Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
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This will be a pivotal moment, putting the spotlight on Cornwall KIM CONCHIE HEAD OF CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
EU. The hospitality ut and will miss the spell for the second pping the heart out and villages. mic intelligence” wall Council shows on Universal substantially” ng between September
76 to 48,890. also reveals on there are 27,000 “workless households”. At 15.3%, that is 1.3% higher than the UK average.
And while the UK rate for unemployment claimants among 16 to 64-year-olds in August 2020 was 6.6%, it was higher in all six Cornish parliamentary constituencies. Worst-hit was Camborne and Redruth at 9.8%, with a similar picture in St Austell and Newquay at 9.1%. In both North and South East Cornwall it is close to 8%, and stands at 7.3% in Truro and Falmouth and 6.9% in St Ives.
All six constituencies were won by the Tories at the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections.
Seasonal unemployment over the winter, and the pandemic hit to the hospitality sector, are likely to have made things far worse.
Even those who have jobs earn almost a fifth less, with the 2019 average wage at £20,353 – just 82% of the figure for the UK as a whole.
Cornwall’s struggles pre-date both Covid and Brexit. In 2018 the region’s businesses earned just £19,288 per head of population – two-thirds of the UK average.
At the turn of the millennium, the county qualified for hundreds of millions of pounds of Brussels funding, ranking as one of western Europe’s poorest areas.
Cornwall Chamber of Commerce boss Kim Conchie hopes hosting the G7 could pave the way for an employment revolution, helping young people stay in the county.
He said: “The 20th century didn’t really suit Cornwall. It was the era of mass-production of homogenised products – we didn’t have the scale or the skill or the nearness to market to really benefit from that.”
With one theme of the summit set to be the climate crisis, he wants a focus on high-skill industry for the region such as renewable energy – citing plans already proposed for a floating wind farm off the Cornish coast.
He also points to lithium mining, needed for electric car batteries and mobile phones, and the Cornish space port at Newquay, set to send satellites into low orbit.
Mr Conchie believes driving a green tech revolution will prevent an exodus of youngsters who are forced to seek good employment prospects outside the county.
He said: “I’d like to see jobs and careers created which enable young people to stay, in a way they haven’t been able to for 150 years.
“I hope this will be a pivotal moment, having the world’s spotlight on Cornwall and those new areas which sit very comfortably with the Cornish psyche and the resources we have here.”