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Basildon Council

Basildon is located 30 miles east of London, with trains from Basildon town centre into Fenchurch Street taking just over 30 minutes. Stansted airport is only 30 minutes drive away, as is London City Airport. Southend–on-Sea is just 12 miles away. The Basildon District is 42.5 square miles and takes in the towns of Basildon, Billericay, Wickford, Pitsea and Laindon. It gathers 165,688 inhabitants. The Basildon District employs 75,000 people, is the 31st most competitive business location in the UK, and is the second largest economy in the Thames Gateway, outside of Canary Wharf.  The A127 Corridor employs over 40,000 people alone and provides the second largest concentration of employees in the Thames Gateway outside of Canary Wharf.  The Basildon District is home to 5000 businesses. Basildon has a very strong engineering and manufacturing base, and is home to major employers such as Ford Motor Company, Case New Holland, Visteon, Selex and Honeywell.  Dunton is home to Ford’s largest R & D facility in Europe. Basildon also has a strong financial sector, with key companies such as International Financial Data Services (IFDS), First Data, Clydesdale Bank and RBS all located in Basildon. Retail, leisure and the service sector are also key employment sectors throughout the District. 527 young people (16–18) are currently not in employment, training or education in the District. This represents 12.2% of this age group and is an increase from 9% in 2008. The recession has hit this age group particularly hard as they are very vulnerable due to lack of experience and sometimes difficult lifestyles. Basildon also has some areas with some of the lowest educational attainment in the UK resulting in a new generation of young people leaving school with few or no opportunities.

The Basildon District has higher than national average young people 16–24 not in education, training, employment (NEETs) (approx 600). The District has lower than national average educational attainment and young people suffer from lack of positive role models and an awareness of benefits of education and local employment opportunities.

There are many opportunities for young people to access high value, high paid employment but they do not have the tools or the ambition to do so. This creates a low value economy employing local people in low value jobs without training resulting in lack opportunities to progress and benefit from an expanding economy

There are strong cultural and peer pressures not to gain employment or further education and difficult for some young people to break away from this peer pressure. This creates a culture of non employment spanning generations and inhibiting social inclusion.

The recession has worsened the situation for this vulnerable group and the numbers have increased over the last year. Young people are the first in a job and the first to go when redundancies are made. Their lack of experience makes it even more difficult to compete with the increased number of job seekers with good experience.

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