EVERY penny of the £5bn capital investment announced by George Osborne is welcome. But I suspect that we will feel the impact of the cuts that will pay for them more quickly and more keenly than we’ll see the benefits.

Like most people, I find the figures that are bandied about at times like this baffling. I’ve never seen £5bn. When, in a year or so the government gurus tell me it has all been spent wisely and efficiently, I’m in no position to argue that we could have got the same results for £4bn or even three. These telephone number sums mean nothing.

What people identify with are the things that impact on their daily lives – projects to improve their street, neighbourhood or town, real jobs for people in their community. What breeds cynicism is that these high-sounding, high-spending announcements about investment often fail to deliver on the ground.

Last week, I wrote about underemployment, the fact that millions of people want to earn more but are stuck in part-time jobs that keep them struggling. There’s another blot on the new working landscape. The fact that when a new project comes on line, too many employers ignore directly employed local labour and use a growing army of low-paid agency workers instead.

The TUC estimates that 7,000 manufacturing jobs and 17,000 construction jobs have been lost in the North-East. It seems fair that the first stop for any employer would be this pool of experienced workers or the thousands of young people desperate for training or a first job. Instead, more and more jobs go to workers employed through agencies, recruited from other parts of the country or Europe, paid less, shipped in for the short-term and discarded when the job is done.

In response to this, Unite, the union, has launched its “Play by the Rules” campaign in an effort to boost home-grown jobs on agreed rates of pay and to ensure that if agency labour is used in the short-term then these workers get the same deal as established workers.

We can’t turn back the clock or pull up the drawbridge. Like it or not, all firms compete in a global market and free movement of money and labour is here to stay.

But there is a big difference between freedom and a free for all. Like I said last week, we have moved into completely new territory in the world of work. Whether we allow that territory to become a jungle or a civilised community is down to us.

In this region we hope to see some major projects beginning soon, road building, construction of the new waste to energy plant and others. It is essential that local labour is the bedrock of the workforce for these projects.

If it isn’t, once again we will see our local skill-base eroded and a chance to pump money in to the local economy wasted.

Employing local people means money stays local, is spent in our own high streets and corner shops and is re-circulated to keep the economy buoyant. It gives back communities a sense of pride. A virtuous circle that maximises every pound earned.

It is also ultimately about fairness and that is something that even in these straitened times that people feel deeply about.

This week some of the proudest global brands, Google, Starbucks, Amazon were humbled, put to shame. That happened because ordinary people were appalled at the unfairness of their tax arrangements.

Firms that see no further than the bottom line also need to think hard about fairness in the workplace.