To: Amber Rudd

Make the job skills demands/job supplies shortages visible

I want stats assembled for every town and city in the UK which shows how much demand there is in an area for certain kinds of workers, how many applicants are typical per job vacancy.

Why is this important?

I lived in an unemployed hotspot for some years, and when I eventually got the job the recruiting manager says to me, they've never known an area like this where 100 applicants applied for the job. And this has got me thinking, there is a heck of an invisibility factor. A fog, so to speak. And I'll use a second example- I'm currently applying for jobs with a particular skillset.(Accounting) It turns out that said skillset acquires a lot of applicants in my particular location. So much so that I am keen to relocate where the demand for the skillset is higher.

And this is where the basis for these statistics are. The basis to provide an idea what demand for said skillsets/job types area are in an area. In the past we've marvelled at immigration's mobility, yet why is it that mobility WITHIN the UK is worse? Why there is a lack of say strawberry pickers in an area? And why this fact is both obscured and the movement of people within the UK is so little.

The idea of these stats is to promote movement. To take away the fog, to remove the obstacles of moving. (uncertainty job demands in an area etc etc)

An idea how this would work would be a concise summary of an area, it might say (i) competition for vacancies, and (ii)abundance of vacancies: for example: care work high/low, admin work high/low, FLT drivers high/low, production work high/low, accounts work high/low, labouring work high/low etc etc.