Outrage and bluster: when silly comments distract from the really important debate on unemployment

Another day, another Conservative politician blaming unemployment on a feckless and lazy underclass. Well, not quite, but minister for disabled people Maria Miller did tell BBC 5 Live that there wasn’t a shortage of jobs. Rather, she said, there was a lack of appetite for those jobs available and that it was important to make sure people had the right skills and didn’t fear the risk of going into work.

Of course you only have to glance at the figures (2.68 million job seekers against 463,000 vacancies) to realise that saying there is no shortage of work is ludicrous. But, as all too often happens in these cases, the uproar over the silly parts of the minister’s comments mean anything sensible in there gets overlooked.

In Britain’s engineering industries, barely a week goes by without some report or company warning of an existing or impending skills shortage. Either there are too few engineering students or too many of them are choosing to go work in the City. These words are often met with incredulity by substantial numbers of the engineering community who feel undervalued, underpaid and under attack from frequent redundancy announcements.

One of the more nuanced takes on this issue is that there isn’t a skills shortage so much as a skills mismatch: some jobs can’t be filled because there aren’t enough people with the appropriate skillset while some highly trained workers languish in jobs that don’t employ their full abilities.

The exact situation is a complex one to describe accurately. A December 2011 report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) on recruiting unemployed people found “a significant mismatch between the composition of jobs in the UK economy and the composition of occupations sought by unemployed job seekers”. Meanwhile, “the unemployed cohort consists predominantly of people who previously worked in low skilled, entry level occupations.”

But another UKCES report from 2009 said that while an oversupply of high skilled jobs and low skilled labour had created “both unemployment and unused skills”, the skills gap was small relative to most countries and that growing numbers of high-skilled people significantly exceeded the growth in high-skill jobs.

The problem, the 2009 report said, was actually due to a lack of demand for skills, not a lack of supply. “The UK has too few high performance workplaces, too few employers producing high quality goods and services, too few businesses in high value added sectors.” The solution is to invest as much in raising employer ambition as in enhancing people’s skills.

The initial findings from the first UK-wide employer skills survey published in December 2011 appear to back this up, recognising that while only pockets of the economy suffered from skills deficiencies, where they did exist they were likely to impact on businesses.

There might be 20 or more applicants for every job in some areas but if companies can’t recruit the right person they might choose to postpone hiring, creating more work for the rest of the staff and preventing the firm from meeting customer orders. UKCES wants to raise ambition and encourage more employer to train their staff to help ease these problems and bring Britain’s skill demands up to an internationally competitive level.

The point to take from all this is that the job market isn’t as simple as a lack of skills, confidence or determination on the part of the unemployed, but that all these issues have to be looked at in the context of an intricate job market of different labour and skill demands.

If Maria Miller had been more subtle in her approach then she might have sparked a much-needed debate on the UK’s skills mismatch and what we can do to address it. Instead, the Tory in her felt the need to deny the unemployment crisis before raising the problem, undermining her own point and prompting outrage and bluster from the Left that, although justified, continued the distraction away from the more important issues.