Public sector job losses: the poorest areas are hit hardest

The public sector employment figures for the first three months of 2011 will surprise no-one: a real terms decrease of 39,000 over the period, with 27,000 jobs going in local government alone. But the statistics do not yet fully reflect the impact of the Coalition's swingeing spending review cuts announced last Autumn: that no doubt gruesome story will start to be told in the next set of quarterly figures.

In fact, public sector job losses were marginally lower in the first quarter of this year than they were in the final three months of 2010, when 45,000 posts were deleted. The picture at the end of last year reflected the impact of the Coalition's mid year spending cuts announced in June. The slight dip in the new year came as councils set about agreeing cuts budgets and issuing 90 day redundancy notices to staff. Those began to kick in on 1 April, after this survey closed.

As John Philpott, chief economist at the chartered institute of personnel, told the BBC, this latest set of Office for National Statistics figures

"...indicates that the scale of public sector job cuts is going to be quite substantial, because we haven't yet had the full impact of the government spending cuts"

The next set of figures may well show a dramatic upwards spike in public sector job losses but they simply accelerate a process that, as I've blogged before, started at the tail end of the last Labour government. The public sector has been shrinking for months: since this time last year 143,000 posts have disappeared, 88,000 of them in local government.

There is a disturbing, if equally predictable, pattern in where those job cuts are falling: those regions most dependent on public sector employment (which tend to be poorer, and are also shouldering the heaviest burden of the spending cuts) have seen proportionately higher public sector job decreases so far in 2011: the south west (down 4.2%), the north east (3.7%) and London (2.7%).

Although the economically robust south east has the third largest number of public sector workers in the UK (behind London and the north west) it has seen the lowest proportionate decrease in state funded jobs in England (1.7%).

The economic blow to Britain's poorest areas is reflected in the overall national unemployment figures. Although the headline data show public sector job lossess are more than offset by a rise in private sector employment, the benefit does not appear to be not equally distributed.

The Guardian's datablog shows that the biggest year on year increases in numbers of benefit claimants are largely in poorer, public sector dependent areas of the south west, London, the north east and Scotland. Some of those parliamentary constituency areas, like Birmingham Ladywood, and Hackney South and Shoreditch, in east London, already have some of the highest proportions of benefit claimants, suggesting joblessness there is becoming entrenched.

By classification, education saw the largest cut in public sector jobs in the first quarter of 2011 (12,000) though it is unclear whether this signifies classroom jobs (schools budgets are largely protected), or administrative, youth work and careers advice posts that have born the brunt of cuts to council children's services department funding so far.

Even the NHS, where funds are also protected at national level, saw job losses: 1,000, although that is equivalent to just 0.1% of the health service workforce.

At first glance it looks like Whitehall has escaped the cull: employment in central goverment increased by 7,000 in those three months. But strip out the 14,500 temporary workers (that's 7,600 full time equivalent jobs) hired to compile the census (all of whom have now gone) and civil service jobs decrease, while the headline public sector job losses figure goes up from 24,000 to 39,000.