Thousands turn out for Blackpool Jobs Fair

The sun shone on us yesterday as I cut the ribbon and opened Blackpool Jobs Fair, alongside employment minister Alison McGovern.

Over 4,000 job seekers turned up to attend the event that was organised by my constituency team and local Jobscentre staff. Over 100 employers attended, offering over 1,500 jobs – over 500 of which were given on the day, along with over 500 interviews offered on the spot.

That morning, new figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) were released, showing that the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) reached an 11-year high in 2024.

Nearly 1 million 16-24-year-olds are adrift nationally – almost one out of every seven people in that age range, and in Blackpool the picture is even worse. Among 16-17 year olds, there was almost twice the national average of NEET young people in Blackpool.

This is the knock on impact of 14 years of Tory austerity and neglect for the working classes and seaside towns like Blackpool.

So it was great to see so many young people turning up yesterday – like Calum (pictured above) and his brother Bradley (filmed below), who came along with his youth worker Brendan to check out the opportunities on offer.

The feedback from employers was fantastic on the day, with people telling me they had run out of application forms and were having to print out more, and others who regularly attend jobs fairs telling me that they had never been to one of this quality where the visitors had such an appetite for finding work.

Alison McGovern put it best when she said that anyone who has assumptions about what Blackpool may be would have their perceptions challenged by visiting Blackpool Jobs Fair. We had fantastic employers there – some you might expect to see, such as the Pleasure Beach, Merlin and the Sandcastle, but we also had local manufacturers like Victrex and Glasdon, public services like Lancashire Fire Service and police, and huge Fylde Coast employers like the NHS and BAE.

Delivering this jobs fair was one of my election promises, and it was important to me that it offered quality job opportunities, apprenticeships and career progression – not just seasonal jobs.

But to tackle unemployment we need to consider the reasons people are out of work in the first place – beyond a lack of opportunities. That’s why it was also important to me that this Jobs Fair didn’t just set people up with work and abandon them. On the day, the ground floor of the Winter Gardens Conference Centre was dedicated to service providers and community partners – offering CV writing workshops, employability advice, mental health support, wellbeing services and education and training opportunities.

“While it’s fantastic to see such an incredible appetite for the event, it’s also a sad indictment of the amount of people seeking work.”

I was grateful that the sun shone because, from the moment we cut that ribbon, people were queueing out of the door – at some points in the day, the queue stretched around the corner to Church Street. While it’s fantastic to see such an incredible appetite for the event, it’s also a sad indictment of the amount of people seeking work.

That said, while chatting to people in the queue, I bumped into a couple I recognised from working at my local express supermarket. They told me they were looking for career progression, and had heard about the breadth of opportunities available at the jobs fair. I look forward to finding out how they got on next time I see them.

If you attended the jobs fair and it leads to work for you, or if you have any other feedback, please visit the Jobs Fair section of the website and let me know. Blackpool has been dealt a tough hand over the years, but these success stories are what I want to celebrate – to show the rest of the country what a fantastic town and community Blackpool is.

Thank you to everyone who made yesterday happen, and to everyone who attended. My ambition is to make this an annual event that gets bigger and better every year and brings in more and better opportunities.