Unemployment figures unlikely to cheer new government
May 12, 2010 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
The unemployment rate is expected to stay around 8%.
Britain’s new coalition government will receive an immediate report on the state of the economy today, with the release of monthly unemployment figures and the Bank of England’s latest economic forecasts.
Economists expect official labour market data due at 9.30am to show the claimant count fell again in April, this time by 20,000 following a 32,900 drop in March.
Still, behind those headline figures, the number of long-term unemployed, particularly among the over-50s, has been rising. And at 2.5 million the number of people out of work is at its highest since the end of 1994. Economists see no change in today’s data from the jobless rate of 8%, the highest since 1996.
“With public sector job cuts looming, and firms likely to think twice about hiring workers if the recovery remains sluggish, we still think that employment has further to fall,” says Jonathan Loynes at Capital Economics.
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has also warned that recent …
Read the original article at Guardian