Headline regional ambitions
Employment
If the employment rate of 16-74 year olds in the region reached 70 per cent by 2031, there would be over 424,000 more residents with jobs than today.
In both a UK and global context, employment rates are high in the East of England. Currently, around 77 per cent of the working-age population are in employment (April 2006 to March 2007). Yet this partly reflects the low provision of higher education places: there is a net outflow of students who leave the region to study elsewhere and as a result, a large share of young people are in work rather than in full-time education or training. The post-retirement age workforce is an increasingly important source of employment growth. The employment rate of 16-74 year-olds was around 67 per cent over 2006/07.
The picture is varied around the region, with the working-age employment rate at around 85 per cent in Harlow and South Norfolk, and less than 70 per cent in Luton and Cambridge. In Cambridge this reflects the share of the population who are students and who are not in paid employment during term time; in Luton, economic activity rates are low among females in certain ethnic minority communities.
Employment performance is also dependent on economic growth and structural factors such as skill levels. In setting regional ambitions around employment, the RES-RSS joint modelling project was used to investigate the levels and rates consistent with the region's ambition on GVA (see Figure 8). Based on this research, the RES sets the ambition of a 70 per cent employment rate of the 16-74 population and, on past trends, this is consistent with a minimum 80 per cent employment rate for the working-age population (on the current definition of 16-59/64). This is a challenging ambition that, if achieved, would see 424,000 more residents with jobs than today. Careful monitoring will be required to understand the evolution of employment over the RES period and, in particular, that improved performance is underpinned by increasing skill levels and not by falling participation in education and training.
