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West Midlands Emsi Covid-19 Briefing

Will Cookson

September 2020

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Emsi Covid-19 Briefing

About Emsi

Emsi brings economic geography and frontier data science together to better understand local economies and what drives them. We link official statistics, proprietary data and robust economic modelling to provide an unparalleled, multi-dimensional view on labour markets and business activity down to the local authority level.

Emsi provides three main sources of data with which to understand local labour markets:

n Structural labour market intelligence, derived from official sources produced by government, but enhanced with robust modelling to minimise the ‘suppressions’ which leave local details blank and projections to extrapolate trends into the future

n Job posting analytics, gathered by harvesting and deduplicating hundreds of thousands of online job postings every month and categorising them by place, job title, company and skills to capture intelligence on the talent employees are seeking out

Emsi uses economic consulting, data analytics, and a variety of software tools to provide information to support successful decision-making. Our mission at Emsi is to help organisations and individuals make better, more informed decisions about the labour market through access to timely, granular and action-oriented labour market data. Never has this mission been so critical as this current period of rapid, short-term change in the labour market as we respond to the COVID-19 crisis.

Emsi UK are based in Basingstoke and our head office is based in Moscow, Idaho. Emsi are owned by Strada Education Network, a US non-profit organisation. For more information about Emsi’s products and services in the UK, visit www.emsidata.co.uk.

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Job Posting Activity

This briefing draws on Emsi’s Job Postings Analytics daily trends. Emsi collate, deduplicate and categorise online job posting activity on a daily basis to build a picture of hiring activity to bring near-real time context to your understanding of local labour market dynamics — particularly important at times like this, as you try to manage your response to the Covid-19 crisis. You can find out more about Emsi data at https://www.economicmodelling.co.uk/data/

Monthly Posting Trend For West Midlands

Last 90 Days’ Posting Activity

These charts map daily posting activity in the last 90 days, comparing 2020 with the same period in 2019. Since 7th March, around the time that social distancing measures came into active discussion, unique active postings have fallen by 4,112, or 32.6 per cent.

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Occupations: Change Since 23rd March

The first chart looks at the change in job posting levels for each of the 9 major occupational groups in the ONS’ Standard Occupation Classification since the introduction of lockdown measures.

The last chart shows the biggest changes at a more detailed level of the Standard Occupation Classification, with the largest increases and largest decreases in postings since 23 March.

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Unemployment - Claimant Count Analysis (West Midlands)

Claimant Count – Job Seekers Allowance by Occupation (West Midlands)

80,000

90,000

100,000

110,000

120,000

130,000

140,000

150,000

160,000

170,000

180,000

Aug

-19

Oct-19

Dec

-19

Feb-20

Apr-20

Jun-20

Cla

iman

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10,000

8212 : Van drivers

9233 : Cleaners, domestics

9134 : Packers, bottlers, canners, fillers

9139 : Labourers in process and plantoperations n.e.c.

4150 : General office assistants/clerks

9149 : Other goods handling and storageoccupations n.e.c.

1111 : Senior officials in national government

0000 : Occupation unknown

9129 : Labourers in other construction tradesn.e.c.

7111 : Sales and retail assistants

Jobseekers Allowance Claimants July 2020

Up 71% Mar-Jul

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n Claimant count includes Jobseekers Allowance and Universal Credit ‘out of work’ benefits (UK up 111% Mar-Jul).

n JSA data equates to approx. 12% of total claimant count, but provides only occupational lens as JSA claimants will have a defined occupation (SOC)..

n Consider short-term impact of furlough on unemployment stats.

Furloughing Analysis

The chart below breaks the overall numbers down across sectors. As you can see, most sectors follow a fairly similar pattern, with a big increase of numbers in the first couple of weeks, then a levelling off, followed by a decline towards the end of May. It is not entirely clear yet whether this fall was as a result of people returning to work, or people being laid off, but it is interesting to note that the decline then slowed across almost all sectors throughout June, with overall numbers only dipping below 7 million on the last couple of days of the month.

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The data provided by the Government also gives a breakdown of the percentage of economically active workers in each sector, across the nine English Government Office Regions, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We have mapped these out to get a good sense not only of which sectors have seen the most furlough numbers, but also some of the differences between regions.

The chartbelow shows which industries are seeing the biggest fall in furlough numbers since the peak across the UK. Whilst this does not necessarily signify a return to work for all these people, with some very likely to have been made redundant, it should give us some indication of where economic activity has picked up again after the shutdown in March.

Some of what we see here confirms a lot of what we have read in the media or heard anecdotally. For instance, we know that building work was one of the first activities to restart after the initial lockdown, and we can see this reflected in the fact that Construction

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is at the top of the chart, with 318,000 less people on furlough at the end of June than at the peak of 720,000 in mid-April (a fall of 44%). A particularly noteworthy figure is the one for Information and communications. Although take up of furlough was not particularly high compared to many other sectors (just 18%), by the end of June only 10% of the entire furloughed number (20,000) had returned to work.

One of the most important questions that the data answers is which industries are seeing the biggest fall in furlough numbers since the peak. Whilst this does not necessarily signify a return to work for all these people, with some very likely to have been made redundant, it should give us some indication of where economic activity has picked up again after the shutdown in March.Overall, the rate of return from furlough is 24%, which is represented by the line on the chart, and so everything from Property upwards is ahead of average:

We don’t yet know how many of those coming off the furlough scheme are returning to work, and how many are being made unemployed, and we must wait for the release of the

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Labour Force Survey later in the year to answer this. I hope this is useful as a piece of follow up,I'd be more than happy to contribute to futuremeetings asthe opportunity arises.

Exposure to Covid-19 by Industry Cluster

Industry Clusters are a way of grouping the sectors of a local economy together, in such a way that it helps you to identify industry clusters or sectors that make your area different and have the potential to grow beyond the national average

Starting with 560+ industries at the 4-digit SIC level. Emsi has localised employment data for each one of these through analysis that ascertains:

n Are they co-located? Do industries tend to have employment in the same places?

n Are they using the same workforce? Do industries rely on the same sorts of occupations?

n Are they buying and selling from one another? Do industries have a key role in the same supply chain?

Emsi has also looked at which industry clusters will be most affected by the Coronavirus pandemic given their dependence on a range of factors: the physical nature of their work; the public nature of their work; their dependence on affected supply chains; their dependence on affected market demand; their proximity to ‘key worker’ functions which may see enhanced demand and/or competition.

Emsi can blend these elements with the latest insights from job postings data to build an ‘exposure model’ to identify which industries within the economy are facing the greatest risks to jobs and earning

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Exposure by Industry Cluster – Top 20 UK

In terms of the West Midlands the Industry Clusters that have a higher presence than the national are:

n Furniture & Wood Products n Building Services

n Plastic & Vulcanised Products n Upstream Chemical

n Automotive Services n Downstream Metal

n Metalworking Technology n Logistics & E-Commerce

n Paper & Packaging n Production Technology

FIND OUT MORE

This report was produced on 14 September 2020. We have a number of commercial local labour market insight services that we offer to people working in the education, economic development and employment space, please contact us to find out more about how we can help you.

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Furnitu

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Household goods and se

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Constructi

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Plastics

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Food and drin

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Automotive se

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Metalworki

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Textiles a

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Paper and packa

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Building se

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Upstream m

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Downstream m

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Logist

ics and eco

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Vehicle and defence

tech

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Exposure Index (UK)

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economidelling.cog/. We have a number of commercial local labour market insight services that we offer to people working in the education, economic development and employment space, please contact us to find out more about how we can help you: https://www.economicmodelling. co.uk/contact/.

www.emsidata.co.uk

Contact

Will Cookson

Director for Economic Development, Emsi UK

07740 344 750

William.cookson@emsidata.co.uk