Council chiefs are using £440,000 to drive down the soaring number of young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs) in Wigan following the COVID-19 pandemic.

This forms part of the town’s ‘employment and skills strategy’ with town hall bosses aiming to help residents, partners, employers and training providers bridge skills gaps and identify where future job opportunities are likely to be.

The cash has been given to Wigan from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund via the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) to tackle the issue. This initiative started in October 2023 and will run until March 2025, and is expected to build on the prior success of the European Social Fund NEET programme ‘Connect to your Future’ which ended in September 2023. Coun Jeanette Prescott told the committee apprenticeships and schemes to get young people into employment are preventing them from ‘turning to crime or drug use’.

The report says that the three groups most likely to be NEET are young people with experience of the care system, the youth justice system and those with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND).

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27 million people across the UK will benefit from a yearly tax cut worth hundreds of pounds from 6 January 2024.

This will mean that a household with two average earners will save nearly £1,000 per year.

In the past year, inflation has halved; the economy has recovered more quickly from the pandemic than first thought; and debt is on track to fall. With a renewed focus on the long-term decisions to strengthen the economy, the government is changing gear and cutting taxes for hard working people, giving them the opportunity to build a wealthier, more secure life for themselves and their families.

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Youth unemployment in the UK rose by 13,000 on the previous quarter in September to November 2023, while youth employment fell by 20,000.

The number of young people who were economically inactive increased slightly.

The ONS plans to reintroduce a Labour Force Survey-based dataset in February 2024 with updated population estimates. This may mean that some of the statistics in the briefing will be revised.

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Data on the unemployment in the UK

There were 1.46 million unemployed people in the UK in September to November 2023, an increase of 16,000 from the previous quarter and an increase of 216,000 from the previous year.

The unemployment rate was 4.2% (the percentage of the economically active population who are unemployed), the same as in the previous quarter and up from 3.7% from a year before.

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The UK Government’s levelling up funding in Scotland has now reached £2.92 billion, an increase of £840 million (40 per cent) since the end of last year.

The huge funding boost is after another 12 months of working with local partners to identify ways to transform communities, create jobs and boost the economy.

The £2.92 billion UK Government support comprises more than £1.5 billion investment in City Region and Growth Deals, and more than £1.4 billion in further levelling up investments ranging from Freeports and Investment Zones to regenerating town centres and saving local community assets.

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More than 2,500 jobs have been created in the environmental sector thanks to the government backed Green Recovery Challenge Fund.

The report – published by The Heritage Fund, which distributed the funding – shows the flagship £80 million Green Recovery Challenge Fund supported more than 150 environmental projects from North Northumberland to the tip of Cornwall, helping create 2,630 jobs in green sectors and connecting more than 400,000 people to nature.

The fund supported a range of projects, including large-scale initiatives to protect landscapes and restore important habitats. The fund also enabled projects to help wildlife flourish by creating bat boxes, kingfisher tubes and bug hotels, as well as launch community schemes and events which aimed to bring people closer to nature.

The report finds:

• The fund supported nature conservation and restoration across nearly 450,000 hectares of land, and created indirect benefits for more than 1.5 million hectares of land.
• Overall, 1,895 sites have benefitted from GRCF environmental actions across the programme, with projects helping to deliver positive impacts on biodiversity, habitat quality and ecosystem health across England.
• The GRCF enabled 609 improvements or installations of infrastructure, including 192km of footpaths, 37km of fences, and 8km of boardwalks to improve access to nature.

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This report from Spring by the Work Foundation suggested that we were living through an unparalleled and enduring crisis in living standards.

With inflation outpacing pay increases, workers were materially worse off than a year ago. In response, the Government launched a large package of support with household energy bills. However, the Work Foundation believed many workers were still struggling with their finances and were experiencing the largest scale industrial action since the winter of discontent in 1978-79.

Key findings:

• High inflation was harming UK employers and limiting bandwidth for support.
• Rising inflation was already impacting workers and their families.
• Employers could shape and develop benefits packages that drove down living costs.
• Security, predictability, and flexibility were all crucial in supporting financial wellbeing.
• There were approximately six million workers in severely insecure jobs in the current workforce

Report Recommendations:

• The UK Government needed to strengthen employment rights to ensure everyone had access to secure and high-quality work.
• Senior leaders needed to review their employment contracts and prioritise increasing job security.
• Employers needed to develop a strategic approach to financial wellbeing and embed it into their organisation’s overall approach to health and wellbeing.
• Employers needed to consult with workers and shape financial wellbeing strategies to provide as much certainty about the future as possible.
• Employers needed to build a strong evidence base to understand the desires of their workforce and monitor the impact of financial wellbeing support.

Read more here.

A report that investigates the early careers of education leavers since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key findings:

• Evidence from previous recessions tells us that young people who entered the labour market during downturns tended to experience worse career outcomes that took several years to recover from.
• The cohort that graduated in 2020, particularly individuals with university degrees, initially saw worse outcomes on some measures. They struggled to find work three to six months after graduation.
• However, the employment rates of the 2020 cohort had fully recovered nine to twelve months after graduation.
• Other cohorts who entered the labour market during or just before the pandemic did not see slower occupational progression or have worse job quality, with one exception: those from disadvantaged backgrounds were more likely to be in the same job that they held at school or university.

The report concluded:

• Despite the unprecedented shock to young people’s employment, hours worked and mental health in 2020 and early 2021, the IFS found no significant evidence of persistent negative effects. But did show that some cohorts graduating into recessions experience depressed employment rates and lower job quality for years to come.
• It also seemed that the rapid economic recovery and the boom in job vacancies as the economy reopened had so far shielded the COVID-19 cohorts from persistently poorer outcomes.
• The fact that significant harm had not been observed for the COVID-19 cohorts does not mean that they were unaffected throughout their careers. It is possible that gaps in outcomes between these cohorts and earlier cohorts would emerge over the next few years as the labour market became less tight if the relative lack of work experience and training of the COVID-19 cohorts put them at a disadvantage relative to other cohorts.

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This blog was originally published on the website of Adzuna, one of the largest online job search engines in the UK.

One area currently of concern to policy makers is the extent to which labour market tightness has created upwards pressure on wages and has been feeding through into prices, and whether interest rate rises aimed at combatting inflation might now be leading to an economic slowdown and rising unemployment. To answer these questions, researchers require high quality labour market data.

The Labour Force Survey (LFS) has historically been one such source. This statistical survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics has been collecting data on the employment circumstances of the UK population since 1992. It is the largest household study in the country and provides the official measures of employment and unemployment, which are crucial headline indicators of the health of the nation’s labour market.

However, response rates to the survey have been falling for a while, with the pandemic accelerating this decline when face-to-face interviews ceased, forcing the ONS to rely on phone interviews. A smaller sample of survey responses reduces the confidence we can have in the headline estimates (i.e., the margin of error around the central estimate). Furthermore, differences in the likelihood of an individual responding to the surveys by group introduces the potential for the estimates to also be biased (i.e., not centred on the true figure).

This issue came to a head last month, when the ONS was unable to publish official estimates based on the LFS, relying instead on experimental estimates which took previous headline estimates from the LFS and updated them using HMRC’s PAYE RTI data and the Claimant Count, which themselves have their own issues making the fact that these were deemed more reliable that the official LFS estimates even more alarming.

The ONS is more than aware of these issues and has put in place plans to improve the LFS to reintroduce it as the regular source of official estimates on labour market activity, as well as continuing with the transition towards a ‘Transformed’ LFS next year.

Read more here.