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ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » The employment statistics which were mistakenly released early yesterday appear to show fairly good news for the North East, as the only region to see a drop in unemployment.
But we're not getting too excited too soon by this, even though more people now seem willing to make whispers about green shoots.
For a start, the sample size used to calculate regional figures leaves a wide margin for error - meaning longer term trends are more important than the monthly stats.
Secondly, while our members have told us through our latest quarterly survey that they expect the pace of job cuts to slow down, the balance of future employment expectations is still negative.
But it would be churlish not to take some encouragement from these figures, and from a relatively report forcecast from the Bank of England today. It would certainly be nice to think that, bit by bit, confidence is creeping back into the North East economy,
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