Budget: County job losses mount
Wednesday 22nd April 2009, 7:30PM BST.
More than 2,400 jobs have been lost in Shropshire in the last eight months, with a third of all county workers employed in business sectors projected to decline over the next decade.
The stark figures were revealed at the Shropshire annual business summit last night, when council officials laid out the economic development challenges facing the county. Representatives from more than 150 businesses heard a bleak report of how the recession is affecting Shropshire.
Tom McCabe, director of development services at the new Shropshire Council, said: “In Shropshire, we experienced an immediate impact upon our financial and professional services, our construction and engineering sectors.
“The number of businesses operating in Shropshire has fallen by 2.6 per cent between last October and this January.
“Our intelligence on redundancies suggests that between August 2008 and March 2009, a minimum of 2,425 jobs have been lost, offset by some 1,100 jobs created, but a net loss of more than 1,300 jobs.
“Around 41 per cent of those redundancies were in manufacturing, 21 per cent in construction, 14 per cent in retail and seven per cent in the hotel and leisure industries.”
Mr McCabe said the retail sector had been severely affected with independent shops in market towns reporting a drop in trade.
The Shropshire Business Board has also been created, to advise the council on economic policy.
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Strangely no redundancies announced in the civil service!? Surely there are vast options for effiency savings on the the Shropshire Council – the metaphorical ‘spade leaners’. It’s almost comical watching SC desperately grabbing some higher justified ground to scrammble up above us mere private sector mortals.
Reality will out though. We are tired of contributing to bloated and undeserved public sector pensions.
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Above comment = example of the usual private sector vs public sector bias.
My annual salary in public sector is less 11,000 a year and that’s before tax. I lose £200 a month on taxes, NI, and paying for my pension, which even if I work this job till I’m 65 will only just about cover means and certainly won’t be ‘bloated’. My department is working on about 2/3 of the staff it needs to operate properly and our budget has been cut consistently every year I’ve been here, with more expectations on us putting out better service even despite that.
I imagine there are a lot of people in the private sector still in employment with far happier earnings than a lot of us in the public sector.
The people who earn stupid amounts of money in the top tiers are the ones who get the press attention and warp public opinion. The reality is that local govt workers are very badly paid – and struggle to make ends meet.
I’m highly sick of the way the media portrays the public sector since it’s sensationalised, biased and only relevant to a small number of individuals at the very top of the scale. I guess that doesn’t make for good news stories…
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All I’m saying is that society is going to have to go through an adjustment and no-one should consider themselves immune. Personally, I blame Margaret Thatcher and the people she gathered around her for the ‘theres no society so devil take the hindmost, have it today and pay for it tomorrow’ culture.
Whatever, here we are in 2009 and we are all going to see difficult years to come and sacrifices will need to be made, if the country can’t afford early retirement onto a comfortable pension then so be it.
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merc, you clearly said that you are tired of contributing to bloated and UNDESERVED public sector pensions. Amber justifiably points out the downright silliness of such a comment which clearly indicates that you know little of the public services. Then you compound the silliness by blaming Thatcher. Just for your information, Labour have been in power for the past twelve years and this latest fiasco is a direct bye product of their years of misrule. The “difficult years to come and the sacrifices that will have to be made” are precisely nothing to do with Thatcher but all to do with the almost criminal “borrowing” and unregulated banks and resultant anarchy under Brown and New Labour. Perhaps you have not read the papers, watched TV, read or studied any paperwork on the subject or listened to any political documentary programmes, had you done so you would have learned that labour are almost 20 points behind in the polls as a direct result of the pigs ear that they have made of things.
Well said Amber but you could have gone on to tell merc how it was that Brown also decimated the private sector pensions schemes by taxing them until “the pips squeaked”. In other words he did a “Healey” on them.
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