Historically, Crawley has always has one of the UK’s lowest rates of unemployment. Not to take away from the efforts of local business organisations and Crawley Borough Council, but we’ve had some significant advantages to help us with this. When the New Town was built, much of the new population moved out of South London with their employer, taking up new council houses and new factories at the same time, with Manor Royal becoming one of the biggest industrial estates in the country.
Over time, as Britain lost its industry, the growth of aviation took up the slack. I’m told that the demand at the airport was at time so great that engineers were quitting jobs on Manor Royal to handle baggage at Gatwick, maintaining the town’s low unemployment rate.
Few industries were hit harder by COVID-19 than aviation, with a direct impact upon the town’s biggest employment site at Gatwick Airport, an indirect impact upon all those businesses either supplying goods/services to the airport or similarly operating within the aviation sector, and a cascading effect upon the town as a whole with so many households losing their discretionary spending power and consequently being unable to spend within the local economy. The end result was that Crawley took a bigger hit than any other economy in the UK
Some of the impact was inevitable, aviation is a major weak point in trying to contain contagion and consequently limits were going to have to be put in place and they were always going to hurt Crawley’s economy. There was also a speeding-up of existing trends, retail was already sharply in decline and eighteen months conditioning late-adopters into buying things online removed one of the last pillars holding up many shops.
Yet, while some of these things were outside of the Conservative Government’s control, others were not. Of all the help I could have expected from Government, getting no help at all didn’t seem the most likely option. For all their words about wanting to support us, department after department refused any actual action never mind investment beyond those available to the UK as a whole. It was a real sign of how little the Government cared about our community, perhaps only topped by Boris Johnson’s opinions of Crawley.
It also served to highlight just how little our current MP can achieve for the town, with joint-letters going alongside contributions in the Commons. Either he wasn’t really trying or he has no credibility with his own Government, either way the impact is much the same.
The result is that almost three years on from the start of the pandemic, Crawley still has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, with the town far from our March 2020 status as the highest density of employment in the country outside of London.
That being said, through the efforts of Crawley Borough Council, the local Business Improvement District, and sub-regional organisations focused on economic development we have still recovered significantly from our mid-pandemic nadir. One wonders if Crawley would have long-Covid at all if the Conservative Government had been prepared to lift a finger, spending the money on economic recovery rather than losing billions to cronyism and fraud while attacking local authorities for trying to prevent it.
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Peter Lamb for Crawley 