Jobs and unemployment in Lewisham, Southwark and Greenwich

We’ve been sent some data about jobs and unemployment in South East London from Adzuna, a service that aggregates job ads from a range of websites. Since Lewisham’s status as a “dormitory” borough (they sleep here, but work elsewhere) is a strategic challenge for Lewisham Council and a topic often brought up in discussions on here, we thought it would be interesting to get some data comparing Lewisham (population 265,000) with our two neighbouring boroughs: Southwark (pop. 287,000) and Greenwich (pop. 228,000).

Southwark obviously covers much of the south bank, which offers a far greater concentration of jobs, than either Greenwich or Lewisham and had more job vacancies available on the day the snapshot was taken (June 29th, 2011) than the other two. The fact that Adzuna only tracks jobs advertised in the classifieds means that it’s not the complete picture, but as an indicator of the availability of casual job opportunities, it’s quite striking that there was only one Greenwich-based job advertised.

Most striking of all though, is the rising number of job seekers allowance claimants over the last three years, a pattern seen in all three boroughs between 2007 and 2011.