Jobless total edges upwards

Unemployment under the Labour Force Survey (LFS) count rose by 32,000 to 1.4 million in the three months to December 2004 compared with the previous three months, even though 90,000 more people were in employment.

The LFS count is the government's preferred measure and includes people not eligible for benefits.

This represented an unemployment rate of 4.7% - up from 4.6% on the previous quarter. There were 830,000 unemployed men (a 5.1% rate) and 581,000 women (a 4.2% rate).

Meanwhile, the claimant count of unemployed, which only includes those drawing jobseekers' allowance benefit, fell by 11,000 to 813,200 in January.

The claimant count unemployment rate was down to 2.6%.

The number of unemployed men on benefit fell to 602,100 (a 3.6% rate), and the number of unemployed women fell to 211,100 (a 1.5% rate).

The number of job vacancies rose in the three months to January to an average of 652,300. However, the number of vacancies per 100 employee jobs remained at 2.5.

Manufacturing jobs continued to fall - 104,000 jobs were axed over the past year cutting employment to 3.24 million in the three months to December 2004. This is the lowest level since comparable records began in 1978.