CIPD reports on job losses - deeper consequences being felt

The CIPD website has reported this today, 15th:

Dr John Philpott, Chief Economic Adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) comments as follows on official labour market statistics for the period April-June 2011 published earlier today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS):



It's clear from the large quarterly fall in employment and very sharp rise in headline unemployment that the UK jobs market is weakening significantly and that we can expect unemployment to continue to rise well into next year. What's most worrying is that the private sector jobs recovery has slowed markedly while the public sector jobs cull is accelerating rapidly. Indeed, the loss of public sector jobs in the second quarter of 2011 dwarfs what might have been expected from the current Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast and is more in line with CIPD forecasts. This suggests that the OBR may have to substantially revise its forecast for the employment and unemployment outlook to 2015 - which will be bad news for the Government as we enter a very uncertain period for the UK economy.

This is just one of several pieces of particularly bad news, not just for those in the public sector in terms of job losses (110,000 jobs lost between March-June 2011), but for public service managers in managing the practical consequences of the government's policies.

For instance, a colleague told me yesterday that youth homelessness figures are spiking alarmingly and family homelessness will go the same way once the government's housing benefit cuts and caps become effective in January 2012. This has largely been hidden from wider public view but for families who will be forced to move home, disrupt their children's education and lose important family and social networks, the impact of the benefit savings measures could be catastrophic. After a decade and more of housing directors in the big cities and elsewhere working tirelessly to eradicate the use of bed and breakfast, are we going to see a return to its use?



At the level of communities, my experience in the East Midlands in the late 1990's was that community sustainability is built in inches and lost in yards, and as rental-tenant 'churn' gathers pace, many socially damaging and divisive activities rush in to the fill the void left as community continuity gives way discontinuity.

The downward spiral for a community can be rapid and extremely difficult to reverse without significant public and voluntary intervention. Neither of these sectors are now in the shape to provide the depth and continuity of support that they were 3 years ago. The private sector, despite rhetoric to the contrary, neither cares nor, unless it sees a profit, is particularly interested in these aspects of the society it is part of. It is of course interested when the incentives provided by the public purse are sufficient, but the level of those is a fraction of the level of the first decade of this century and will probably never return to those levels.    

This is a complex scenario that requires people of huge commitment, energy and passion, and the public, voluntary and community sectors have those in abundance - even now. The risk is that so many of our finest public servants are now doing roles of exceptional breadth and greater complexity, with little or no recourse to external support, of even the most rudimentary kind. Just at the moment when those with something to offer are ready, willing and able to do so, the new orthodoxy of 'external support is bad' is at its strongest. And, even if a senior manager has some resources to use external support, there is political opprobrium and organisational reputational risk in accessing that support. That simply can't be right.

Finally, let us not forget that the smoke screen so often put up by those in power that this is all the fault of a previous government and/or what the public sector had coming to it, bears no simple mathematic test - £65b was provided to two banks and more generally, to save the casino bankers from decimating our financial systems. Not a single banker in the UK has paid any price for that deceit and ineptitude, and certainly not the same price as the 110,000 public sector workers are now paying as they lose their jobs during the past 3 months.