After a bruising couple of weeks, the government was in need of some good news and that was provided by the latest jobless figures. Fears that the end of the furlough scheme would lead to rising unemployment have proved groundless.
It is, of course, early days. There are still only flash estimates of what happened in October once the Treasury’s wage subsidies had come to an end but the signs are promising.
But rather than the expected surge in redundancies as firms had to cope without government financial support, there was a 160,000 rise in the number of payrolled employees. In the three months from August to October the number of job vacancies hit a new record of close to 1.2m – up almost 400,000 on the pre-pandemic level.
The Office for
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