The latest unemployment figures published a couple of days ago showed unemployment had fallen in Scotland, whilst it has continued to rise across the rest of the UK:

• The Scottish unemployment rate declined to 6.9 per cent, with 2,000 fewer people in Scotland unemployed. At the UK level, unemployment increased by 21,000 and the UK unemployment rate was 7.9 per cent over the same period
• Scotland’s employment rate increased by 0.5 percentage points to 74.2 per cent, with 15,000 more people in work, while the UK employment rate remained unchanged at 72.5 per cent

However, on the traditional measure – the monthly tally of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance – unemployment rose by 1,300 to 136,000. The only explanation I’ve heard for how one measure can go up whilst the other one goes down is that the time periods over which they report are different – with the Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants figures taking November into account.

The Scottish Government, of course, chooses to highlight the positive news and portrays it as the result of all of its hard work through PACE and the Future Jobs Fund. I’m not so sure, but hopefully it is a fragile sign of recovery nonetheless.

More interesting comment on Scotland’s resilience comes from David Bell, Professor of Economics at Stirling University. In this article he explains how a housing market that was less overheated in Scotland than the rest of the UK helped Scotland to suffer less pain during the recession of the 1990’s. Because consumers and small businesses would often use housing as collateral, Scottish workers and business owners were less over-stretched because they had lower levels of house price inflation to borrow against.

This time around, the credit squeeze may have also had relatively less impact in Scotland, because we had not borrowed against soaring house prices to the same extent as other parts of the UK. In addition to that, Professor Bell has seen businesses use short-time working and other flexible methods to hold on to people, rather than let them go.

So, if you have avoided redundancy so far, it is worth preparing to be flexible and adaptable so, if it comes to it, you can discuss alternatives to redundancy with your employer.