clutching boxed belongings suggested this recession would wallop the top end the most. It has not. Instead, as usual in such times, it's construction workers, manufacturers and "elementary" staff who've initially been hit the hardest.

But Seeda's study shows the recession's effects are spreading. The proportion of white-collar professionals losing their jobs is growing while the loss of blue collar jobs is slowing.

There's variety too in various expert predictions for the future which the report gathers together.

Perhaps wisely it does not speculate much itself on what will happen next.

"I'm an economist, not a gardener", said Seeda's executive director Paul Lovejoy, refusing to be drawn on those ethereal green shoots.

It does conclude, however, that employers must keep their skills base in order to make recovery possible when things improve.

A builder we spoke to from Hastings, who'd had to lay off his entire workforce, could find that difficult.