More gloom for public sector jobs

Latest official figures show public sector unemployment is accelerating – and that’s before the spending cuts start to really kick in More gloomy data on public services jobs today – and this is before the spending cuts have really taken hold. Latest figures show that public sector employment fell by 132,000 in 2010, with local government accounting for the biggest chunk of job losses, and Yorkshire, the north west and Scotland shouldering a big share of the pain. Office for National Statistics data reveals that the cull of public sector jobs started under the last government, but accelerated under the Coalition in the last two quarters of 2010. These increases almost certainly reflect the first phase of Coalition cuts, announced in the emergency budget in June, which took out £1bn of local government spending in-year. It will also include public workers who have taken voluntary redundancy packages as councils and other organisations react to the bigger round of spending cuts announced in the comprehensive spending review in October. Of the 132,000 job losses, local authorities accounted for 66,000. Losses were, as expected, higher in areas where dependency on public sector employment is highest and the private sector weakest: the north of England, the south west of England, and parts of London. The 2010 figures include public corporations – such as the nationalised banks like Royal Bank of Scotland – a sector which which account for around 215,000 public sector jobs overall. But strip out the banking job losses and public services still account for 123,000 axed posts. In the final quarter of 2010, 45,000 public sector jobs were lost, reducing the total number of state employees to 6.2m. Within this, local government employment slumped by 24,000, central government by 9,000 and Civil Service by 8,000. There were interesting variations within public service sectors. The social work workforce grew in the third quarter of 2010, for example, as did the number of NHS staff, while police and armed forces numbers went down. The numbers are likely to increase: the latest GMB union count of “jobs at risk” in UK local authorities , published on Tuesday night, shows that over 170,000 posts are under threat of redundancy at 318 (out of around 500) councils and police and fire services – up from 163,000 at the last count , on 21 February (I’ve discussed the robustness of the GMB figures on a previous blog post ). The GMB’s council figures are based on HR1 notifications submitted by employers. These must state a time for when the redundancies will start. According to the GMB, the most common date on the HR1 forms in 31 March 2011. Even allowing for councils which delete fewer posts than they first anticipated, this suggests there will be a statistical spike in the public sector unemployment figures from next month. The GMB also includes job cuts totals (compiled by Unison and the TUC-backed False Economy Campaign) for the NHS (49,000) and other public sector bodies (6,208), making, it says, a total of 226,472 public sector jobs at risk. Official estimates suggest that 330,000 public sector jobs could be lost over the next four years. But according to John Philpott, chief economic adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, that figure may have to be revised: “Figures showing that public sector employment had already fallen by 123,000 in the year to December 2010 suggest that the eventual cull of public sector jobs by 2015 could be considerably higher than current Office for Budget Responsibility estimates suggests. Public sector cuts Public sector careers Local government NHS Patrick Butler guardian.co.uk

Posted by on March 16, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.