The Ladywood Constituency of Birmingham, UK has the highest unemployment rate in the UK and has had that position for decades. This is despite the fact that Birmingham City is the UK's second city; Europe's largest local authority and biggest landlord; and the City Centre has 31% of the companies in Birmingham. The City Centre is within the Ladywood Constituency, This can only mean that they DON'T employ local labour and haven't been doing so for decades.
When these companies are asked why they don't employ local labour, they claim that they are unqualified, unskilled, and inexperienced. This was used to form one of the policies of FullEmploy: we'll employ and help local people who are unqualified, unskilled, and inexperienced. To enable this to happen, we've ring-fenced each constituency so that we'll only help people within that constituency so that we can focus on the problem. In other words, we'll operate in a constituency by constituency basis. We'll operate on a ward by ward basis but find opportunities for the local people within the constituency they're in.
Birmingham City Council has the largest per capita budget in the country - £3.5bn for its 1m inhabitants - that's £3,500 per man, woman and child. Yet it's spent on prestige projects and the local people don't see much benefit of all that money; they just look on as people from outside the constituency get the jobs they should've had or look at somebody else's wealth that they don't benefit from. Perhaps the new policy of FullEmploy will help reduce the chronic unemployment in Birmingham's inner city areas.
Birmingham City Council members are experts in getting inward investment into the city; it's just that the new employers either bring their workforce with them from outside Birmingham or are very selective when recruiting staff. Personally, I don't blame the employers, they need the staff who CAN do the jobs available. This has become another policy of FullEmploy: identify jobs available and the skills required to do them; then train local people in these required skills so that they become attractive to the new employers as well as existing ones.
The idea is simple, if the local people miss out on current opportunities, there will always be more opportunities sometime later. If not, FullEmploy will help them start their own businesses. It's a well known fact that when there's a plethora of skills in a particular area, that area attracts inward investment without the need to give inducements.
So, the Ladywood Constituency has the highest unemployment rate in the UK; although Birmingham has a high level of oppurtunities, they're largely not available to the local people because most of them are unqualified, unskilled and inexperienced. To make matters worse, nobody is doing anything about it.
FullEmploy will do something about it. In the coming days I'll outline the vision, aims, and objectives of FullEmploy and show the way forward. It'll be a learning exercise for all concerned including the local people involved.
