What does long term unemployment look like across cities?
Given the usual coverage around the Budget yesterday, you might have missed the release of this month’s labour market statistics. At a national level, there was another fall in unemployment over the last quarter, which was driven by a fall in long term unemployment. Given this, I thought I’d take a look at what long term unemployment looks like across cities.
Figure 1 shows the portion of total claimants who have been claiming JSA for over a year. The first striking pattern is the geographic spread. With the exception of Lancashire where the number of long term claimants is relatively low, cities in the north tend to have a higher share of long term claimants than cities in the south.
Figure 1: Proportion of total JSA claimants claiming for over a year (Feb 2014)
Hull has the highest proportion of long-term claimants. At 38.2 per cent, more than one in every three claimants in the city have been claiming for over one year. It is closely followed by Middlesbrough at 37.8 per cent. Aberdeen records the lowest proportion, which at 16.5 per cent is less than half the proportion seen in Hull.
It is the cities that have the highest claimant count rates that also have the highest proportion of long-term claimants with Hull, Middlesbrough and Birmingham featuring as the top three in both rankings. Unemployment in these cities is high and long term. Cities with relatively low claimant count rates, such as Aldershot, Bournemouth and York, also have a relatively low proportion of long-term claimants. Unemployment here tends to be low and short term.
Surprisingly, despite the recent improvement in the national labour market, the majority of cities have seen their proportion of long-term claimants increase over the past year. On average, there has been a rise of 1.2 percentage points on the previous year. Figure 2 shows that again this plays out very differently across the UK. Warrington has experienced a very large rise of 6.7 percentage points on the year while in Aberdeen the proportion has fallen 4.4 percentage points.
Figure 2: Yearly change in the proportion of total JSA claimants claiming for over a year (Feb 2013- Feb 2014)
The differing nature of unemployment across our cities means that a different policy response is required to get people back in to work. See Cities Outlook 2012 for more analysis on this.
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