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 March-May 2010, the count of people unemployed and claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance to June 2010, and average weekly earnings for May 2010:
“This is easily the best set of official labour market figures since the start of the jobs recession two years ago, with a sharp quarterly rise in the number of people in work and fewer economically inactive, as well as a welcome drop in both headline unemployment and the jobseekers’ allowance claimant count. But while the jobs market was clearly much perkier in the spring quarter, with close to 2.5 million people unemployed it is still far from in the pink. And with a big public sector jobs squeeze already underway and the pace of economic recovery uncertain, things may look a lot less rosy by spring 2011 than they do at present. Today’s good news may simply be the calm before the storm.
“A spring 2010 pick-up in employment comes as no surprise to the CIPD, since this is what our own surveys of employers’ hiring intentions had shown. Worryingly, however, more recent employer surveys suggest the pace of jobs recovery has slowed since the spring, placing a question mark over whether the private sector will in the short-run generate enough jobs to offset mounting public sector job cuts.
“Moreover, while the jobs market improved in the spring all the net new jobs being created were either part-time, temp positions or filled by the self-employed. The number of full-time employees continued to fall while the number of people working part-time because they could not find a full-time job further increased to reach 1.06 million.
“The most positive feature of the latest employment figures is an indication that conditions in the youth jobs market have at the very least stopped getting worse and may be starting to improve. What is unclear is the degree to which this reflects the impact of policy measures taken by the former Labour government, which are now being withdrawn by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. This makes it imperative that the coalition gets its planned Work Programme up and running as soon as possible.”
