Invest in the North East

CAMPAIGN SHOWS HOW WE ARE EXCELLING IN JOB CREATION

DATA gathered for the Invest in the North East campaign shows some of the challenges facing the region – but also positive news on how the North East is outperforming the rest of the country on job creation.

Invest in the North East has been launched by The Chronicle and our sister paper The Journal to make the region a better place in which to live and work, specifically by helping companies to create more and better jobs, to raise levels of skills and educational attainment, and to improve infrastructure in the region.

The campaign – which is backed by a range of leading employers in the region – has drawn together official statistics from a range of sources to show how the region is performing in those areas.

That data shows the North East lagging behind the rest of the country in many areas – but also how recent years have seen a concerted effort to close that gap.

On business activity, the region has one of the lowest level of private sector enterprises, with only 319 businesses per 10,000 adults in the North East compared to a national average of 517.

That enterprise gap is one of the factors holding back the region’s economy, as matching the national rate would mean more than 25,000 additional employers in the region.

The proportion of new businesses that grow to become £1m turnover firms, and those that scale-up from that size to become £3m businesses, is also below the national average.

Some of the challenges facing the North East business community are related to levels of skills and educational attainment in the region, and again official figures show the size of the challenge.

The North East has more people with either no or low qualifications, and fewer people with high qualifications compared with the rest of the country.

But since 2014 only two other parts of the country have seen larger increases in the proportion of their population that are qualified to level 4 or above – the equivalent of a higher education qualification – putting the region ahead of areas such as Sheffield and Leeds.

That increase in higher level skills was reflected in data released by the North East LEP last year which revealed that of the 53,000 new jobs created in the region since 2014, almost twothirds (63%) were classed as higherskilled posts. The number of jobs being created in the region is also significant. Because while the North East still has some of the highest levels of unemployment in the country, levels of joblessness have fallen significantly over the last six years and have also closed the gap on the rest of the country. At the end of 2011, the North East’s unemployment rate stood at 12%, almost four percentage points above the national average. The most recent figures available show that the region’s unemployment is now less than half that rate, and at 5.3% it is less than 1% behind the UK average. The region also no longer has the highest unemployment rate in the country. Invest in the North East is being supported by a number of top employers, including Newcastle Airport, Northumbrian Water, Newcastle College, rail company Northern, Stagecoach and Newcastle University.