LAST week, I held one of my regular Jobs Fairs. These are opportunities for employers and jobseekers to get together in an open forum. Kidderminster Town Hall was packed with 25 businesses looking for staff, and around 400 people looking for work.

This is a response to a challenge we have in Wyre Forest. When I was first elected, there were around 2,500 people unemployed locally. It’s been below 1,000 for a few years, now. But the unemployment rate has been creeping up over the last year or two from a low of around 700 to the current 900.

Of course there will always be people between jobs and any healthy economy needs an available labour resource for new businesses starting up. Typically, around 2.5 per cent unemployment is a healthy level for an economy: our unemployment is around 2 per cent and has been lower. This low level of unemployment leads to wage inflation, and that puts pressure in employers – typically the smaller employers.

However, there are always two sides of the story. I am keen to get as many people into work as possible, for what I hope are obvious reasons. But when I speak to employers, more often than not, they tell me there is simply not the availability of workers locally for them to meet their needs. Yet with this pent-up demand, you would expect wages to be higher. But local average wages are lower than the regional average, and the region is lower than national average.

We have a lot of manufacturing jobs locally, but key to better wages is better skills and higher productivity from the local economy.

There’s no doubt that we have some very good employers in the area, in high technology sectors and specialist areas as part of the automotive supply chain. But to deliver the wider opportunities we need, we need to attract more high tech employers and support that with more local training opportunities.

We have been successful working with the wider county and it is recognised that Kidderminster was let down after the demise of the carpet industry. To remedy that, we are favoured, to a certain extent, when businesses look to come to the county and want advice as to where to locate. But with improved local skills, and improved local infrastructure, we can attract those higher paying employers.