'You're ghosted or told there's a better candidate': The suburbs where one in three adults is jobless

Article excerpt

In parts of east Birmingham, one in three adults are unemployed, a crisis that defies the national economic narrative. The BBC visited suburbs where job scarcity isn't merely a statistic but a lived reality: residents describe being ghosted by employers, told they're less qualified than other candidates, or simply unable to find work that matches their skills and circumstances. While the UK's official unemployment rate hovers much lower, these neighborhoods reveal a starkly different picture, prompting questions about what solutions could actually work in communities where traditional pathways to employment have broken down.