No sign of green shoots here.
While these figures were published by the UK Office for National Statistics last Wednesday, first opportunity to comment on this Blog was today. It’s not a pretty sight!
These trends look really nasty and not a hint of an upturn in employment or a lessening of the rate of increase in unemployment.
As the report says,
The employment rate for people of working age was 72.7 per cent for the three months to June 2009, down 0.9 from the previous quarter and down 2.0 over the year. The total number of people in employment for the three months to June 2009 was 28.93 million, down 271,000 over the quarter and down 573,000 over the year.
The unemployment rate was 7.8 per cent for the three months to June 2009, up 0.7 over the previous quarter and up 2.4 over the year. The number of unemployed people increased by 220,000 over the quarter and by 750,000 over the year, to reach 2.43 million.
What is a developing tragedy is the level of youth unemployment, which according to the BBC is fast approaching one million. Here is an extract from the BBC report,
According to BBC calculations based on ONS data, the unemployment rate among 16-24 year olds has risen to 12.6%, with about 928,000 people in that age range classed as unemployed.
That is especially sad.
By Paul Handover
Learning from Dogs 