Recruiters have called for a year-long national insurance holiday to support hiring by small businesses in order to tackle rising youth joblessness as the TUC warned of an imminent female employment crisis.
The Report on Jobs published by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation and management consultancy KPMG revealed that, even though demand for staff in February grew robustly overall and the total level of job vacancies rose at the fastest rate since April 2010, unemployment across all demographics was only likely to grow over the coming months.
Kevin Green, REC’s chief executive, warned: “We anticipate that unemployment will increase over the spring, summer and autumn, before very slowly starting to decline at the very end of this year and into 2012.”
The “scandal”, however, was that more than 20% of young people aged 16 to 24 had no work as employers continued to remain conservative, “favouring experience over potential”, he added.
As a result, the body called on the coalition government to do something positive to support job creation among small-to-medium enterprises in its forthcoming Budget. “A National Insurance holiday of at least one year for every young person employed by a smaller company is an obvious win-win for both business and jobseekers.”
Green also pointed to the existence of a “two-speed labour market” as the private sector continued to hire in increasing numbers and the public sector lost jobs. While the IT and computing and engineering and construction sectors were most active in recruitment terms, the nursing, medical and care sectors showed significant falls in hiring activity.
Permanent staff placements increased at their fastest rate for 10 months in February, while temporary billings saw the biggest rise since May 2007, however.
The TUC, meanwhile, pointed to a potential crisis in female unemployment at its annual women’s conference in Eastbourne today. It indicated that, while more men lost their jobs in the recent recession and more still remained out of work overall, male employment had begun to recover over the last year, increasing by 0.4% (the equivalent of 238,000 who got a job).
Female employment on the other hand, had fallen by 0.5% or 19,000 people who lost their job. Overall male unemployment over the same time period had dropped by 0.3% of 31,000 compared with a rise of 0.5% or 71,000 women.
To make matters worse, the number of jobs available in sectors in which women traditionally work was far lower than at the start of the recession. Retail vacancies had fallen by 34,000, educational posts by 20,000, health and social work roles by 18,000 and administrative and secretarial positions by 14,000.
But redundancies in the public sector, where more than a third of all women are currently employed, meant that the situation is only likely to get worse.
The TUC’s general secretary Brendan Barber said: “The UK desperately needs an economic strategy that prioritises growth and jobs to bring revenues in and the deficit down. The current plan of deep, rapid cuts is causing job losses to mount and sending our economy in the wrong direction.”
