A headline waiting to be written
The resilience of Liverpool's economy in this recession has yet to capture the media's attention. It'll be one of the defining headlines of the year when it does, argues Dougal Paver.
"Sign on, sign on, with a pen in your hand..." So goes the chant from visiting football fans at Goodison and Anfield each game. How we laugh.
During the eighties shake-out of the British economy, they had a point. In the 80/81 recession unemployment in Liverpool reached 28%. In the 90/91 version, it was 14%. This time around it's topped out at 7.5%. Do you spot the trend?
And how's this for a surprise? When, last week, it was announced that the UK had suffered the largest ever quarterly rise in unemployment of 281,000 it went unnoticed that Merseyside's share of this was just 19. And that's across 6 boroughs.
Average it out, then, and whilst the UK was piling on the redundancies Liverpool added just three people to the dole queue. That's not just resilient, that's coming out fighting.
There are two broad reasons for this: first, the sheer number of public sector jobs in the region; and second, the huge growth in retail and leisure employment in recent years as major infrastructure such as Liverpool One and the arena and convention centre have come on stream.
Pain lies ahead, perhaps: the Conservatives have noted the necessity of reducing a bloated state's share of economic output - and when you see the parlous state of the public finances you'd have to agree. It's hard to see how Liverpool will escape the cull.
All of which points to the need to continue re-aligning Liverpool's economy toward a varied private-sector base. The work of Liverpool Vision and The Mersey Partnership, not to mention their private sector partners, will be vital in this regard.
Meantime, perhaps visiting footy fans will be asking us for work. Chants of "giz a job" would be the ultimate irony.
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