Urgent action is needed to rebuild our economy after coronavirus.
The lockdown of the economy has already caused a sharp rise in numbers claiming work-related benefits, including unemployment benefit. While the official unemployment rate has so far held steady, over a quarter of all workers have been furloughed. These jobs will become vulnerable as the Job Retention Scheme ends in October. As temporary support measures are wound down, a major economic stimulus will be needed if we are to avoid mass unemployment.
The scale of action needed is also an opportunity to address long-running problems in the British economy, including the long-run decline of our industrial base, which has contributed to regional inequalities and the growth of insecure and low paid jobs, while stepping up action to decarbonise our economy and better preparing our public services to deal with future challenges.
The TUC has set out the measures needed nationally to rebuild our economy:
We want to see regional and devolved nation recovery panels, mirroring a National Recovery Council for the UK, representing unions, employers, Jobcentre Plus, relevant civic partners and local and regional governments, to feed into the planning and delivery of recovery strategies at local and devolved nation level.
These regional and devolved nation structures are essential because there are wide variations across the country in terms of both the nature and scale of the challenges faced and the institutional arrangements and capacities for addressing these challenges. In these circumstances, a one size fits all solution won’t work. Instead, we need to turn headline objectives into tailored strategies for each region.
Furthermore, different parts of the country will not be equally hit. The economy is already highly regionally imbalanced and uneven impact of lockdown on different sectors, combined with their uneven regional spread, means there is a danger of compounding regional inequalities. 9 per cent of the North East’s employment is in at risk occupations, rising to 26 per cent for workers age 25 and under.[1]
We hope to see action on these measures in the chancellor’s summer budget, but there is much that the region can do within existing structures.
As well as calling on the chancellor to provide support for the region as part of a national recovery plan, this report sets out a recovery plan for the region that the North of Tyne Combined Authority, Tees Valley Combined Authority, North East Combined Authority, the Cumbria Combined Authority and the regions LEPs can start putting into action right away.
Download full report (pdf)
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