2/7/2014: Live Register: Changes on Q1 2011 & Government 'Score Card'

In the previous post I covered Live Register (top numbers) for June. Here, as promised, a sort of 'Score Card' for the Government tenure period - looking at the LR performance over the period from Q1 2011 through Q2 2014. This is summarised in the table below:

Note one simple exercise, taking the rate of improvement in figures over either 3 years and a quarter (entire tenure of the Government) or over the last 12 months (quarterly averages basis), we can look at the number of years we are still away from getting the LR and its underlying components to some sort of a 'norm' (selected as the average of 2007-2008 period). Two things are evident from this exercise:

1. The task ahead is still awfully large and in no case are we out of the storm until around 2019-2020; and
2. The task is being made easier in recent months as things have been improving more rapidly

This confirms my earlier analysis that the current crisis does not appear to be as easily solvable as the one of the 1980s (you can see some of this here).

It would not be fair to criticise this Government for the problem of unemployment. And it would be wrong not to recognise the fact that the numbers are improving and the rate of improvement has accelerated in the last 18 months. Still, noting the caveats to the improvements that I cited in the earlier post on this subject, and considering the effect of State Training Programmes on LR (the cornerstone of Government labour market policies endorsed fully by the Troika) there is more of this road yet to travel than what has been marked over the last 3 years.