I WAS twice taken to task in the local press last week for dismissing too lightly a report from the Centre for Cities that argued that structural economic weaknesses would mean Liverpool might be among the last cities to recover from the recession.
The implication was that I gave a knee-jerk response to a report that actually made some important points. To a degree, I accept the criticism.
I had been provided with only a summary of the key findings and reacted without the benefit of having studied the full report.
I had assumed that the report, like so many before it, would be based on old data, but in fairness most of the statistics are as current as they could be.
However, the way the findings were publicised – both by the authors and the press – represented Liverpool as far weaker than the actual data suggests. So, now that I have read it thoroughly, I am inclined to recant only partially.
Refreshingly, Liverpool does not feature in the league tables of the highest rise in Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) claimants; or in the 10 worst-affected cities for vulnerable employments sectors; or among the cities with the fastest increases in youth unemployment; or the slowest rates of employment growth.
Even among those cities overly dependent on public sector employment, we no longer feature as a special case although we are still, reasonably, regarded as vulnerable to public sector cuts along with some surprising bedfellows like Leicester, Swansea and Plymouth, as well as more predictable cities like Newcastle and Glasgow.
Admittedly, in terms of the percentage of our workers in vital knowledge-intensive employment, we are sadly nowhere in the top 10 – but then, Leeds and Edinburgh are the only northern cities that do feature. Neither are we in the bottom ten.
It is much the same story with the list of the highest-qualified workforces.
Disappointingly, we do appear on the list of cities with the slowest growth in population (although the figure of -0.3% represents a brake on earlier rates of out-migration). Outside the capital, only Leeds and Bristol exhibited population growth and both were less than 1%, an eminently bridgeable gap.
The one statistic contained in the report that does concern me is our employment rate, which, at 62.5%, was lowest of the major cities (for comparison, Birmingham was 64.8%, Manchester 67% and Bristol top at 77.8%). Strengthening our labour market is therefore critical. Liverpool needs a higher employment rate and a higher employment growth rate, with a strong contribution from private sector jobs.
The real story is that we have come a long way in recent years, and that our direction of travel is the right one.
Sustainable economic growth needs to be underpinned by capital investment in buildings and public infrastructure and revenue spending on education and skills at every level, but especially at the top of the labour market. It also depends on confidence and self-belief, and if I react so strongly to many reports it is because they too often lack context and undermine the people in the city’s public life and private business whose efforts are making unreported headway.
