Paying the Price of Government Failure – Unemployment in Yorkshire and the Humber

We recently posted an item on our website about unemployment and living standards in our constituency, Leeds North West. Here we turn our attention more widely to Yorkshire and the Humber. This has been made possible by the publication of the Yorkshire and the Humber Jobs and Opportunities Bulletin (July 2013).

The threat and the fact of unemployment in Yorkshire and the Humber is a very serious one. The Coalition’s austerity programme has hit our region harder than some more affluent areas in the south of the country. No surprise there!

The evidence from across the country is clear. Five years after the global financial crisis and economic crash and with three years of coalition slash and burn policies, the UK has 2.5m people unemployed – 8 per cent of the labour force – including almost 1 million young people aged 16-24. The proportion of people who are in work…