UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
What you never knew about Jobcentres
Although the number of Britons claiming jobless benefit in October rose by its smallest amount in 18 months, the jobless rate is at 7.8 percent.
One resource, sometimes overlooked by unemployed professionals and businesses looking for new recruits, is Jobcentre Plus, a government-run employment agency.
Businesses can cut costs by using the free vacancy-advertising and recruitment service offered by Jobcentre Plus. As well, employers that hire people who are unemployed for six months or more through a so-called Recruitment Subsidy scheme will receive 1,000 pounds for each eligible jobseeker. They can also access in-work training of a value of up to 1,500 pounds.
Chris Nicol, district manager, south London, explains what’s on offer for professional jobseekers.
from The Great Debate UK:
What managers can do to maintain morale in a jobs crisis
* Ian Kessler is a reader in employment relations at Said Business School at the University of Oxford. The views expressed are his own *
The Chinese define a crisis as ‘an opportunity on a dangerous wind', and the crisis created by the current economic downturn has certainly placed the management of human resources centre stage. Corporate survival has become dependent on controlling and reducing labour costs, while future organisational viability has necessitated restructuring, placing further strains on the workforce. The challenge confronting human resources management is reflected in the predicted scale of job losses: the International Labour Organisations suggests that in 2009 as many 51 million jobs worldwide could be lost.
‘We are all to blame for financial crisis’ – archbishop
Bankers, auditors, money-market speculators and regulators all came in for criticism at the Church of England’s General Synod during a discussion on the implications of the financial crisis and the recession.
The City had lined its pockets, regulators had not done their job properly and auditors had signed off financial deals that should not have seen the light of day, the synod heard at its meeting in London.
Expert view: Redundancy can be a “golden opportunity”
Sue Tumelty is Managing Director of employment law specialists The HR Dept. The opinions expressed are her own.
The latest Labour Market Outlook survey conducted for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) with the accountancy firm KPMG looks bleak. The Ipsos Mori poll of 892 UK employers in January, reveals that more than one in three (36%) plan to cut jobs in the first quarter of 2009.
UK job losses: real stories
Simon Owen is a strategy and innovation consultant who helps companies identify and implement new business opportunities. He worked at a London based consultancy before being made redundant in January 2009. The opinions expressed are his own.
Most recently I worked for a leading innovation company that specialised in innovative growth projects. They took a much more creative approach, and I enjoyed it because they generated great ideas that had genuine impact and acted on them.
Out of work: Useful resources
Losing your job can come as a massive shock, even if it is something you have been worrying about for months. The latest figures show that for the first time in over a decade the number of people out of work has risen above two million.
If you are one of them, you probably want to find a new job as quickly as possible. Here are a number of useful resources to help you.
Time for salary cap for bankers?
It’s not a great time to be a banker at the moment with financial apocalypse making the pin-striped gents probably more loathed than estate agents or journalists. Thousands of them have lost their jobs and those that are still in paid employment are finding that their renumeration packages are coming under ever greater public scrutiny.
Over the weekend reports that the Royal Bank of Scotland was about to award its staff a billion pounds in bonuses prompted outrage at a time of soaring unemployment and with a deep recession looming. Most people would agree it is a no-brainer that a company that has just posted the biggest-ever financial loss in British corporate history, required a 20-billion-pound government bail-out to stay afloat last year and is now nearly 70-percent state-owned should not be allowing its staff to be trousering huge bonuses.
Labour’s jobs summit
The government is to offer firms a “golden handshake” of up to 2,500 pounds for every person they recruit who has been unemployed for more than six months. Total cost of the initiative is expected to be around 500 million pounds.
Unemployment in Britain rose to 1.86 million people in the three months to October, equal to six percent of the workforce and the highest rate since the three months to June 1999.
Job crunch Britain: how have you been affected?
Net job creation in the UK has almost stopped as employers feel pessimistic about prospects for the economy, the latest quarterly Labour Market Outlook survey by KPMG and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has found.
The balance between the proportion of employers looking to increase staff levels over the next three months and those expecting to cut has fallen from +41 in autumn 2007 to +2 in autumn 2008 – the lowest figure recorded since the survey began in spring 2004, according to the Payroll and Human Resources Newsletter. 
Of the 721 employers surveyed, 83 per cent anticipated that Britain’s economic condition would further deteriorate this autumn and only one percent said they thought there would be an improvement.Respondents felt more optimistic about their own organisation though, with only 25 per cent believing that things would get worse.
Spend and spend some more?
Recent headlines alarmed us with news of the country’s budget deficit having risen to its largest in six decades, while top economists ominously declared that we’ve moved beyond merely tipping into a recession, to hurtling towards one.
More crucially, both Chancellor Alistair Darling and Prime Minister Gordon Brown have sought inspiration from revered economist Maynard Keynes’ oft-cited advice – spend and spend some more to fight off the ill effects of an economic slump. Keynesian theory’s greatest principle is the fundamental concept of the circular flow of money. He opined that when individuals rein in money outflow, the government needs to be “priming the pump”.
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The Wall
