Is there a North-South divide in unemployment?

There’s no doubt there is a serious inequality between economic experience in different parts of the UK. This is manifesting itself in various different ways – as we’ll explore in a forthcoming series of pieces on Sky News. However, the recent improvement in unemployment has been felt in almost every part of the country. As this table shows, for the first time in well over a year there are now no UK regions with double-digit unemployment.

There is a disparity between jobless rates in the North East and London, as this graph shows, but the gap is actually significantly lower than in previous recessions.

And if you look at the comparison between the North East and the South East, the disparity is only half what it was in the early 1990s.