Crawley’s low wage economy

Figures published by the Commons Library at the end of last year confirm that the average gross wages for those living in the constituency remain below not only the regional median wage, but the national median wage.

This often comes as a surprise for people, as the average weekly earlings paid within the constituency are actually one of the highest in the country, but the explanation for the apparent mis-match is simple enough.

Crawley has a huge jobs market. It’s not just the airport, Manor Royal is one of the UK’s largest business parks in the country and in addition to the town centre we have a number of other smaller yet significant employment scattered across the borough. Before the pandemic, we had the higest density of employment in the UK outside of London, and we have mostly now recovered to our pre-pandemic positon.

Consequently, the vast majority of jobs in the constituency are held by people who do not live here, with those living within the constituency tending to take on the less well-paid jobs.

While the cost of living in the region is one of the highest in the country, what saves most families is the very high levels of employment in the town, meaning that most families have money consistently coming in, even if there is little left over once all the bills have been paid.

However, I want more for our town than families only just managing to keep their heads above water, which is why it’s important that we address two sets of issues: social mobility and the ability to retrain.

I have written extensively around the town’s problems with social mobility, particularly the fact that we are regularly ranked as having the worst social mobility in the entire region and amongst the very worst in the country. What does this mean? Simply put, that what your parents do for a living is likely to be the best predictor of how far you will get in life.

To address this we need more capacity in schools, both in terms of ensuring that teachers aren’t so overworked that they can’t provide sufficient support to ensure that all the children in their class are able to realise their potential, and the engagement opportunities with schools to encourage children to think bigger in terms of their career aspirations.

This very much fits into national Labour Party policy, with ‘Breaking down barriers to opportunity’ forming one of the party’s five missions for Government. Locally we’ve spent a lot of time supporting activities such as STEM-fest with the express intention of trying to better engage people in thinking about their careers at a young age, something which has become more challenging since the Government did away with the funding to support giving pupils work experience.

Secondly, we need to enable people to retrain. We need to bear in mind that while the airport has historically provided an endless source of local jobs, there is no guarantee that this will carry on into the future. Certainly, we saw the risk of being too closely invested in a single sector during the pandemic, but beyond that the lower skilled jobs at the airport are in the process of being automated, they simply will not be there in the future. As a result, people are going to need to find new careers.

This is why when Labour regained control of the council in 2014, we produced the town’s first ever Employment and Skills Strategy, analysing the extent of the challenge and proposing a range of solutions. While some of these solutions, such as Employ Crawley and the Town Centre Skills Academy, we were able to deploy on the ground ourselves a number required wider support.

It took six years and a global pandemic, but eventually the Government caught up with us and since then we’ve been able to move ahead with projects designed to diversify the range of local jobs and upskill current workers. There’s still a long way to go, but at least we’re now on the right course for delivering the better career opportunities local people deserve.