People living in Knowsley earn thousands of pounds less a year on average than people who commute to Knowsley to work.
For a person in full time employment who lives in Knowsley, this difference can be as much as £3,000 compared with someone who travels into the borough for their job. At a meeting of Knowsley council and partners yesterday, the head of policy and performance Debbie Loughlin referred to this earnings gap when discussing the borough’s economic growth.
Ms Loughlin said that while Knowsley had seen economic growth that is “not actually as bad as we thought it would be” post covid, with the borough doing better than elsewhere in the city region, one area where a clear gap remains is in the wage levels of local residents.
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Ms Loughlin said: “There is still a disparity between wages earned in borough and those earned by those people who live in borough. People travelling in borough to work are earning those high salaries from jobs we have created but our people are working outside the borough for low wages.”
She said more work was needed to ensure the council’s Knowsley 2030 strategy made headway in tackling this. Data from the Office for National Statistics shows a clear different between the wages of those for whom Knowsley is a workplace and for those who live in the borough across nearly all areas of measurement.
According to the figures, drawn from data from 2019, the average wage for people living in Knowsley and working full time is £29,936 per year. For those who are coming to the borough to work, that figure stands at £32,612, a difference of almost £3000 per year.
When the median – the mid point of wages earned – is taken into account, these figures are £22,695 for people living in Knowsley and £25,112 for those working in the borough.
While unemployment across the borough has been steadily falling after a high point during the first lockdown, when almost one in ten people in the borough were unemployed, the quality of the work available to residents and the wages that go with it is also an area of concern.
Discussing the borough’s relatively low wages, assistant executive director of Justin Thompson said: “We’ve spent a lot of time historically lots of time trying to get people off unemployment and into lower paid jobs.”
As part of a strategy change, Mr Thompson said, through greater partnership learning, there could be scope for “using some of that capacity to help people earn more in their careers instead.”
