Another milestone has been reached in the recovery: 73.6pc of working-aged British people are now in employment (see above) – the highest in recorded history. And, needless to say, the highest of any country in Europe. What kind of jobs? Mainly full-time employees (up 2.1pc) not self-employment (down 0.6pc). The total number of hours worked is also up, and Britain is working almost a billion hours a week.
Unemployment is down, and as Michael Saunders from Citi notes (pdf):-
The drop has been concentrated in the long-term jobless rate (ie the share of the workforce who have been out of work for more than 12 months), which has dropped from 2.2% a year ago to 1.6% now, with a slight drop in the number of people out of work for 6-12 months and a slight rise in the number of people unemployed for less than 6 months. The UK’s improved ability to get the long-term unemployed into work probably is helping to reduce hysteresis effects and hence to cut the structural jobless rate.
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