Look past the headline statistics and you’ll see economic reality starting to infiltrate the labour market. Today’s employment figures from the Office for National Statistics mark very little movement from the previous quarter, with employment at 76.4 per cent (down 0.2 per cent on the previous quarter) and unemployment at 3.9 per cent (unchanged from the previous quarter, still hovering at a record-low level). Yet today also marks the biggest decrease in UK employment for a decade, since May 2009 in the wake of the financial crash.
For many workers, being temporarily away from paid work is likely to become permanent
How can this be? The official figures from the ONS have yet to officially budge because of the ‘increases in economic inactivity, with people out of work but not currently looking for work’. In other words, the number of people who aren’t looking for a job has increased (a decision influenced, no doubt, by the plunge in job vacancies since lockdown began), which means they fall out of the official calculations for determining unemployment rates.
More telling, perhaps, are the ONS’s claimant count figures: the number of people eligible for some kind of unemployment-related benefit.
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