With all the scary economic news around at the moment, any good news is worth highlighting like the forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility that there will be 160,000 fewer jobs lost across the UK in the public sector.
Given Wales large dependence on the public sector and the private sector still stuttering any help should be welcomed, but probably wont be.
Dylan Jones Evans has broken the figures down for Wales
So what does this mean for Wales?
Given that Wales accounts for 5.7 per cent of all public sector employment in the UK, this means that around 18,000 public sector posts will be lost in Wales over the next four years as compared to the 28,000 civil service jobs originally estimated.
Whilst these unfortunate job losses are an inevitability of the previous government's spending plans, the fact that 88,000 jobs were lost in the Welsh private sector during the recession does place things into perspective and if the economy grows again, then these public sector losses could be revised downwards again.
In fact, what it means is that the private sector in Wales will need to create 7,000 net new jobs every year between now and 2015 to compensate for the loss of employment in the public sector.
To put this into perspective, given that there are 200,000 firms in Wales, it means that roughly one in every thirty businesses in Wales will need to create one job every year to make up for the estimated reduction in civil service jobs.
So while this is better news the job situation in Wales remain dire with over 117,000 unemployed at the latest count, the news shouldn’t allow WAG or the UK Government the space to relax in terms of developing a bigger, stronger and more robust Welsh private sector for all our sakes now and in the future.Any source
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