Political Monitor

Excerpt from Political Monitor for APSCO for the week 24/5/2010

What Stakeholders are saying

UK cuts 'to push unemployment close to 3m'

The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development have warned that Government spending cuts to be announced in the forthcoming emergency budget could cost an extra half a million jobs, leading to unemployment figures close to 3 million.

The report goes on to say that there is little prospect of above inflation wage increases until 2015, and public sector workers are likely to face pay cuts.

Revising their forecast for unemployment in the second half of 2012 to 2.95 million, the CIPD have predicted that 500,000 public sector jobs would be lost between now and 2015. The body expects unemployment to remain close to the 2.95 million figure throughout this period.

CIPD chief economic adviser John Philpott said:

"Although tough fiscal medicine is unavoidable and may boost the UK's long-run economic growth and job prospects, reliance on cuts in public spending rather than tax increases as the primary means of cutting the deficit makes the short-term outlook especially bleak for those individuals and communities already suffering the greatest hardship in society.

"Given what we know historically about the way in which the social burden of unemployment and stagnant average income growth is shared across individuals and communities, the prospects for those already suffering the most disadvantage seem particularly bleak."

REC report finds mixed demand for IT staff

REC's Technology Demand and Supply report for this quarter has found that whilst IT staff remain in demand, there has been a decline in temporary contracting in this sector for three consecutive months.

The report found that demand for ICT labour has increased by four per cent and for skills by ten per cent while supply of staff increased, the ratio between demand and supply now standing at 1.5 potential applications per job.

REC believe there are now 60,000 unemployed IT professionals and 68,000 employed jobseekers competing for 86,000 job vacancies, with particular demand in the areas of Systems Development, Architecture, .NET and SQL SVR.

However, according to the REC's index for May, demand for IT and Computing workers on a non-permanent basis stands at 56.4, down from 57.1 in the previous month, and 58.5 in March.

Jeff Brooks, Chair of REC Technology said:

"These results show that the demand within the sector continues to grow and return to good health. At ground level, members say that things have improved markedly from the low points of late 2008 and early 2009. IT systems are clearly seen as tools that can help drive growth and help reduce cost across the enterprise and we expect to see this growth maintained.

"I would also re-iterate our message to the coalition Government that IT can help reduce costs within the public sector and continued investment in technology is vital if Government is to both improve services and reduce budgets."

All insights