Unemployment rate falls to 5%

Wednesday, 17 December 2003 8:18 PM

Unemployment figures fell by 33,000 in the three months to the end of October, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics.

The jobless total now stands at 1.47 million - close to 2001's all-time low of 1.43 million. The number of people claiming jobless benefit - the secondary measure of unemployment - also fell by 7,900 to 917,800.

That means that despite significant job losses in traditional industries such as manufacturing, the UK's job market remains buoyant - a good indicator of the state of the economy.

The unemployment rate in Britain is now just 5% - far better than the other leading European economies such as France and Germany.

But there were less positive indications in the ONS's announcement. The number of hours worked per week fell by 3.9 million despite the decrease in unemployment, suggesting that many of the new jobs are part-time - indeed the statistics show that there was an increase in part-time workers of 42,000.

And employers showed that their faith in the slowly recovering economy was not enough to generate any unexpected pay hikes. Growth in earnings remained static at 3.6% for the year, although the ONS pointed out that this remained well above the annual increase in retail prices, which stood at 2.6% by the end of October.

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