The latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that the number of unemployed people in the UK rose again in the second quarter of 2011.

The unemployment figure now stands at 2.51 million – 7.9% of the working population. This is an increase of 80,000 on the previous three-month period, and constitutes the sharpest rise for almost two years. 

The data revealed that private-sector employment actually increased by over 40,000 in the second quarter, only to be cancelled out by tumbling public sector figures. John Philpott, chief economic adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), labelled this disparity "worrying."

Adults who live in Yorkshire are the happiest people in the UK, a recent survey has revealed.

Mintel's annual British Lifestyles study found that almost 60% of the county's residents are satisfied with their lives, compared with a national average of 50%.

Londoners, on the other hand, are the least content; less than half declared themselves happy.

A new study from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that UK residents enjoy a quality of life that is well above the average.

Launched as part of the OECD’s 50th anniversary celebrations, the Your Better Life Index is part of a larger Better Life Initiative that aims to measure wellbeing and progress.

The index allows citizens to compare lives across 34 countries, based on 11 dimensions – housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety, and work-life balance.

When asked, 68% of people surveyed said they were satisfied with their life, well above the OECD average of 59%. 

Though some may be surprised to hear it, the UK ranks among the top countries in several sections of the index, with higher incomes and shorter working hours than the OECD average.

Life expectancy at birth in the UK is 79.7 years, slightly above the OECD average.

The index identifies a strong sense of community and low levels of civic participation in the UK. 95% of people believe that they know someone they could rely on in a time of need, higher than the OECD average of 91%.

However, voter turnout, a measure of public trust in government and of citizens' participation in the political process, was 61% during recent elections, a figure that is lower than the OECD average of 72%.

Visit our International Destinations for more information on life in countries across the globe, and don’t miss our coverage of Europe and Asia Pacific in the Summer 2011 issue of Re:locate.

The first round of the Regional Growth Fund (RGF) will see an expanded amount of public investment support 50 bids by companies and partnerships who demonstrated how they would create jobs and a high level of private-sector-led sustainable economic growth in their local communities over the coming years.

The Government expects over 27,000 jobs to be directly created and safeguarded, with close to a further 100,000 jobs in associated supply chains and local economies.

The second round of the fund opened to bids on 12 April. This round will aim to allocate the remainder of the fund (nearly £1bn).

The £450m being invested by the Government through the first round of the RGF is expected to leverage more than £2.5bn of private-sector investment.

The RGF is a £1.4bn fund designed to encourage enterprise, growth and jobs in the private sector and support areas and communities that are dependent on the public sector.

”I am delighted to announce the first successful bids for the

Regional Growth Fund,” said Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. “I was bowled over by the quality of the bids. This money will now help create and safeguard jobs in some of the communities worst hit by the economic downturn.

“Today is a step towards rebalancing our economy away from an unhealthy overreliance on a small number of industries and a few areas. We need to spread opportunity across the whole country, drawing on our many talents. I know that with the right support these businesses can work with their communities and, together, play their part in leading the country back into prosperity.”

Business Secretary Vince Cable said, “Supporting job creation in the regions is vital if we are to drive growth in our local communities.

“We have received a large number of ambitious and highly competitive bids to this first round of the Regional Growth Fund, which will help a number of businesses across the country to expand and create thousands of new jobs.

“The Regional Growth Fund is a competitive fund, and we wanted to see proposals that created jobs in the private sector, in areas of deprivation and that is at risk of suffering from public-sector cuts. I’m confident that the successful bids we have chosen will deliver on this.”

Conditional allocations have been made to successful bidders and will now be subject to a due diligence process, which will establish whether the Government is confident that the organisations can deliver on the proposals in their bid and be agreed through contract.

The following are examples of projects that have been given conditional allocations of funding:

• The Haribo factory going ahead with planned expansion of its site near Wakefield, safeguarding the existing factory
• The development of a former eye hospital in Manchester into a biomedical centre of excellence, which will receive match funding through the European Regional Development Fund as well
• General Motors in Luton announced recently that the next-generation Vivaro van would be built at its plant in Luton, safeguarding around 1,500 jobs, helped by a conditional RGF allocation
• Construction of a manufacturing plant on the Lotte Chemical site in Teesside, to develop resins for food and drink packaging
• Opening the Gateway to the Sheffield City Region – construction of a link road to facilitate wider housing, industrial and commercial development south of Doncaster
• Development of a new factory, R&D laboratory and HQ office facility for Holroyd Precision Ltd in Rochdale

A more detailed breakdown of the total bids received to the first round of the fund is available on the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills website. Also available on the website is a regional breakdown of where the bids came from and their total value

The bill proposes to devolve planning and housing decisions to councils and neighbourhoods, and announces a package of incentives aimed at rewarding councils and local communities which work with developers. It has been described by the government as “a ground-breaking shift in power to councils and communities overturning decades of central government control”.

Proposals for 24 local enterprise partnerships have been given the green light by the government, in a move that is intended to lead to local business and civic leaders working together to drive sustainable economic growth and create new jobs in their communities. The implications for relocation may be considerable. 

Ministers announced the first wave of successful partnerships as part of a new plan for local economic growth, which sets out the government’s role in empowering locally-driven growth, encouraging business investment and promoting economic development. They also declared the £1.4bn Regional Growth Fund open for business.

The federation said that proposals to localise business rates, published in yesterday's White Paper on local growth, would provide a key incentive for councils to encourage new development, create jobs and boost local economies.

The White Paper said this “more radical” option, which the BPF has lobbied on for several years, would “go further than the Business Increase Bonus scheme, with incentive effects likely to be stronger and more predictable, over longer time periods”.

Liz Peace, chief executive of the British Property Federation, said, “It’s extremely positive to see ministers giving thought to a more substantial relocalisation of business rates, something that would free councils from government grants and give them a real financial reward for approving development that generates economic activity and creates new jobs.”

The White Paper also provided welcome clarification on a number of government policies, including the working of Local Enterprise Partnerships and the coalition’s Regional Growth Fund, as well as detail on how planning will be used to drive growth, and on the introduction of tax increment financing.

Liz Peace said, “It’s encouraging to see that tax increment financing (TIF) and incentives for growth get a good airing. However, with regeneration grinding to a halt, we need these incentives in place as quickly as possible, and to be introduced in a flexible way, so that schemes can be funded from a variety of sources, including the private sector.”

The BPF also welcomed further detail on how a local planning system will function, and gave broad backing to the coalition’s localism agenda.

Michael Chambers, associate director, added, “We want to see neighbourhoods and communities feeding much more effectively into local-authority plans and generally have a greater say in shaping their areas. But creating thousands of formal neighbourhood plans in towns and cities around the country could lead to an increase in bureaucracy. We need to know a lot more about how neighbourhoods will be defined, who will draw up these plans, what status they will have, and what resources will follow them.”

For all commercial businesses, one of their main liabilities will relate to the properties that they occupy for the purposes of their business whether owned outright or occupied under a lease. Where negotiating a lease, the tenant should be seeking to minimise or limit their potential liabilities and to ensure greater flexibility as to what they are permitted to do under the lease.

Many occupiers, particularly retailers and leisure operators, are very experienced in lease negotiations. A number of other businesses, however, do not take leases on a regular basis.

There will be a wide range of operational and practical issues which a tenant needs to consider, ranging from the energy efficiency of a building to the electricity capacity particularly when a tenant is taking space in quite an old building, it is important to check that the building actually has enough power to cope with the modern 24-hour use which many tenants now require, and the demands of modern IT.

It is always tempting to agree heads of terms quickly when the tenant is under pressure to find new space. However, making sure you agree all the key issues at the outset will ensure that negotiations proceed more quickly and efficiently it is not just a question of agreeing the rent and the term.

Key issues on heads of terms

• Tenant`s break right Include a tenant`s break right at certain points during the lease term (e.g. five years/tenyears) on service of a fixed notice period. You should try very hard to resist the imposition of any other pre-conditions (i.e. compliance with terms in lease), as the wider the conditionality for the break, the greater the chance that the break right could be frustrated where exercised by the tenant
• Additional rent free Also, you might suggest, where there is a tenant`s break right in the lease, that the lease include an incentive to remain in occupation of the property; e.g. six months rent free post the break date if the break is not exercised
• Service charge You should (particularly with short-term leases) seek to negotiate a service charge cap that is linked to RPI increases. This will provide greater certainty over expenditure under the lease (or part of it) and protect against unexpected surprises
• Repair obligation Try to limit your repair obligation (e.g. no replacement of carpets, etc, or no dilapidations liability). To provide additional certainty, you might want to agree a schedule of condition for the property. The tenant will be required to put the property back into the condition as detailed in the schedule of condition
• Statutory obligations A lease will normally require the tenant to carry out any works required by any statute or other legal obligations. In the case of a 15-year lease, that may be fine. However, a tenant taking a short-term lease of, say, five years or less, will want to limit their potential liability to undertake works which statute may require going forward
• Underlettings Depending on the nature and size of the property, you should consider whether it would be possible to underlet parts of the property to separate occupiers, and, if so, on what basis. Your need for space may change over time, and the ability to underlet the whole or parts of the property may significantly assist cash flow in the future

This article first appeared in Law-Now, CMS Cameron McKenna`s free online information service, and has been reproduced with their permission. For more information, go to www.law-now.com

Following the closure of the Government Office for London, the Government has announced its intention to close down all eight government offices in the English regions.

The offices, which cover the East, South East, South West, East Midlands, West Midlands, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the North East, are responsible for representing central government in the regions and feeding back local views to Whitehall.

Commenting on the decision to abolish the offices, Communities and Local Government secretary Eric Pickles described them as "agents of Whitehall to intervene and interfere in localities."

Final decisions on the closures will be made during the autumn spending review. Mr Pickles said the Government would do its best to avoid compulsory redundancies. 

Medium-sized cities like Exeter, Ipswich and Norwich are important 'nodes' within the national economy and should work with each other and larger neighbours to drive economic recovery across the UK, claims a new report from The Work Foundation.

Commissioned jointly by the three cities, the report, Recession, Recovery and Medium-sized Cities, shows how the recession has played out differently in the 49 English medium-sized cities, according to differing levels of workforce skills and industrial profiles. Focusing on the actions being undertaken in these cities to respond to the recession, it shows how medium-sized cities are taking decisive action to support struggling businesses, the newly unemployed and young people trying to find work. It also reveals how these cities can contribute to economic recovery.

Economic growth over the past decade has largely been concentrated in the UK`s largest cities, and this looks set to continue. Among medium-sized cities, the picture is more uneven: many accounted for a smaller share of regional productivity (Gross Value Added*) in 2006 than in 1995. Nonetheless, over the same period of time, regional employment in the private-sector knowledge-intensive services (such as business and high-tech services) that are set to expand and drive growth over the next decade has grown in the majority of medium-sized cities. This creates key opportunities for such cities in the upturn.

Naomi Clayton, report author and researcher from the Ideopolis Programme at The Work Foundation said, "Medium-sized cities are responding well to the challenges created by the recession and are undertaking important local initiatives to attract business, boost skills and promote regeneration and recovery. Over the next decade, it will be private-sector knowledge-intensive services that create the majority of new jobs and generate the highest productivity gains. Medium-sized cities are, therefore, well positioned to play a key role, working with each other and with their larger neighbours in driving regional and national recovery."

The report`s four recommendations show how medium-sized cities can help drive the recovery:

• Through concerted investment in economic development and regeneration, working closely with neighbouring large cities (where possible), with other medium-sized cities and with their surrounding sub-regions to maximise competitiveness
• By developing strong civic leadership across private, public and third sectors, working towards a clear long-term vision of sustainable economic success that takes account of its distinctive assets, such as universities, industrial composition and quality of place
• Investing to increase workforce skills and to stimulate local employer demand for higher levels of skills
• By creating an economic development strategy that responds to the changes in the economy and seeks to attract and grow private-sector knowledge-intensive services firms, jobs and individuals, as well as develop sectors such as retail, leisure and tourism to provide high-quality employment for those at all skills levels

Recession, Recovery and Medium-sized Cities is available at www.theworkfoundation.com

* Gross Value Added (GVA) measures the contribution to a local, regional or national economy of each individual producer, industry or sector in that area. It is used in the estimation of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a key indicator of the state of the whole economy.