According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), unemployment numbers (those without work, registered and seeking employment) have fallen to their lowest level for seven years. The current figure (for the period between January and March) stands at 1.83 million and represents a reduction of 35000 over the previous quarterly reporting period. The UK workforce (in employment) stands at 31.1 million people. Unemployment in the UK now officially stands at 5.5% and is down by 1.3% from the comparable figure for 2014.
UK data also suggests that average pay has risen by 2.2 in Q1 2015 compared to the Q1 2014 level. This figure looks at basic pay and does not include bonus payments (which many segments of the work force never see anyway). If bonus payments are included, then the increase in average pay dips somewhat to 1.9%. The rate of increase in UK earnings is the best seen for four years and represents a real increase of purchasing power since the consumer price index of inflation stands at 0% (March data). Pay inflation in the UK has outstripped price inflation for seven months, consecutively.
According to ONS, the participation rate in the UK workforce as a whole is at 73.5% which represents the best performance since records began to be kept back in 1971 – it would of course, be instructive to see what that figure would be if computed against the unemployment definitions used 44 years ago. Despite the fact that 1.83 million people are without employment, the number claiming “Job Seekers’ Allowance” (formerly known as the “claimant count”) is down by 12600 to stand at 764000 which tends to suggest that 1.1 million unemployed people are not claiming this allowance for whatever reason.
On a cautionary note, the Governor of the Bank of England warned that UK productivity was falling (and therefore UK growth forecasts were being trimmed) since many of the new jobs were at the lowest end of the skills spectrum.