It seems today’s good jobs figures — employment at a record high and the unemployment rate back below 8 per cent — are at least partly thanks to the Olympic Games.
While the UK added 212,000 net jobs in June-August, London alone added 101,000 — accounting for 47 per cent of the total rise. And — as Citi’s Michael Saunders observes — the six boroughs that hosted the Games (Hackney, Newham, Barking and Dagenham, Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets and Greenwich) have seen their proportion of residents claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance fall by an average of 0.48 percentage points, compared to 0.25 points for the other 27 London boroughs and 0.1 points for the country as a whole.
Hackney’s dole queue is 1,252 people shorter than it was a year ago — the biggest drop of any local authority in the country.
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