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One in ten will be jobless by end of 2010, business chiefs warn

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Published Date: 09 March 2009
UNEMPLOYMENT will reach 3.2 million, or just over 10 per cent of the workforce, in the second half of 2010 as a result of the recession, a leading business group will predict today.
The British Chambers of Commerce said economic prospects had worsened "significantly" since its last forecast in January as it made more gloomy estimates of how industry will be hit by the economic slump.

Manufacturing output will fall "sharply"
this year, while capital investment by firms will "plunge", according to its report.

Unemployment, which is set to go over two million later this month, will peak at 3.2 million, the BCC warned, adding that next month's Budget was the government's "last real chance" to make up for the "failure" of the VAT cut last November.

Director general, David Frost, said: "It will be business that leads the UK out of recession. For this reason it is vital that companies are given the freedom to create jobs and wealth.

"The Chancellor now has a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the government's firm commitment to supporting wealth-creating businesses during this recession."

• One in ten practising solicitors in Scotland has been sacked during the credit crunch. Lorna Jack, chief executive of the Law Society in Scotland, said her members are facing the bleakest situation in memory.



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  • Last Updated: 08 March 2009 9:15 PM
  • Source: The Scotsman
  • Location: Edinburgh
  • Related Topics: Recession , Unemployment
 
1

John Cameron,

St Andrews 09/03/2009 06:24:27
We face two major national crises. The first is our collapsing economy which is everywhere apparent. The other looms on the horizon. Within a few years Britain will be faced with a terrifying and unprecedented shortfall in its electricity supplies. All but one of the nuclear plants which provide a fifth of our power is so old they will have to close. Nine more major coal and oil-fired power stations are rapidly running out of the hours they are allowed to remain open by Brussels. The combined output of these plants is 22 gigawatts. At peak demand we need 56GW. We thus face a 40 per cent shortfall in the supply needed to keep our economy functioning. There is no way that gap can be filled in time by new nuclear plants while building more gas plants when we are fast running out of our own gas and prices are likely to soar is frankly insane. For years we have indulged the eco-fundamentalists with their delusional rubbish about the need for a low carbon economy and a future of windmills turbines, tidal ducks, and all manner of batty Heath Robinson devices. If we look at where we actually derive our power at present, we can observe that a company such as Npower gets 38 per cent from coal, 46 per cent from gas, only 3 per cent from renewables. Most people in the UK can already see a wind turbine from their sitting room window but these ugly bird-killers only very intermittently provide 1 per cent of the electricity we need and are unlikely ever to produce significantly more. The 25th anniversary of the miners' strike is upon us. The most interesting point, missed in all the recent media hyperventilating, is that our coal industry went into the strike with 187,000 miners and 174 pits. Four years later the inefficient pits were closed and the workforce cut by two-thirds, yet output, at 100 million tons a year, was much the same as before the strike. Productivity had trebled. Sadly the dash for gas saw the benefits of that revolution thrown away. Of the 62 million tons a yea
2

ddmc,

09/03/2009 09:31:11
Economic cycles, UB40 had a song about this in the eighties !
3

Tartan Viking,

09/03/2009 19:50:03
Nine in ten Labour MPs will be jobless by end of 2010, voters warn

 

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