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

2012-02-07T00:04:00.000Z

Another day, another Conservative politician blamingunemployment on a feckless and lazy underclass. Well, not quite, but ministerfor 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 thatit was important to make sure people had the right skills and didn’t fear therisk 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 toooften happens in these cases, the uproar over the silly parts of the minister’scomments mean anything sensible in there gets overlooked.

In Britain’s engineering industries, barely a week goes bywithout some report or company warning of an existing or impending skillsshortage. Either there are too few engineering students or too many of them arechoosing to go work in the City. These words are often met with incredulity by substantial numbers of the engineering community who feel undervalued, underpaid andunder attack from frequent redundancy announcements.

One of the more nuanced takes on this issue is that thereisn’t a skills shortage so much as a skills mismatch: some jobs can’t be filledbecause there aren’t enough people with the appropriate skillset while somehighly 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 economyand the composition of occupations sought by unemployed job seekers”.Meanwhile, “the unemployed cohort consists predominantly of people whopreviously 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 hadcreated “both unemployment and unusedskills”, the skills gap was small relative to most countries and that growingnumbers of high-skilled people significantly exceeded the growth in high-skilljobs.

The problem, the 2009 report said, was actually due to a lack of demandfor skills, not a lack of supply. “The UK has too few high performanceworkplaces, too few employers producing high quality goods and services, toofew businesses in high value added sectors.” The solution is to invest as muchin 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 economysuffered from skills deficiencies, where they did exist they were likely toimpact on businesses.

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

The point to take from all this is that the job market isn’tas simple as a lack of skills, confidence or determination on the part of theunemployed, but that all these issues have to be looked at in the context of anintricate job market of different labour and skill demands.

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

Why you can't always trust the broadsheets either

2012-02-01T23:14:00.001Z

Trust in the media is up we learnt last week from a survey from PR firm Edelman. Given the hacking scandal this seems like a miracle, but a closer look at the stats shows almost 70 per cent of the UK public distrust the tabloids. About half of people actively trust the broadsheets, a position it's easy to fall into when you see the work of hard-working journalists going after important stories for newspapers with global reputations.

When you're covering the same stories as broadsheet journalists, you get an insight into how often they get facts wrong. But while everyone makes honest mistakes, it's a lot more disturbing to see reporters from trusted brands like the Telegraph and even the Guardian twisting stories to their own agendas.

This week I covered a report into the comparative lifetime costs of overhead and underground power cables. Not exactly gripping stuff you might think but it's an emotive issue for some, especially those who live in areas of previously untouched countryside where pylons are due to be erected.

The report made clear that despite improvements in technology even the cheapest underground cables are always at least five times more expensive than overhead lines over their lifetime: no less than £10.2m per km compared to £2.2m for pylon cables. That's a lot of extra money to spend when you think that the UK will need around 350km of transmission lines in the next ten years. When most expensive, buried cables cost £24.1m, taking the total costs even higher.

Even though the difference in estimated costs has come down, these figures for underground transmission are still eye-wateringly high - surely a disappointment for those who oppose pylons, especially as the country isn't exactly flush with cash at the moment. But if you'd read some of the upmarket newspapers you'd think the report had paved the way for the diggers to come out and start burying cables straight away.

Overhead lines are many millions of pounds cheaper than underground cables but apparently th Credit: National Grid

"Could underground cables save our countryside from march of the pylons?" asked the Telegraph. Not likely is the answer, but the paper focused on the fact that the difference in estimated building costs had fallen from thirty to ten times as much, compared with research from the 1960s.

So eager was the paper to stress that underground cables were supposedly much cheaper than previously thought that it managed to get the crucial monetary figures wrong, claiming overhead lines cost £22m per km (this has now been corrected but see the comments at the bottom drawing attention to the mistake). And it falsely claimed buried cables were more efficient, when energy losses are broadly similar to overhead lines.

The Guardian likes to think itself the most trustworthy of all the papers, and most of the time I'd probably agree. But its coverage of this story was little better, and the paper allowed itself to be led by the reaction of vocal lobby group the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) rather than the sober facts of the engineers who had compiled the report.

When the report was presented to journalists, its authors were keen to stress that we shouldn't focus on the ratio of costs at the expense of the figures. Yet that's exactly what the broadsheets did.

Targeting stories at a specific readership is vital for all journalists and publications, but it needn't and shouldn't be done in a way that skews the story so much that key facts are obscured (or worse reported inaccurately). Broadsheets in particular are often good at telling the story behind the stats but in this instance they've moulded the research to fit their own arguments.

And how did those untrustworthy tabloids do? The Mirror reported the story straight, while the paper most associated with spinning a story to get its readers' pulses racing, the Daily Mail, managed to speak directly to its readership's interests without masking the truth.

Don't judge a book by a cover and don't judge a newspaper solely on the colour of its masthead.

Stephen Harris

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

Why you can't always trust the broadsheets either