Britain’s absent workers are slowly being lured back into employment

The latest labour market update – published by the Office for National Statistics this morning – looks a lot like last month’s update: that’s to say, a mixed bag of news. Unemployment rose again, up 0.1 per cent between October to December, to 3.7 per cent. But this quarterly rise was once again off-set by a fall in economic inactivity: down 0.3 percentage points, largely thanks to young workers entering (or re-entering) the workforce. 

Overall, it’s a trade-off worth making: the official unemployment figure has failed for some time to reflect the true number of people out of work, as over two million people of working age are thought to be missing from the labour force due to health ailments, while 5.2 million working-age people are on some kind of out of work benefit (a rise from 5.19 million to 5.21 million in August, the latest figures we have).