Public sector employment in Crawley

Crawley’s workforce has always had one of the lowest proportions of public sector workers in the country, regularly coming bottom of the table. The reason for this, if I had to guess, is that the presence in the town of Gatwick Airport and Manor Royal mean that we have a local economy the size of a decently-sized city, but that the smaller population size of the town means that we have far fewer public sector facilities within the town.

The House of Commons Library has just released a new tool looking at public sector employment and this confirmed the small public sector workforce.

With the number of local private sector jobs in 2022 still recovering from the pandemic, the usual extent of this mismatch is understated in these figures, but the difference remains clear to the eye.

What is more confusing is when we look at the change in overall figures, which appear to show an annual three figure increase in the size of the overall public sector worker each year.

To be fair, they do say that the constituency figures might not be accurate from one year to the next, but overall there appears to have been an increase of almost 50% in the size of the public sector workforce throughout austerity from 2015 to 2022.

Now from looking through lists of rateable property in Crawley, I do know there are buildings owned by government agencies unassumingly located in various bits of the town, but the numbers working in those locations can’t be particularly large. I also know how local public sector bodies have been letting their workforce numbers drop in order to address their budget gap over the last 14 years, so it seems hard to believe that the larger organisations locally are responsible. Maybe, it’s agencies like Border Force at the airport, where it’s harder to notice changes in workforce? Or are they simply taking the national/regional figures and pro-rating across constituencies?

I genuinely do not know, but the continued success of the local economy means that no matter what the overall public sector figure, it seems likely that the gap between those working in the public and private sectors in Crawley is only going to grow with time.