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Thirty jobs lost every day in Northampton
More than 30 jobs have been lost in Northampton every working day since the start of the year, pushing the unemployment rate in the town to a 13-year high.
Latest figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show that 2,135 people signed up for Job Seekers' Allowance (JSA) in the first three months of 2009, increasing the claimant count to 6,453.
The unemployment rate of 4.9 per cent is now the highest since September 1996, and has doubled since May last year.
Brian Binley, the Conservative MP for Northampton South, said he feared that the worse was yet to come as the recession showed no signs of slowing.
He said: "This is what you get when you don't have proper jobs. In Northampton we have an awful lot of logistics employment imported into Northampton and the trouble with this is that these are the first type of jobs to go in a downturn.
"It impacts on my concerns for the growth agenda. We have got to get down to the business of attracting jobs of high value to come to the town. The figures are not going to get better from this point onwards. If we talk about the future of Northampton we must talk in a serious way about job creation."
Sally Keeble, Labour MP for Northampton North, said: "I obviously think the situation is extremely serious and I have started up a project to look at the impact of the recession especially on young people. How school leavers fare when they are looking for jobs is the single biggest issue for us all.
"The Government has also put forward a number of measures to help people who have not got jobs to get back to work as soon as possible," she added.
The latest ONS data showed that Northampton had a significantly higher unemployment rate in March than Northamptonshire, where it was 4.2 per cent.
Last month, a survey by comparison website uSwitch showed that more people were claiming Job Seekers' Allowance in the town than in the city centres of Nottingham, Derby and Leicester and the percentage rise in unemployment was far greater than the rest of the region.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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