Continued surge in student numbers enables unemployment to fall
Continued surge in student numbers enables unemployment to fall, despite fewer people in work as private sector sheds jobs, says CIPD
Dr John Philpott, Chief Economic Adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) comments as follows on official labour market statistics published earlier today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which update the Labour Force Survey measures of employment, unemployment and economic inactivity to the quarterly period November 2009-January 2010, the Workforce Jobs series to Q4 2009, Public and Private sector employment to Q4 2009, the count of people unemployed and claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance to February 2010, and average weekly earnings for January 2010:
“One word sums up the latest official jobs figures: confusing. Unemployment is sharply down, however you measure it. Yet there also 54,000 fewer people in work, with full-time jobs particularly hard hit. The apparent paradox is explained by a very sharp rise of 149,000 in the number of economically inactive people, with the number of students surging by 98,000. Jobless young people are thus turning to study in their thousands to avoid the dole.
“Although a fall in unemployment is clearly better than a rise this should not be read as a sign that the UK jobs market is recovering strongly. Overall the jobs market is flat, operating at much weaker level of demand than before the recession, and still at risk of a serious relapse. Most worrying is the fall of 61,000 in private sector employment in the final quarter of 2009. The jobs market for the time being is still being propped up by the public sector but the public sector job creation machine is about the be switched off. Indeed, the latest figures already show a fall in employment in local government – this marks the start of a jobs cull that will ultimately see hundreds of thousands of jobs cut from the overall public payroll.
“Whether or not benign headline jobless figures limit the potency of unemployment as a vote clinching issue in the forthcoming General Election campaign, whoever forms the next Government will face a Herculean task in its efforts to return the UK economy to full employment within this decade.“
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