Jobs recession gets underway
By August there were 695,000 fewer employees working for UK employers than in March, the strongest evidence yet of the COVID crisis and recession.
This is an early estimate based on official government tax sources of the number of payroll employees.
The severity of the jobs recession is still not showing fully in either the unemployment rate or the number of redundancies, although both increased.
In July there were still more than five million temporarily away from work (including furloughed workers).
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also reports 250,000 people away from work because of the pandemic but receiving no pay (possibly people outside the Job Retention Scheme who believe they’ll have a job to come back to).
Meanwhile, the Claimant Count, a measure of the numbers claiming benefits for the reason of being unemployed or on very low incomes, reached 2.7 million in August, up by 120.8% since March.
On the plus side, the latest ONS figures showed small signs of a recovery in total hours worked and a higher level of vacancies.
Average earnings, which have been falling since April (mainly in manufacturing and the private sector), are also starting to level off.