The jobs market continued to improve in the three months to April, with the number of people out of work falling by 161,000 to 2.16 million, bringing the unemployment rate down to 6.6 per cent, its lowest level since January 2009.<\/p>\n
In addition, the number of people in work rose by a record 345,000 to 30.5 million, the biggest increase since records began in 1971, most of whom are in full-time employment with private companies, while the number of people claiming Jobseeker\u2019s Allowance in May fell by 27,400 to 1.09 million.<\/p>\n
The figures were announced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) yesterday (June 11) but the ONS also revealed that the quarterly rate of earnings growth, including bonuses, slowed to 0.7 per cent, from 1.9 per cent the quarter before. This was largely because of delayed bonus payments. Excluding bonuses pay rose by 0.9 per cent, although this is still well below the rate of inflation, currently at 1.8 per cent.<\/p>\n
However, despite saying that interest rates would rise once unemployment fell to 7 per cent, the Bank of England is now looking at a broader measure of how much spare capacity there is in the economy and has decided that there is still slack to take up, particularly around wage growth, before making a move.<\/p>\n
It is therefore likely that the Bank\u2019s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) will keep rates at their record low of 0.5 per cent until the second quarter of next year, as wage growth could take a while to pick up.<\/p>\n
On the back of the news, Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted that the Government had reached a “major milestone” in its long term economic plan, with “two million new private sector jobs since 2010”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The jobs market continued to improve in the three months to April, with the number of people out of work falling by 161,000 to 2.16 million, bringing the unemployment rate down to 6.6 per cent, its lowest level since January 2009.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}