Summary
FAI economist Hannah Randolph is joined by Director Mairi Spowage and Jack Evans, a senior policy advisor for JRF in Scotland, to discuss new research on the labour market in Scotland. We discuss how many people potentially want to work across local authorities and regions in Scotland, as well as why we chose to create a measure of who wants to work rather than a traditional unemployment figure. We also talk about how issues with survey data pose a practical challenge for local authorities as they design local employability and poverty policy and services.
You can find the full report from the FAI here, and the JRF briefing here.
Episode notes
Participants
Dr Hannah Randolph (Economist, FAI)
Prof Mairi Spowage (Director, FAI)
Jack Evans (Senior Policy Advisor, JRF)
Time stamps
(0:22) Who wants to work across Scotland
(3:24) Child poverty and supporting parents into work
(8:09) Why focus on “people who want to work”?
(13:29) How we talk about labour market status
(19:26) Surveys and other sources of labour market information
(26:55) What’s next?
Transcript
You can find the transcript for this episode here.
Authors
Hannah is a Fellow at the Fraser of Allander Institute. She specialises in applied social policy analysis with a focus on social security, poverty and inequality, labour supply, and immigration.
Mairi is the Director of the Fraser of Allander Institute. Previously, she was the Deputy Chief Executive of the Scottish Fiscal Commission and the Head of National Accounts at the Scottish Government and has over a decade of experience working in different areas of statistics and analysis.
Jack Evans
Jack is a Senior Policy Advisor (Scotland) at JRF. His research interests include in-work poverty, employer practice change and procurement.