Barely a week goes by without more good economic news. The IMF have now confirmed that Britain was the fastest growing economy of any major advanced nation in 2014, forecasting growth of 2.6%. We have already pulled ahead of France to make us the 5th biggest economy in the world. But we can certainly do more and both David Cameron and George Osborne have set us the target of being the biggest economy in Europe. That is the prize for the work we have done as a country, and the work we will still need to do.
The financial crisis was truly horrific and we tend to forget that we are still only just getting free from it. We still have emergency levels of interest rates, helping support families who's borrowings were left at terrifying levels after the decade of excesses leading up to the financial crisis in 2008. We still have £375 billion of quantitative easing, another measure introduced to resolve the financial crisis and a measure that will need to be unwound.
The reality is that there are a lot of successes but the process of repairing the economy, and public finances, is not one that can be achieved overnight. But it is slowly changing.
The jobs market has improved enormously, with more jobs than ever in the economy, unemployment falling and wages now, finally, outstripping inflation. And the jobs are better quality jobs. Last year, around 530,000 new jobs were created of which all but around 23,000 were full time jobs.
But what does this mean for Wyre Forest? The good news is that we are doing better locally than average. When I was elected, we had unemployment significantly over 2,000 people: now it is below 1,000 and the fall has been faster than the national average. In the five years leading up to 2010, unemployment in the over 50s went up by a tragic 132.5% - nearly double the national rate of increase. Since 2010, it has fallen by 56%, happily falling at a faster rate than the national average.
Average wages have increased a little in Wyre Forest, but I think we should be doing far better. That is why we are working to attract better, higher value employers and more training. We are on the right track, but we need to stick with it.