Rachel Reeves is facing renewed pressure over Labour’s economic plans today after unemployment rose to a five-year high.
The rate of UK unemployment rose to 5.2 per cent in the three months to December, up from 5.1 per cent in the three months to November, the Office for National Statistics said.
This was the highest since the three months to January 2021 and the highest for over a decade outside of the pandemic era.
Most economists had expected unemployment to remain at 5.1 per cent in the latest quarter.
The number of people on payrolls also fell by 134,000 in the past year, the figures showed.
It is further evidence of the stagnation of the economy, following on from weak GDP figures last week.
Tory shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith, said: ‘These figures show the impact of a ‘zombie government’ with no plan for growth.
‘Labour’s Jobs Tax, economic uncertainty and their red tape Employment Rights Bill are holding back hiring, creating a jobless generation.’
Rachel Reeves is facing renewed pressure over Labour’s economic plans today after unemployment rose to a five year high.
The ONS added that regular wage growth fell back once again, to 4.2 per cent in the three months to December, against a downwardly-revised 4.4 per cent in the three months to November, and was 0.8 per cent higher after taking Consumer Prices Index inflation into account.
But there was a welcome increase in vacancies, up by 2,000 quarter-on-quarter to 726,000 in the three months to January.
Liz McKeown, ONS director of economic statistics, said the data showed ‘more people who were out of work are now actively looking for a job’.
She added: ‘The number of vacancies has remained broadly stable since the middle of last year.
‘Alongside rising unemployment this means that the number of unemployed people per vacancy has increased, reaching a new post-pandemic high.
‘Meanwhile, redundancies are also showing an upward trend.’
The Government is ‘taking active measures’ to get more people into work, a minister has said in response to the figures.
Stephen Kinnock, a health minister, told Times Radio: ‘We know that we had the best growth of all the G7 European countries last year, and on unemployment, I think we’ve seen something like 440,000 new jobs created in the economy.’
Pointing to investment in apprenticeships and other schemes to get people back into work, he added: ‘We’re taking active measures to get more people back into work.
‘But of course, there’s still a long way to go, given the appalling economic inheritance that we got in July 2024.’
