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It is scarcely a role they can have wished for, but Dorothy Whittaker's family might consider themselves the exemplars of Derby's credit crunch. One of her sons, who runs a property business, put a number of his houses up for sale this week. Another son, a chartered surveyor, has kept his job for the moment, but only because others have been fired. Her 18-year-old granddaughter, along with 50 others, is being let go at the end of February after the call centre where she works lost its biggest clients - three Icelandic banks. And yesterday Mrs Whittaker was at the jobcentre in Wardwick Street with her daughter Rosie, looking through the vacancies with a mounting sense of alarm.
Rosie, 28, has been out of work since glandular fever forced her to quit her office job in October. She hasn't claimed benefit - "I thought I would go straight back into a job" - but has now used up much of her savings and thinks she will have to sign on shortly. Despite seven years' experience and good clerical skills, she can't find a suitable role, and is now looking at cleaning jobs on the minimum wage.
"It's just everywhere, and it's affecting everyone, and it's happened so fast," said her mother, a little distractedly. "We have seen a couple of recessions, as I can remember, but I have never ever seen it as bad as this."
This morning, the prime minister will be in Derby, his first pitstop on a three-day regional tour intended to show his personal commitment to struggling manufacturers and panicking workers in the looming employment crisis.
Though he might reasonably hope not to run into Rosie's father ("Put me down as Colin-Whittaker-I-want-to-thump-Gordon-Brown"), the PM has also cast the trip as a listening exercise, in which the residents of potential employment blackspots - Liverpool this afternoon, the north-west and Birmingham tomorrow, south Wales on Friday - have the chance to voice their concerns.
These will not, in all likelihood, be easy concerns for Brown to hear. More than 3,000 job losses a day have been predicted for the first three months of 2009, and many of them will vanish in the east Midlands. A great many already have done, as the depressingly ratcheting tallies carried in local papers over recent months have demonstrated: 140 from the Rolls-Royce assembly and test facility in the city, where the PM is expected today, 80 jobs likely to go at CLF Technologies outside Derby, which makes parts for Bentleys and Jaguars, 76 at Amber Valley district council in Ripley, as many as 800 rumoured to be at risk at Toyota plants in Derby and Wales.
In nearby Leicester the Christmas pantomime has Cinderella working in a struggling shoe factory. The 100 staff at Equity Shoes, the city's last big footwear manufacturer, cooperatively owned but facing imminent demise, will sympathise.
Nottingham, meanwhile, expects to lose 300 jobs at the business information specialists Experian and 54 at the brand consultancy Rees Bradley and Hepburn. Tales of Robin Hood, the flagship tourist attraction, seems likely to close with the loss of up to 50 jobs. Still hiring, though, is the city's Jobcentre Plus, taking on 15 staff to cope with expected demand.
One of the striking features of Derby city centre is the number of empty units and barely breathing high street ghosts: Zavvi, now in liquidation, was yesterday desperately flogging the last of its stock, sandwiched between a branch of USC, in the same position, and a vacant lot that once was Internacionale (sic).
The local paper has launched a "Derby bites back" campaign but this does not feel like a town that has many teeth - at least not until an election.
"This is an unprecedented situation, certainly in my lifetime," George Cowcher, chief executive of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire chamber of commerce, said last night. "One of the beauties of the east Midlands is that we still have a very well-balanced economy. We have a lot of manufacturing, but also financial services, and a thriving tourism industry. We thought we would be able to ride out the manufacturing storm. But there are some who are finding it very, very difficult."
Back at the jobcentre, among the young men in tracksuits and nervous older men, mostly alone, another mother and daughter, Diane and Donna Johnson, were also hunting without much success for a post for 22-year-old Donna once her Christmas job finishes at the end of the month. They, too, are "very worried".
Mrs Johnson's brother, Mark, works at Rolls-Royce, and still has a job - just. "The thing is, it all changed so quickly," she said. "One minute it was boom, boom, boom and now, all of a sudden, we're in a recession. What happened? When will it end?" Brown may find that, rather than bending his ear, the regions will want to press him for answers.
- British identity and society
- Credit crunch
- Manufacturing sector
- Unemployment and employment data
- Retail industry
- Family finances
- Work & careers
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