Opinion

Serious measures needed to solve west Belfast's jobless problem

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

West Belfast has seen the lowest number of jobs created by Invest NI in the city over the past three years. Picture by Matt Bohill
West Belfast has seen the lowest number of jobs created by Invest NI in the city over the past three years. Picture by Matt Bohill West Belfast has seen the lowest number of jobs created by Invest NI in the city over the past three years. Picture by Matt Bohill

According to a set of assembly answers obtained by SDLP MLA Alex Attwood, only 6 per cent of Invest NI’s financial assistance in Belfast has gone to the west of the city over the past three years, along with just 9 per cent of the jobs it has created and 8 per cent of the visits it has arranged for potential investors.

South Belfast received seven times as much money and four times as many jobs, with north and east Belfast splitting the difference between them, the east being slightly ahead.

Responding to the figures, Attwood said: “Jobs should go to all parts, spread across the city and the north. All should get fair treatment.”

A casual observer might expect each quarter of the city to be in line for 25 per cent of jobs, spending and visits, not least because they all have roughly equal populations. However, that ignores the fact that the city centre, home to one third of the jobs in Northern Ireland, is mainly in the south Belfast parliamentary constituency. The north and east Belfast constituencies each contain a half of the Harbour Estate, the inevitable home of waterfront regeneration and reclaimed industrial land.

Westminster boundaries are drawn to give equal populations. They carry no further meaning within a city and certainly do not imply central Belfast ‘belongs’ to residential south Belfast, or that west Belfast is excluded altogether. The city centre, the waterfront, the harbour estate and all their opportunities belong to everyone and should be perfectly accessible to every resident in a city barely five miles across.

By requesting a constituency breakdown of Invest NI activity, Attwood was guaranteed to receive apparently ‘unfair’ figures. This may be useful for attacking the record of successive DUP economy and enterprise ministers, or of embarrassing Sinn Féin for governing with the DUP. It may help to highlight genuine issues with historic inequality and disadvantage in west Belfast - few would deny the district has problems. But this particular form of statistical melodrama, which the SDLP is not alone in using, carries a subtext of present-day prejudice. It implies, however carelessly or accidentally, that the most Catholic part of Northern Ireland is being discriminated against to an outrageous extent, through official inaction at best or active policy at worst. How does it help west Belfast or wider society to foster such a toxic misconception?

People who risk promoting this view have an obligation, due to its seriousness, to be specific. Do they believe there is official sectarian bias against economic development in west Belfast today? If so, which agencies and individuals do they hold responsible?

Invest NI says job creation is “driven by business”, so there is little it can do to direct investment to particular locations. That is an over-simplification - the Harbour Estate proves you can develop sites that are not even initially dry land. However, both sides of this argument ignore the obvious fallacy of assuming local jobs go to local residents. In practice, most of Northern Ireland is one travel-to-work area.

The true measure of job disadvantage in west Belfast is how well people there can access opportunities across the city and beyond. West Belfast currently has an unemployment rate of 8.1 per cent, compared to 5.8 per cent for both Belfast and Northern Ireland. Economic inactivity is around 40 per cent, compared to 31 and 26 per cent for Belfast and Northern Ireland respectively.

These are appalling figures - easily among the worst in the UK. Yet they still do not come close to indicating the scale and type of government failure implied by the misleading constituency breakdown of Invest NI activity. Nor do they suggest more Invest NI activity in west Belfast is the solution.

A majority of adults in the area are in work and presumably most of them are working elsewhere, given that west Belfast is predominantly residential.

What everyone else needs is help to do the same. Even if Invest NI was capable of landing jobs on their doorstep, what use is that to people who cannot get a job in town, a mile or two away?

The barriers they face are not quangos too narrow-minded to cross the Westlink but training, education, childcare, benefit rules and employment practices.

If any part of Invest NI’s £160m budget was earmarked for helping west Belfast, those are the problems it should be spent on addressing.

newton@irishnews.com