ABC Council area ‘historic’ employment levels praised – with continued 2025 growth expected
Principal economist at Ulster University’s Economic Policy Centre, Dr Eoin Magennis has praised employment growth within the ABC Council area – hailing it as the best performance seen in the borough in the past 50 to 60 years.
Despite some concerns regarding productivity rates in the borough, the senior economist praised the borough’s economic performance when he addressed ABC councillors at a recent Economic Development & Regeneration Committee meeting.
Dr Magennis stated: “We’ve actually seen quite good local local growth within the local economy in most of the broad sectors – services in particular, manufacturing probably a bit less.
“So we’re forecasting that growth will continue this year and into next year, and in fact it will be a little stronger next year than this.
“Much of the growth is underpinned by continued strong employment growth, and in particular Health, Transport and Construction.
“Within the council area, as well as across the North, unemployment is going to remain at historic lows.
“We’ve never really seen unemployment at 2% before, but we’re expecting that to continue over the next while.
“Unemployment being at a historic low, we could look to see over the next 10 years hitting 75% of those who are aged between 16 and 64 being in employment.
“In a sense that sets the scene for most of the economy at the moment, the tightness of the labour market, the difficulty of recruitment, challenges around retaining staff as well.
“Within ABC we’re at a high now of almost 100,000 employee jobs, so it’s quite a remarkable steady growth, it’s very rare you would see a picture of employment growth like that.
“That’s certainly not something we would have seen in the previous 50 to 60 years.
“The council area remains stronger in fact than most other council areas within the North in terms of the employment growth.
“And we’re expecting between 5,800 and 7,500 or so jobs to come in roughly over the next decade.
“We’re anticipating that across almost every sector, the key sectors being Health, Manufacturing and Construction.
“One of the things we haven’t seen to date in the council area to the same extent has been good growth in Professional Services jobs, but we’re seeing that now in tradable services, and we expect to see that continue.
“Under the upper scenario there would be more than a thousand new jobs added on in those kinds of professional services.
“In line with that, the Gross Value Added (GVA), we again expect to see that continue growing – in fact it’ll be just ahead of the NI average.
“There is a challenge in the council area in terms of productivity. When we think about productivity, the key thing to understand by that is if we have good productivity growth and strong productivity growth, you begin to see that in things like pay levels, but also in terms of the quality of the jobs on offer.
“That is a key challenge that probably needs to be addressed.
“Regarding the tightness of the labour markets, and given we’re forecasting continuing economic growth and employment growth, [there will be] a need to [identify] hidden reserves of labour in terms of economic inactivity rates, and what we could do in terms of supporting people to get back into work.
“That’s going to I think require a number of initiatives.
“In terms then of where ABC goes in terms of the key discussion points, the first [issue] is the tightness in the labour market. I’d say it’s going to accelerate and become even stronger, because I think employment growth is going to be stronger in ABC than elsewhere.
“Now some of the that could mean and will mean pulling in commuters from other parts of Northern Ireland, but it also means tackling inactivity.
“There is also another issue there within ABC, and that is the need to foster greater levels of entrepreneurship.
“The council is very good and very strong in terms of self-employment numbers, but not enough of that is actually then leading to further employment.”