Employment figures show that the Staffordshire economy is in good health, a county councillor has said.
The number of people claiming Universal Credit across the county has fallen to 3.5% – below the West Midlands figure of 5.9% and the England statistic of 4.9%.
Cllr Philip White, cabinet member for economy and skills at Staffordshire County Council, said the numbers were “good news”.
“These figures show how productive the Staffordshire economy is and how many jobs we have for people to go into.
“Between September and October we’ve seen an increase of about 5,500 more vacancies.
“It shows that our business are growing and they need more people.”
Cllr Philip White, Staffordshire County Council
Cllr White told a meeting of the county council’s cabinet today (17th November) that the fall in jobless figures had forced a rethink in how some services operated.
“The change in our economic circumstances has been reflected in a change to what was previously our redundancy and recruitment triage services.
“We still offer advice to businesses needing to make people redundant or trying to avoid that, but the focus is shifting to helping link people up jobs because the demand for redundancy services is so dramatically lower than we expected during the pandemic.
“The demand isn’t there on the redundancy front so that change has been made and that is very welcome.”
Cllr Philip White, Staffordshire County Council
